Time flies when you have kids..close to a year since my last update!
Well where to start? I had fixed the oil pressure gauge from leaking and made sure the exhaust stopped rubbing against the frame. But on my next outing a new problem occurd; while picking up my son from a friend, the engine would hardly crank over, so we put some jumper cables on it and barely got it to fire. Your first thought is the battery, even though my battery has an indicator which was bright green, telling me the battery is 100%.. So I put the battery on a charger overnight and as suspected, the engine wouldn’t crank over in the morning. The next suspect if the battery is ok, is the starter motor and at that moment I had an epiphany and realized why there was a piece of 2x4 wedged between my oil pan and starter..yes you’re reading it correctly, there was a piece of wood holding my starter in place. I never felt indulged to investigate why it was there and figured that as long as it worked, it needed no attention. this must make some of you cringe or at least shake your head in disbelief, but I’m a true fan of the KISS principle, Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Anyway I pulled the starter and found that the engine blok has been mutilated by the PO. Hence the wooden blok. As you can see on the next picture there is a piece missing and the thread had been raped, so they just put a wire end (if that’s what it’s called in English) through it, with 2 nuts on top.
I pulled out the wire end and it looks like there’s some kind of tube inside the whole? I don’t know these engines well enough so now clue if it’s supposed to be there?
Looking from the top, I had to go against my belief and grind off some part of the engine, so I would be able to have the bolt from the bottom up fastened with a nut that sits straight.
Here’s the new high torque starter mounted. The old one isn’t broken, but I had already bought the new one, so why not use it. It’s lighter, stronger and less prone to failure..unless my mounting construction fails.
Thinking that would be the last of my engine troubles for a while, I decided to change my oil and filter. When unscrewing the filter I noticed that not the filter came loose, but the filter bolt?
That was an easy fix, I just put a tiny weld on the thread so It would fasten at a certain depth, after which you can screw on the filter. The PO left me a box of goodies including 2 oil filters, guess my surprise when both filters weren’t the correct ones. The PO had told me the engine is a 350 and seeing that’s a common engine, I had no reason not to believe him. (There’s no engine nr on the Dutch title as it wasn’t required at the time that they imported it) So I trotted off to the Dutch version of Pepboys and got an oil filter for a GM 350…. Which of course was the same as the other 2 I had laying around. Time to have a look at the engine number
OMG.. I have a 283, a 1967 Chevelle engine to be precise. So guess my truck ain’t matching number then At least I was able to get the right filter and everything is hunky-dory.