Quote:
Originally Posted by hewittca
Sounds like you have a lot going on! I saw your Malibu earlier on in the thread. I definitely dig that one as well. I had a '80 back in the day. Sometimes I wish I still had it.
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Sadly my '78 is farther apart than it already was as one of the flipper projects turned out to be worse than hoped.
I picked-up a non-running/non drivable '81 ElCamino Jan of '23. We tinkered around w/it & got it running so I proceeded to fix the drivability issues. One we had a fully functional vehicle the plan was to put it on the market. As we were completing some shop clean-up, I left it running in the P-lot to burn off some of the funk from it sitting >7yrs. After about 30mins of idling, we could hear a bottom end knock. No bueno letting it go for profit w/that known issue so it sat idle in the lot.
Fast forward, we continued work on the scheduled/customer Model-A project that was a complete drivetrain swap for a '30 Sedan (60° v6/4spd to a Pinto 2.0/C4 auto); rebuilt & lowered my '30 Cabriolet + brake swap (mechanical to hydraulic brakes), bought/flipped an '02 Suburban, head swap on my 5.3 equipped Envoy Denali, & a trip to Colorado mid June.... We were BUSY.
We struggled significantly w/the drivetrain swap on the '30 Sedan (supposed 'kit' that we had to significantly modify to make it work) so that ate up alot of our time. What should have been 5-6wks part-time/after hours of effort turned into a 13month project. We finally finished it up right around the week of Thanksgiving & returned focus to the other stuff sitting idle.
We decided direction was needed regarding the ElCo. We yanked the motor (305) just before Xmas & looked @ the bottom end. It was ugly. We were going to throw a backyard/down & dirty rebuild @ it but then chose another path.... We plucked the 52k mile 305/350 combo out of my Malibu & swapped it into the Elco. No worries that it would have any more issues that way & no additional expenses (parts purchases) either. We yanked the drivetrain out of the Malibu on a Sunday afternoon (after picking up a 6.0/4l80e that Sat AM) & had it swapped into the ElCo by the start of the 2nd half/Sunday Night Football game. We tinkered around a few nights that week & it was running/driving before the end of Thursday night. Had someone interested & it sold/he picked it up on Jan 2nd.
That following weekend we got another flipper repaired (bad shift linkage on a 5spd VW Jetta/Wolfsburg edition), I finished minor stuff on a car/flipper I bought for my dad & delivered it (DFW/TX to ATL/GA & back) & got my '99 (Spot) aligned/inspected + legal again the next week. Since then (last week), bought/flipped an '04 Tahoe & I bought a 2014 Mazda MX-5 (from the guy that bought the ElCo
)......