Project Blue Hair Engine Swap

Today, a new life for our Nova, the straight six comes out and Ls Vet Motor goes in. It's the ultimate sleeper. Plus our challenger gets a little closer to the road. And wouldn't you really rather drive a buick?

Welcome to muscle car project. Overkill is back. But before I tell you where we're going, I gotta tell you where we've been

overkill is our 70 challenge that we've been working on all season

and it's looking like a whole different car.

Good mark hooked us up with some new quarters because they needed to be replaced. This was a movie car. It wasn't too fast, too furious. It got pretty beat up in a form of life.

We did a whole bunch of body work on this thing. We cut the floor out,

we braced up the body, front and center.

We put new metal in the roof.

Red top speed shop, hooked us up with a K member, complete with NASCAR pickup points that K member lets us use a GM steering box that we got from a GR

we put air eye suspension on all four corners to drop overkill right down in the dirt

since it's a Mopar. We went with a 528

hemi 610 horse from

Mopar performance.

Then we backed it up with a Tko five speed from Kesler

and a Dana 60 from Curry.

Now, we had the whole drive line in this baby on the jig and let me tell you, it was pretty cool, but now we had to blow it all back apart so we can put the floor in it, get it Rhino Line and Brett and Daniel are getting it ready for body work and paint.

And once that's done the drive lines going back in and we're gonna put this baby on its wheels, but there's still a lot of work to do just to get it ready for primer.

Now, you guys have probably noticed that Jared hasn't been here for the last few weeks. That's because he went back up to rad rise. That's all right. He's still gonna be building cool cars and he's still a stand up guy. So I had to go out and recruit some help because I'm no body guy.

We'll be taking it into the paint booth later on today.

But I want to show you another project first.

Now, Old Blue Hair here, I'm gonna turn it into a sleeper because we all know that there's not enough sleepers left in the world. So I'm gonna tear out this 236 cylinder and that power glide and I'm gonna slam in a 364 LS motor with 440 horse with a six,

oh

man. It's going to be fun

now for you guys who don't know what a sleeper is. It's the kind of car that looks bone stock on the outside, the interior even looks stock, but it's in the drive line that matters. That's what's going to jump out and bite you in the butt. I'm even going to try and keep these fashionable stock up caps. This thing is so original. It came in here with just 33,000 miles on it. That's barely 1000 miles a year.

You've never seen one of these babies before on TV is G MS L s3 64 crate motor

right out of the C six Corvette, but it's set up to run a carburetor. This baby makes 440 horse right out of the box with a 750 on top

aluminum block six volt man nodular iron crank. This one's made to go and it's going in our Nova.

This is not a simple drop in deal. We may have to cut the cross member. We'll probably have to make our own mounds. There's no telling what else we might have to do to this thing.

There you go.

Yeah.

And some of you guys are probably wondering why would he take the nose off this car for a simple engine swap?

Actually, it's a real good reason.

I want you guys to see exactly what it is. I gotta do, I've gotta make engine mounts. I've gotta worry about exhaust. Who knows? I might even have to make headers, but this way you guys can see exactly what's going on.

There's plenty of room for you to look at it.

That's why I did it. I'm thinking about you

and I know you want to see the Challenger on its wheels. It went from the jig to the rotisserie. Now it's Rhino Life and it's almost ready to start test fitting it so we can do the body work

you're in

while Daniel and Brett are getting that challenge. You ready for some primer.

I'm gonna get this fashionable six cylinder out.

So we get the new motor in.

Usually I just put it on jack stand so I can get to the tranny mount in the drive shaft, but the lift is right here. So why not?

Now, there's a few things I gotta do underneath it here, pull out the drive shaft, unbolt the tranny cross member and the mount just makes it easier to get it out

and the exhaust. Then I can drop this baby down and start pulling it out.

High floor exhaust

coming up. We'll fire up the hot wrench to get our six speed LS two in the Nova

and later try this with your Buick.

Welcome back,

Brett's mixing up some primer for the challenger once we get that baby primed and all dry. We're gonna wheel it back out into the shop, start reassembling it so we can hang body panels on it. So we start looking like a cool car.

You know what you're doing, man.

Oh yeah.

You sure. Oh yeah.

Check it out. Brett's got his Doughboy suit on and a full respirator gig.

A

lot of guys just wanna wear a mask. That's a bad idea. When you're painting, you wanna be safe and wear all the protection that you can get your hands on.

This PPG primer is gonna be dry in just a few hours so we can start putting the drive line back in it later on today

while Brett's Prime and the Challenger,

I'm gonna yank out the six and

so we keep everything moving along.

Now, you wanna be careful around your wiring when you do this, make sure you disconnect everything before you go ripping it out. Don't just cut wires. You're gonna get in trouble.

I'm environmentally conscious

and that's not all that's out of this place. We're gonna be cutting this frame. So this 30 something year old dirt's gotta go.

All right. We got our front end cleaned up. It's grease free and I'm gonna put that

in there.

Of course, I'll have to do some modifications, but that's ok.

That Flex plate is gonna come off first because we're putting a Rockland 6 ft in this thing.

Oh,

that's the way. Yeah.

Now you're probably wondering,

hey, why is that guy not putting a clutching pressure plate on there because I'm test fitting everything

and we know we can't use the old motor mounts because they're just not the right ones. So they're out of there.

So we're gonna stab this one in for the first time to see how it fits.

And then we're gonna get an idea of where we need to cut and what we don't need to cut

these exhaust manifolds in their way. So they're coming off and that's just the beginning.

Now, when I was testing the engine the first time, there'll be many of them. Trust me. I noticed that the transmission hits the floor. So I've got to take out the interior, cut out the tranny hump, put it back in to see where I need to set up my cross member where the shift is gonna fall.

Now, I gotta be really careful with this rubber mat

because it's an integral part of the whole sleeper. Look,

before I start cutting up this floor,

we're gonna pull the challenger out of the spray booth so the guys can start putting it back together.

Now, you guys are probably going there. He goes cutting up a really nice nova. But you know what? That's ok because I don't feel bad at all about cutting up a really nice car.

Oh,

I, I

up

oh, plenty of room now.

So what I'll do is I'll save this

and maybe raise it up

and this might save me some work from having to do another one.

Well, now that I've got all this new found floor space, it's time to put the engine in. But you're gonna see that after the break

next, the Buick Horsepower Nationals from Indianapolis and finally the Challenger is back on its wheels.

So I figured I'd come up with a new way to work underneath the dashboard of the car. I just took the engine out, cut a big hole in it. Now, I've got easy access to get up in here. But besides all that,

the Buick Horse Power Nationals in Indianapolis, Indiana was a happening place. Those buick guys know how to make some ridiculous power and have really nice cars. Check it out.

I think I'm gonna patent this idea. Can I do that?

It's nice when you make a quarter mile pass and in 10 seconds and

people look at and go. Wow. Is that a buick

Buicks are a very rare thing and, uh, we can definitely make them run though,

big strong fast and just a tad bit unusual. That's how they like it here at the Buick

course Power Nationals at Indianapolis Raceway Park. Torque from those big 455 Buicks.

And the sounds of hair dryers from those little Turbo V Sixes is the norm for the weekend. Welcome everyone

for the summer classic here, Fred of Beauty.

You don't see as many Buicks as you do Fords or Chevy. And that's the big draw for these buick guys like Paul Cassidy. He drove a hard 18 hours to get here with that 4000 pound family station wagon that'll lift those front wheels. Just a touch off the ground.

There's not a whole bunch of us around. So when we do get together, I mean, we have a good time, a lot of fast cars, it's just different being out there with a buick.

That's what these events are all about is people sharing knowledge and learning lots of things about these cars. So, you know, a lot of these guys here,

they don't want to be like everyone else and drive a Chevrolet product.

Different

is a word. You hear a lot around the national

because those buick guys are a bit different

and they want you to know it.

Someone says you're driving grandma's car,

you just wanna go faster.

And if you can't get the parts, you make your own one

connecting rod for a, uh, for a buick 455

started making on basically because getting parts for Buicks is a pretty difficult thing,

but there's something about that buick that just makes it all worth the trouble. You don't see the cruising you don't see in the car shows that much and it just something different that, that people don't have,

they're even casting new blocks for the 455. And the first one they're saying is making 1100 horsepower. It's bored and stroke and supercharged.

This motor actually has the mains getting oiled, the rods getting oiled and then everything else. It's got a four bolt main casting, it's four bolts front to back.

It's running low nines already and they're still figuring out how to get all that power to the ground.

A few of these cars were never meant to hit the track like the Buick of the future

and another show car based on the Buicks of the past.

If you're thinking about the here and now,

and you think Buick means old and slow,

these guys are gonna be the first ones to show you that that's not the way

coming up, mounting motor mounts.

Hey, you guys. Welcome back. Hope you had a good break. I know I did. It's time to test fit this engine one more time. At least one more time by the way

and see what we gotta do.

We could throw this engine in here a bunch of different ways, but no matter how you do it, carburetor has gotta be leveled

and this thing's gonna be a sleeper. So we gotta fit everything under the stock hood.

Sometimes you might have to cut the oil pan at the cross member, but this one it fits and I like it. Tell me, I'm good.

Just tell me, go ahead. Shake the,

say yes. Shake the camera. There you go.

Money.

We're so good. He might even get to challenge it back on his wheels today. Bring it up some more.

I hold what you got.

I'm gonna leave Brett to finish this up.

I'm gonna go back to the Nova,

a couple of things popped up. No big deal though. I can always modify it to fit.

But I did get these really cool engine mount plates from S and P

is what they do is they push the engine forward a little bit so you can use your stop motor mount chassis mount for this car if it had a V8. But this car came with a straight six. So I'm gonna modify my own chassis mount

and then I'll be good to go.

But

something that you need to be aware of is this oil pan down here S and P makes when it's notched to clear the steering linkage from where the engine sits,

but I'm gonna raise my engine up an inch and a half. So I don't have to do that. And therefore I won't even have to modify my chassis cross member. It just makes it easier for me. I prefer to do that because I'm impatient and I want to get the car on the road.

Something that's really important. You always wanna run some ants

on your steel bolts when you put them in aluminum because the heat from the engine, when you run them out. If you don't have an sees, you can gall your threads

So I'm gonna measure up one of these top mounts and cut some tubing to fit inside of it.

Then once the top mounts are ready, I'll get the engine centered up and make some fashionable frame mounts.

These tabs. Here, there's one on each corner, so they're symmetrical. So you can use those to measure from the engine block to the frame rail to center everything up.

I'm gonna put a space between the engine and the cross member

to set the engine right down on it so we can get the hoist out of the way,

then we're gonna level everything up. Oh, another surprise.

The transmission is hitting all along here in the tranny hump because this transmission is so big.

I've actually made a couple of swipes with the tin snips,

but it wasn't enough. So I gotta break out the plasma and get ugly with it.

We said this engine was gonna be in and out a lot. Well, we weren't lying. So here we go again.

Easy.

The back seats gotta go.

We're gonna deal with that next week right now. I got a little surprise for you

while Blue Hair is one step closer to being a sleeper

overkill is getting ready to get on the tarmac. Let's see what it looks like. This is the first time, you know,

countless man hours, months of work.

This is so sick. Oh, look, it's a roller skate.

It's nice and low.

Next week we'll finish up those motor mounts, give blue hair some disc breaks

and show you how to overcome a problem. We ran into with our headers.

That's it for this week. We'll see you guys next time later.