As the joke goes: The introduction of the Chevy Nova was never a hit in Mexico since Nova means “no go” in Spanish. In Tennessean, it now means “it goes again!” You may have noticed that I have not been posting much lately. To be honest I have been overwhelmed with projects that consume my daylight hours and leave me wiped out for the night. The only other activity that I partake of is Halo. Let’s face it, I would play Halo if it was my last day on Earth.
One of the projects that has kept me busy is reintroducing the 1972 Chevy Nova of my Dad’s back into transportation. As many of you remember from my previous post on this car, the poor car was in derelict condition and had not run for nearly a decade. That is now the past, as it is once again mobile under its own motor driven ability. This is not a small accomplishment. Thus this may seem to be a long posting, but I need to make up for all the time that I have missed. For you car people, you will like this. For the rest of you, sorry but I have had posting of little girls and teddy bears recently. Time to “man up” the site for a little while. (insert Tim Allen grunting now)
Note: Any time I say “we”, I am referring to Pete, myself, and Dad or any combination of the three. Without Pete’s help this would never had been possible, Thanks Pete.
Don’t just skim these photos too quickly, you may miss the video at the end. And yes, there will be a test at the end of class.
We begin the project by dragging the car out into the open where we can work on it. We promptly removed the hood and totally exposed the engine bay. Days of forecasted rain were ahead, so we kept a tarp handy. A necessary tool for any “shade tree mechanic”.
We then remove the motor and strip it down. We knew that the engine had “issues”, but did not know what they were. Some of the people that had been associated with the Nova in the past even suggested that possibly some foreign parts may have been put into the block. Sheesh.
What we found was unbelievable. As we were pulling the Chevy 350 SB, we discover parts of the transmission do not line up with the motor back. Upon further investigation it is concluded that this was a 6 cylinder Pontiac transmission held to the engine with only 2 bolts! Glad that it didn’t run, it would not have made it far. Also after digging into the motor we found massive inconsistencies in the wear of the lifters and on several of the lobes on the cam. In the picture above you see two lifters pictured. The one on the right has developed a massive dip while the other stayed somewhat normal. Several of the cam lobes were totally worn out and rounded. This explained the push tubes bending and the motor not running at all. We came to the conclusion that someone had actually put the wrong cam in and decided to just “freshen up” the motor with proper parts and use what we could of the existing ones.
Further inspection into the old motor components revealed some VERY NICE forged pistons that looked nearly new. The rods also were a very expensive brand that looked nice as well. Zero wear was discovered in the wrist pins. The only sign of wear was some strange “stress marks” on the rods. These seemed to be fine after inspection and we decided to use them. After all we are going stock and this is just a freshening up…right?
We place the motor into the bay after “freshening it up” and anxiously put it together to fire it up. We used the old 6 cylinder trans in the name of expediency and let her crank. You are expecting me to say that it didn’t start aren’t you. Well, you are wrong. It started up beautifully. Purred like a kitten. Then this little kitten peed on the ground. We inspected the leak to determine that nature of the mystery fluid. It was not oil, too clear. Not power steering fluid, too thin. Couldn’t be water it is in the back of the motor. WRONG! It was water, in the back of the motor. What we discovered was a cracked block. (insert many vulgar expletives now).
Pete finds us another Chevy 350 block to take the place of the busted one. It had to be at least close to stock to re-use parts. This one was freshly milled and decked. It also had been chemically cleaned and stripped of all impurities. We then move into the building to work for it has been raining cats and dogs for days. This place is looking like a wrecking ball hit it.
To make an already long story shorter. We get the motor together with little hassle, other than Mother Nature totally saturating us. Dad finds a matching transmission (Chevy 350 Turbo). We thus get a new a new starter and join up the motor and transmission together. Dad also buys a new carburetor as the old one had “vanished”. We drop the combo in and voila, all the parts come together. The motor starts up fine with only minor problems occurring. All is fixed (including a small oil leak and flipping the flywheel to the proper direction: those have to face the right way ya’ll.). We start it and begin to drive it up and down the drive to ensure that it is ok. Then, dum dum dum. I look as it makes one pass up the driveway and see some fluid leaking, ALOT! Come to find out it has a massive gas leak in the lines near the tank. I replace around 8 feet of steel gas line and we begin again. This time it is finished.
Our coworker, James, did an immaculate job cleaning the very dirty 1972 Chevy Nova. He really had to scrub to get off years of leaf debris and dust. He got it to shining, however, and it has not looked this good in years. It somehow looks better just for the fact that I know that it runs now. Hover over pix to reveal comments about them. Don’t forget the video at the end.
Dad fired the Nova up and the first thing he did was……