The motor project.

(06/26/04) Here's what I started with. A bone-stock 292 I6 with a Rochester Monojet carb and strangulation exhaust manifold.

I removed a few bolts here and there and the whole assembly virtually jumped off. I had to make a couple of cuts with the Sawzall to get the exhaust pipe out, but all in all it came out pretty easily.

I was kinda undecided about what color to paint the motor so I did a little bit of a poll on the Nova and El Camino mailing lists. This side is painted in Detroit Diesel green, which is close to the original color.

And this side is the same old red as everything else. Guess which won?

(06/29/04) Yep. Red won pretty handily, although chrome, purple and Chevy orange were in the running, too.

Just for the sake of consistency, I painted the other side the same color. :)

(06/30/04) Then I started boltin stuff on. I'm using an Offenhauser intake manifold, a Carter 625 CFM AFB carb with electric choke and Hedman Hedders (painted with flat black BBQ paint.)

(07/01/04) The manifold and hedders didn't wanna play well together. I spent several hours grinding away at the points marked in the picture. I also had to grind and "form" the hedder tubes. (Form is a word we used to use to avoid sayin that we'd bashed the hell out of it with a BFH.)

(07/01/04) I finally got them to stop tryin to occupy the same space and then bolted things together. In this pic, I've got a 1 inch phenolic spacer under the carb (I had to modify that one, too. It wasn't near flat on one side and wouldn't allow the carb to sit flat on the manifold.) The PCV, fuel and vacuum lines are also connected.

I put a new set of Champion truck plugs in and reinstalled the distributor cap and wires. I normally wouldn't use Champion plugs, but it was all I could get at the FLAPS (Friendly Local Auto Parts Store.)

(07/03/04) Then I wired up the choke and installed the throttle cable. That was another little fabrication episode, since the fitting on the carb's throttle arm wouldn't fit. I had to take the carb back off and drill the arm out...and at the same time make a bracket to clamp the cable.

And I installed the Mr. Gasket pedal inside and fastened the cable to that end. It was really stiff when I first installed it, but it seems to be freeing up a little bit as I run the thing. I swear that I'm gonna get a pedal pad for that clutch pedal one of these days.

I put a small open-element filter on it for the time being. I still need to trim that threaded rod...and I may use the red powder-coated air cleaner that I was gonna run on the Monte Carlo. It might look kinda kool in there.

I fired it up on the 4th of July, open headers and all. It sounded like World War III goin on under my feet. But since the neighbors were lighting firecrackers, I figgered that I was just doin my own fireworks. Btw, I sprayed a shot of starting fluid in the carb and it fired right up. I had a loose clamp on the fuel line, so I had to fix that....but then it just took off. I finally had to lean out the idle mixture and turn the idle down a bit...but so far it runs like a champ.

(07/10/04) While I was messin around with the motor, I got a delivery that had some new taillight bezels and blue dot lenses. Those took a coupla seconds to install. Fixin all the little electrical bugs took about 8 hours. But all the lights seem to be workin now.

Note: I've had a lot of requests from people wanting to know where I got the blue dots. They came from Dixie Truck Works. They're on page 16 of the catalog, which is on this page.
The part number it DTW-606. They're $25 per pair plus shipping...at least that was the price as of August 2005.

And after lookin for the set of Purple Hornie mufflers that I had and failing to find them, I broke down and got a set of 30 inch Cherry Bomb glasspacks. You can here here a wav file of the open headers here and the glasspacks here. I'm surprised at how much quieter it is now. It's almost respectable. That's a shame. :)

Next page: "Lil' Jesse...my pit bike".

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