I'm pretty exited, just finished cleaning up from a great night in the garage. So I had this old, worn out 283 laying around in my garage. Pulled it from a '59 pickup I had bought to turn into a daily driver. The guy I bought it from told me the owner before him had put this 283 in there, it was a '63, and it had been rebuilt at some time. He told me all this and followed it with, "but I'm not exactly sure what the deal is with it." The motor leaked from damn near every place it could, so I pulled it and dropped a 305 I had rebuilt in there to simply make it a daily driver... So tonight, getting closer to starting my 31 coupe build, I decided to tear into the old 283 and see how bad off it was... D.W. from the Thunderbolts and his wife Laura stopped over (er, well... stumbled over, Laura was pretty lit), followed shortly by Jasonic from Garageland. We tore the mill down in no time. Cyls looked good, no bad new in there. When we started pulling rod caps, the bearings looked great, close to new. So after inspecting all the rod and main bearings, I decided to leave the rotating ***embly alone. Hell yeah! First tidbit of good news. By this time everyone took off, so as I poked around in there I found the casting on the crank... listed as a 327 crank, checked the stroke... 3.25"! Flipped it and and measured bore... 4"! S****ed the carbon off the pistons.... Stamped '.STD'!!!! My worn out old 283 is a pretty fresh 327!!! It has a pretty clean set of power pack heads. I see solid lifter cam and aluminum flywheel in my future. Anyway thanks for reading my little rant, I'm still smiling and I'm going to bed now. Thanks Dave, Laura and Jasonic... I need all the help I can get. Goodnight.
Yeah - a lot of help I was tonight. I am so excited that we will finally get going on the coupe. This is going to be a fun year.
Nice suprise. Wish I had that kind of luck. I tore down what I thought was a 301, ended up being a '56 265 bored to 283. Let me know if you need anything.
A 327?! You ****! Got a heater for that garage? We will need it this winter. Or, we can drag Jasonics pizza oven over
WOW, that is pretty exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing your coupe in person at the Lonestar RoundUp next year.
Good news! I just went through a 283 and a 327 that turned out to be at the end of their lives. There are getting to be less and less of them to use.
The Jalopy Journal
