I bought a 55 Chevy, four door, six cyl., manual. Solid body and it ran pretty good but it wouldnt start unless you dribbled a little gas down the carb plus, it was a little sluggish on the hyway during accelleration, so I figured accelerator pump in the carb is shot. No problem just rebuild the single brl. carb. All goes well, take carb off. Put paper towel in intake to avoid mishaps,rebuild carb, reinstall carb. Fire that mother up. Wait! this doesnt sound right! Somthings wrong! Engine not running smooth, strange smelling smoke comeing from tailpipe. WHATS WRONG!? Oh S#$T! The paper towel! Damage: Bent pushrods in the back two cylanders, I cant say for sure but Im betting the towel held open the intake valves till the piston helped them close. probably bent valves also. Go ahead; Laugh
i know somebody that started their fresh 383 with a red shop rag in the intake but it didnt hurt the motror at all just shot bits of the rag all over his shop.
dahm i almost did that a while back but i remembered just right after i put the carb on and had to pull the carb off and pull it out but dahm that fucking sucks and i won't laugh at ya aleast not infront of ya good luck with the rebuild
We all do stupid things. I crashed my 58 Chevy into a parked S10 pickup that was sitting 60 foot BEHIND my Chev.....sad thing was, I wasn't driving, I was adjusting the carb. Yuppppp, but it's okay. I can laugh about it now. Cried about it then, but laughing now! xxx Brandy
When I swapped the 2BBL intake on my Y block for the 4bbl that is on it now, I wanted to make sure to clean up the mating surfaces on the intake ports before I put the new gasket and intake on it. I put those blue shop towels in the ports, and in the holes to the water jackets. When I got to the part near the water jackets, I just tapped the towel to give myself some extra room cleaning around the hole and PLOP...down it went into the head. I freaked out and swore and had a royal fit about it, but in the end was able to fish it out with a coat hanger.
I got it one piece at a time........and it didn't cost me a dime........I love that song! Sounds like me and my cars! Coat hangers are a GOD SEND! Lost a race to a bad axle bearing down my 3rd member once.......coat hanger to the rescue!! xxx Brandy
Yea its ok to laugh cause I bought a 6 cyl, 4 door. This car reminds me SO much of high school and all the stuff we did with (to?) our cars. Most of us drove what we could afford. There were a lot more four doors in the parking lot than guys "remember". I love this thing. Im takin it down tomarrow and get duals and Fentons put on. Even on 4 Cyl. it runs. You cant kill a stovebolt six. I already have a rebuilt 235 ready to stick in, but I already had the muffler guy set up for tomarrow. In the mean time Im sanding and gettin it ready for primer. I love this car!
I was looking to buy a truck about 10 years ago. I kept seeing this 65 Chevy in amazing shape a few blocks from my then girlfriends house. He had it advertised for $6500.00 which was out of my price range at the time. I happened to be walking down the street one day and I had just gotten paid and I had a wad of cash on me. He was outside and working on it and I talked to him about it. He said he was having running problems with it and he needed to get rid of it asap and he was frustrated as all hell. I joked that I could give him the $1400.00 bucks I had in my pocket and take the problem off his hands. When I produced the cash he went into the glovebox, signed over the title, handed me the keys and said that it was now my problem and he would appreciate it if I could just get it out of his driveway by that night. He walked inside and I took a quick look at it. It ran, but just barely. I checked all the basics and they seemed good. Fuel, spark, etc. I just shotgunned a guess of a carb and I pulled it off right there with his tools to walk it down to the local parts shop. After I removed the carb I was happily suprised to find a large shop rag stuffed in the manifold. The carb had been bolted down onto the edge of it so thats why it didnt get completely sucked in. I took it out, reassembled it and fired it up. The guy came out of his house and he was amazed that it was running so well. I had to be honest and I told him what I found and I offered to give him the title back. He just shook his head and told me to beat it before he changed his mind. Not a bad score.
dont feel bad, my dad back when he was still in high school owned a 57 chrysler 300. 392 hemi with a stick, somewhat rare car. anyways, he had an exhaust leak but spent all of his money on buying the petty blue paint for his car and another his side-ride an electro-glide. well, his big, bright, 18 yr old idea was to get some scotch tape and tape the split in his exhaust pipe really well. when he did this, he put so much tape on it that it would choke out the engine. apparently as the pipe heated up the the tape would get soft and he was so liberal with the usage of it, that it would actually wick into the pipe , choking it off after several minutes of driving. when it would cool back down it would fire right up again. well, he fixed the exhaust leak, but never could understand why it was he had this new issue. he tried all kinds of stuff to no avail and eventually gave up and ran the car in the paper. some older fellow came out and bought the car subsequently and trailered it home. the next day he came back with my dads car and was looking to give it back, because he knew how much he loved it. but my dad was at work and my grandmother told the man to keep it, and this would be a valuable lesson for him to learn. quit being so damn cheap. i dont think my dad even learned about this til after he was married and overseas with the service.
A paper towel did that? Ouch One time I was doing the heads on a poncho 400 and left a thread chaser in a cylinder and put the head on- cracked the crank and bent a con rod... now I triple check everything \ Haunted Ken
I know a guy who left one in a cylinder. Bent a rod,the valves,etc. What an expensive mistake. He has never been able to figure out how he missed the rag when he put the head on.
Its not so bad really. The head was already cracked and if it were'nt for a BIG rear main leak I might have tried just puttin on a new head. As it is I'm deep into pulling the engine. I have a rebuilt 54 but the engine mounts are different. I'll have to modify things a little. And so it goes.
Better a towel than an intake bolt!!! We where putting a small block in the 48 Ford and couldn't find one of the intake bolts.... figuring it probally fell on the ground somewhere we just put a new one in and fired the motor. It ran fine on initial break in (20-25 minutes or so) and then we pulled it out of the shop to take it for a run. Two blocks down the street and the motor jammed up and shut off. Got it back to the shop pulled the heads and couldn't see nothing, pulled the motor put it on a stand turned it upside down and pulled the pan, the bolt must have fallen into the distributor shaft and lodged perfectly between the crank and the back of the block. No damage just a scratch on the block... wow what luck.
You have to laugh, one time years ago after staying up late to finish putting a tranny into my 36 Ford. I stood up from what I thought was a completed job to notice I had forgot to put the throw out bearing back in.
The Jalopy Journal
