BUILD THREAD 1985 Grand Prix SBC 400 Swap - "Lady Sif"

[MrSony]

Never heard of a painted engine holding in too much heat. Hell within a year the paint will be burned off mostly anyway. If you're concerned about oil temp run an oil cooler.


Anyways
Is the paint good enough for a cut n buff or you gonna rattle can it?
And I refuse to believe swapping to different wheels blew up the rear end. I think it may have already had low fluid or a bad seal from factory (or before you guys got it) and it just happened to grenade after the wheel swap.

 

[79 GP 4 speed]

Paint the entire engine. Engine builders paint the entire engine after being rebuilt. Paint it Pontiac engine blue to confuse people. Oil pans are painted on new cars from the factory.

 

[fleming442]

Paint it Pontiac engine blue to confuse people.

Uhhhhh, no. Who do you think you're going to fool? Paint it hug-ma-nutz orange like it should be.

 

[79 GP 4 speed]

It's easy to confuse people just with colors. People will look at my car and tell me what a nice looking cutlass I have. So yes they are out there.

 

[Highlord_Fox]

Never heard of a painted engine holding in too much heat. Hell within a year the paint will be burned off mostly anyway. If you're concerned about oil temp run an oil cooler.


Anyways
Is the paint good enough for a cut n buff or you gonna rattle can it?
And I refuse to believe swapping to different wheels blew up the rear end. I think it may have already had low fluid or a bad seal from factory (or before you guys got it) and it just happened to grenade after the wheel swap.

His point of contention was to not paint the oil pan with high-temp heat, but to use normal oil-resistant paint for it. I basically said the same thing, that down the road I can just put in a filter re locator with an oil cooler in line.

The body paint? It's... Tolerable, but I want to repaint it another color. It'll be rattle-canned to stop rusting, and then really nicely painted in like a decade at this point.
The engine paint? If you didn't know better, you'd think the stock color was "rusted iron" with "peeling orange highlights". I'm gonna strip all the orange off of her and repaint it from ground up.

I do not know. He said that he made one trip with them, that the car handled differently, and on the return trip the axle blew out. It's kind of a moot point, since I don't like the 14" rims anyway, and the axle in it is the axle in it.

Paint the entire engine. Engine builders paint the entire engine after being rebuilt. Paint it Pontiac engine blue to confuse people. Oil pans are painted on new cars from the factory.

Ha. That'll really confuse people! If I wasn't going to paint the car dark blue at some point in the eventual future, I would have painted it a more traditional color.

 

[PBGBodyFan]

Looks like you're having fun. The axle code is stamped on the passenger side facing the front/front lower. On about any rear end I've done it to it took some heavy scrubbing/sanding to get it clean enough to read. A series of letters/numbers stamped in the tube. Looks like it orginally came with a 2.41 open, think that was the lowest gear numerically a 305/2004r would get.

 

[Max Headroom]

According to a cursory search, without numbers it looks like a 7.5 Chevy rear end, from sometime between '78-'88. I will need to get in there with a brush and clean it off when I pull the cover to change the oil & gasket in it.

I also got a shot of the engine casting code, in case anyone was curious:
View attachment 157095

The casting number you need is stamped on the back of the block. The number in the picture may not give you the engine size.

 

[Highlord_Fox]

The casting number you need is stamped on the back of the block. The number in the picture may not give you the engine size.

Gotcha. I'll give it a scrub and pull it up next time I'm working on the engine. I do know it's a 400, based on what I was told, and what I was able to pull from punching the code I have into the Interwebs.

 

[bracketchev1221]

Uhhhhh, no. Who do you think you're going to fool? Paint it hug-ma-nutz orange like it should be.

I painted my 406 gm blue and told everybody it was a 305. Wasn’t anything special but went mid 13’s when I was in high school.

 

[Highlord_Fox]

I painted my 406 gm blue and told everybody it was a 305. Wasn’t anything special but went mid 13’s when I was in high school.

Cheeky. I love it! I'm tempted to paint the entire car black and sneak some Buick badging on it, but I feel like that'd be disrespectful.