I've always been a Ford guy, but when my wife's car went terminal in 2002 I had to give her mine so she could get to work. A friend had a wrecker service; he gave me a 1980 Malibu wagon that he'd removed from a repair shop after it had been abandoned. It had a horrible banging noise from the engine, but he knew I could deal with that...
It turned out the banging noise was the harmonic balancer, which no longer had any rubber in it, so the outer ring was just flailing around. So I replaced that, and did a full tune-up, and drove it. 229 V6, 46,000 miles (I found the original owner and verified it), 2.73 rear, puke beige. Just a plain-jane wagon.
"Here, it flies like a truck."
Or, "hey, a wagon is like an El Camino with a pass-through shell!" I carried lumber, and pipe, and engines, and bags of concrete, and whatever else needed to be hauled around.
Because I can't leave well enough alone, over the next few years it acquired a set of 15" rally wheels, a 1-3/8" Trans Arm front bar, a 7/8" Cutlass rear bar, all of the front chassis braces except for the long core-to-firewall A-body bars, Moog heavy duty springs, air shocks, poly bushings, a Class III trailer hitch, a cool vintage trip computer, a three-core V8 radiator when the old one died, and a new heater blower.
The old 229 ran fine, but the rear main seal leaked bad enough to turn the underside of the car into an oil slick. Take *that*, rust weevils! I wound up with another 229 for free, brand new, with a 204/214 cam and an Edelbrock 2bbl intake. I dropped it in in 2007, along with a T-350 I built myself. (My God, it's full of clutch packs!)
I drove it a couple more years, then less and less, and a couple of weeks ago my wife's car got the gollywobbles, the water pump on my truck went out, and I went out to the old Malibu, now sitting on three flat tires, with mold growing on it. And ants. The neighbor's tree was planted by Satan himself; sap blows from their yard to everything in mine, and and it's fertilizer for mold and ants...
A few hours on the battery charger, a few trips from the compressor to the car with the air tank, some fresh gas squirted down the carb... it fired up. I had to mosey down and have four new tires put on, since I'm pretty sure "egg shaped with big cracks" isn't the proper tire configuration. And the gas in it smelled *really* bad, and the accelerator pump doesn't seem to do much, and it doesn't like to idle... but it's going, and I've put a few hundred miles on it. Sitting out in the weather for most of ten years hasn't helped it any, but it cranks and goes. I'm going to run some more fuel system cleaner through it before I rebuild the carb; no sense doing that and gumming it right back up with tank ick.
So the Malibu is back in service. I found my old to-do list. The front brakes are still squeaking; I have a complete B spindle conversion from a friend's GN, with upper control arms, lowering springs, and Bilsteins. I have the rear discs from a '95 Camaro I bought for parts. I have one of the fancy dash pods with gauges, but not all the wiper bits to match it. Yet.
The 229 runs fine, but... my main daily driver is a 3-cylinder Geo Metro. 60 cubic inches, 50 raging horsepower. And the Geo will run away from the wagon and kick sand in its face. The 229 gets good mileage, but if the wagon was any slower I'd need to put some bicycle pedals in to help get up on-ramps before I got run over. And with the trailer hooked up old people on walkers can outrun me.
Under some sheets out in the shop are a freshly-built LT1, a nearly-finished '87 GN driveline, a 383 Chevy stroker, and some other stuff. I gave the 455 Olds to my brother and the 403 Olds stroker bits to a friend, so those aren't lined up to tempt me any more.
Eeeny, meeny...
It turned out the banging noise was the harmonic balancer, which no longer had any rubber in it, so the outer ring was just flailing around. So I replaced that, and did a full tune-up, and drove it. 229 V6, 46,000 miles (I found the original owner and verified it), 2.73 rear, puke beige. Just a plain-jane wagon.
"Here, it flies like a truck."
Or, "hey, a wagon is like an El Camino with a pass-through shell!" I carried lumber, and pipe, and engines, and bags of concrete, and whatever else needed to be hauled around.
Because I can't leave well enough alone, over the next few years it acquired a set of 15" rally wheels, a 1-3/8" Trans Arm front bar, a 7/8" Cutlass rear bar, all of the front chassis braces except for the long core-to-firewall A-body bars, Moog heavy duty springs, air shocks, poly bushings, a Class III trailer hitch, a cool vintage trip computer, a three-core V8 radiator when the old one died, and a new heater blower.
The old 229 ran fine, but the rear main seal leaked bad enough to turn the underside of the car into an oil slick. Take *that*, rust weevils! I wound up with another 229 for free, brand new, with a 204/214 cam and an Edelbrock 2bbl intake. I dropped it in in 2007, along with a T-350 I built myself. (My God, it's full of clutch packs!)
I drove it a couple more years, then less and less, and a couple of weeks ago my wife's car got the gollywobbles, the water pump on my truck went out, and I went out to the old Malibu, now sitting on three flat tires, with mold growing on it. And ants. The neighbor's tree was planted by Satan himself; sap blows from their yard to everything in mine, and and it's fertilizer for mold and ants...
A few hours on the battery charger, a few trips from the compressor to the car with the air tank, some fresh gas squirted down the carb... it fired up. I had to mosey down and have four new tires put on, since I'm pretty sure "egg shaped with big cracks" isn't the proper tire configuration. And the gas in it smelled *really* bad, and the accelerator pump doesn't seem to do much, and it doesn't like to idle... but it's going, and I've put a few hundred miles on it. Sitting out in the weather for most of ten years hasn't helped it any, but it cranks and goes. I'm going to run some more fuel system cleaner through it before I rebuild the carb; no sense doing that and gumming it right back up with tank ick.
So the Malibu is back in service. I found my old to-do list. The front brakes are still squeaking; I have a complete B spindle conversion from a friend's GN, with upper control arms, lowering springs, and Bilsteins. I have the rear discs from a '95 Camaro I bought for parts. I have one of the fancy dash pods with gauges, but not all the wiper bits to match it. Yet.
The 229 runs fine, but... my main daily driver is a 3-cylinder Geo Metro. 60 cubic inches, 50 raging horsepower. And the Geo will run away from the wagon and kick sand in its face. The 229 gets good mileage, but if the wagon was any slower I'd need to put some bicycle pedals in to help get up on-ramps before I got run over. And with the trailer hooked up old people on walkers can outrun me.
Under some sheets out in the shop are a freshly-built LT1, a nearly-finished '87 GN driveline, a 383 Chevy stroker, and some other stuff. I gave the 455 Olds to my brother and the 403 Olds stroker bits to a friend, so those aren't lined up to tempt me any more.
Eeeny, meeny...
