WOW!! THERE ARE A LOT OF BUICK V6 HATERS ON THIS FORUM!! LOL!!
Anyway, any Buick V6 has the potential to take on the rice. You are talking about over 20 year old stock cars that most likely have not been maintained properly and were certainly not designed from the factory to beat little beer can cars.
What you need to do is the math. What exactly do you want? Here are a few suggestions from the guy who still runs Olds diesel cars, and the 3.8 will stomp on me in stock form, so listen, okay?
First off, if you are building any car (especially a low powered car) you build the car first and THEN the engine! How do you think crappy Hondas with little 1.8 engines get the better of you? Gears and weight!
There is nothing wrong with a Buick V6, so let's leave that alone and do what the car REALLY needs done to it first! LISTEN UP ALL YOU V6 HATERS!! YOUR V8 TRANSPLANT IS JUST A CHEAP CRUTCH!! hahahahha
Anyway, first is transmission and rear end. You pull that crappy TH200c and junk it and then get yourself a nice performance built (usually to GN specs) TH2004R trans. It is a direct swap; on 81 and newer cars you just move the crossmember back to the next set of holes, for 78-80 (and some 81s) you must have a welder fab the plates with the holes so that you can move it back properly. Everything else is the same, EVERYTHING. Even us V8 guys benefit from that swap. You now have gone from a 2.56-ish first gear to a 2.87. That is take off power from a stoplight that you can feel! You also get a nice overdrive to increase your sorry top end speed and your gas mileage on the highway.
Run a nice "saturday night special" torque converter that will give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800-2000 stall speed. You won't overheat your transmission but again, the pickup off of the line will be noticeable!
Next, ditch those crappy 2.xx rear gears that you have! They are just plain awful. You need to be in the 3.42-3.73 range. The 3.42 giving better mileage and the 3.73 giving a much, much better takeoff. Driving around town, your mileage will probably go up with this transmission and rear combo!
You budget guys (like myself) can still get the transmission from the wrecking yard (usually a delta 88) and the rear gears can be had from a 3rd gen Camaro or Firebird.
Now, I GUARANTEE that you are driving a car with a TOTALLY DIFFERENT personality if you just do the trans and rear. But we're not done!!
Next is WEIGHT. You need to put your car on a diet if you want to eat rice like the skinny guys do! That means fiberglass hood and fenders, doors, trunk lid, etc.. You can pull out your backseat and tons of interior crap, and you can delete all of your AC, power steering, etc. It just depends on what you want to spend.
The weight saving is the most expensive and I would only do it on a car that you want to keep forever because you won't get your money back if you sell the car. I also like AC, so....
NOW you are ready to deal with the engine because your car is rice eating ready!
You need a good flowing exhaust (regardless of engine choice. I used a 3 inch cat back system from a camaro and had the exhaust shop hack and weld it to match the Cutlass. The crossflow performance mufflers fit close enough where the stock one used to go. You can also buy the aftermarket Grand National cat back and just use that. It's a bolt on with a small mod needed where your cat hooks up.
Now that everything else is taken care of, you can do the engine up right. If you still want to swap, go ahead, the new engine will also be far ahead of where it would have been had you just pulled your 6 and dropped it in.
A drop in V8 in your car will still lose to the ricers!!
You can beef up Buick V6 engines plenty before you go turbo and they do fine.
DON'T LISTEN TO THE HATERS!! and most of all just have fun, man! hahahah
Anyway, any Buick V6 has the potential to take on the rice. You are talking about over 20 year old stock cars that most likely have not been maintained properly and were certainly not designed from the factory to beat little beer can cars.
What you need to do is the math. What exactly do you want? Here are a few suggestions from the guy who still runs Olds diesel cars, and the 3.8 will stomp on me in stock form, so listen, okay?
First off, if you are building any car (especially a low powered car) you build the car first and THEN the engine! How do you think crappy Hondas with little 1.8 engines get the better of you? Gears and weight!
There is nothing wrong with a Buick V6, so let's leave that alone and do what the car REALLY needs done to it first! LISTEN UP ALL YOU V6 HATERS!! YOUR V8 TRANSPLANT IS JUST A CHEAP CRUTCH!! hahahahha
Anyway, first is transmission and rear end. You pull that crappy TH200c and junk it and then get yourself a nice performance built (usually to GN specs) TH2004R trans. It is a direct swap; on 81 and newer cars you just move the crossmember back to the next set of holes, for 78-80 (and some 81s) you must have a welder fab the plates with the holes so that you can move it back properly. Everything else is the same, EVERYTHING. Even us V8 guys benefit from that swap. You now have gone from a 2.56-ish first gear to a 2.87. That is take off power from a stoplight that you can feel! You also get a nice overdrive to increase your sorry top end speed and your gas mileage on the highway.
Run a nice "saturday night special" torque converter that will give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800-2000 stall speed. You won't overheat your transmission but again, the pickup off of the line will be noticeable!
Next, ditch those crappy 2.xx rear gears that you have! They are just plain awful. You need to be in the 3.42-3.73 range. The 3.42 giving better mileage and the 3.73 giving a much, much better takeoff. Driving around town, your mileage will probably go up with this transmission and rear combo!
You budget guys (like myself) can still get the transmission from the wrecking yard (usually a delta 88) and the rear gears can be had from a 3rd gen Camaro or Firebird.
Now, I GUARANTEE that you are driving a car with a TOTALLY DIFFERENT personality if you just do the trans and rear. But we're not done!!
Next is WEIGHT. You need to put your car on a diet if you want to eat rice like the skinny guys do! That means fiberglass hood and fenders, doors, trunk lid, etc.. You can pull out your backseat and tons of interior crap, and you can delete all of your AC, power steering, etc. It just depends on what you want to spend.
The weight saving is the most expensive and I would only do it on a car that you want to keep forever because you won't get your money back if you sell the car. I also like AC, so....
NOW you are ready to deal with the engine because your car is rice eating ready!
You need a good flowing exhaust (regardless of engine choice. I used a 3 inch cat back system from a camaro and had the exhaust shop hack and weld it to match the Cutlass. The crossflow performance mufflers fit close enough where the stock one used to go. You can also buy the aftermarket Grand National cat back and just use that. It's a bolt on with a small mod needed where your cat hooks up.
Now that everything else is taken care of, you can do the engine up right. If you still want to swap, go ahead, the new engine will also be far ahead of where it would have been had you just pulled your 6 and dropped it in.
A drop in V8 in your car will still lose to the ricers!!
You can beef up Buick V6 engines plenty before you go turbo and they do fine.
DON'T LISTEN TO THE HATERS!! and most of all just have fun, man! hahahah
