Mind you that WOT surging/breaking up issue started two weeks ago with 5,000 miles on the motor, not 12 miles.just to let you know I beat your record on blowing up a new rebuild.....I put a SBC back together after I got home from a nite at the bar, that engine put a rod through the block within 15 minutes of firing it up....it had open headers so I talked myself out of the knocking I thought I heard.....
Yes. Crank was squeaky clean. Ran a thin pipe cleaner brush thing through the holes to knock anything out. Same with all oiling holes in the block. Flushed them out with water and air until the water was clean enough to drink. Caught some bits the initial hot tanking missed.
TDC is zero exactly as I recall. I'm gonna double check my double checks when I rebuild it again this summer. And I intend on running nascar style exhaust, exiting out the sides before the rear wheels, but buying some qalker quiet flows or something similar to quiet it down for testing and tuning. I've set off many a car alarm as well. My favorite thing to do back when I had my old Thunderbird was to go downtown where hundreds, if not thousands of people are on a given friday/saturday night, pop it in neutral, rev it to 4500 and quickly let off. sh*t sounded like a 12 gauge being fired. The donut gaskets on the manifolds were rotted away to it was basically an 11:1 big block 429 running open manifolds. Occasionally when I did it with my regal drunk chicks would go "WOOOOOOOO!" and their less drunk man friends would tell them to be quiet. fun times. No popping with the regal, but since there was little to no exhaust I would still get a little burble in decel.
Both were scarred, if that's what you mean. The rod half was flattened out in the middle, like it was being pushed down super hard... which also leads to the detonation problem it had towards the end. R45tsx plugs, .045 gap, accell super stock 8mm wires, brand new HEI dizzy from TA. May have also been the carb air valve doors being a smidge too tight, but that wouldn't cause the erratic idle when the vacuum advance was plugged in or the detonation.
I didn't allude to the bearing making it detonate, I alluded to the idea that the detonation could've caused that rod to be forced down more aggressively that normal and wearing the bearing out and consequently allowing it to spin on the crank. And I still don't know why all of a sudden the car would run like crap with the vac advance plugged in, and ran and idled fine with it unplugged. I found a port on the carb that only had vacuum above idle rpm when the throttle blades started to open, and it ran worse on that than one that had less vacuum as the rpms rose. I checked with a working vacuum gauge.
