Hello everyone. Been a long time member of http://www.realoldspower.com, http://www.oldspower.com and http://www.pro-touring.com but just happened upon this site through another forum. Figured I'd sign up!
My car is an '87 Olds Cutlass Supreme that I bought as my first car when I turned 16. Drove it for years as a daily driver to high school and college. It started off with 69,000 original miles and the base 307 Y roller engine, TH-2004R and 2.56 rear. But it did have the F-41 suspension package and was always a decent handling car for what it was.
This is essentially how it looked back then (minus the cowl hood which was added years later)
Over the years I upgraded a few things starting with the transmission when it blew up at 104,000 miles. Then had the stock 7.5" rear rebuilt with an Auburn limited slip and Richmond 3.73 gears. When I was a sophomore in college and built a pretty basic 455 and dropped it in and its been down hill ever since. lol
About seven years go I decided to take it to a friend of mine to have a few rust issues fixed and repainted. The more we got into it, the more rust we found and then it just became one big "might-as-well" project. We found the rear inner wheel well housings were rusted and pulling away from the trunk floor. So since those needed cut out, might as well notch the frame. Also found that the frame had rusted through around a few of the body mounts so I decided to replace those. Then we figured it wasn't that far from just pulling the entire body from the frame. I believe that was the point of no return.
I ended up pulling the 455 and completely rebuilding it. Afterall, if the car was going to look as mean as I thought it was, I couldn't have a slow 13.9 second big block in there. I also decided at that time that I wanted to go with a manual transmission so I found a stock LT1 T-56 out of a '96 Camaro SS for a reasonable price and snatched it up.
And since the frame was out from under the car I might as well replace all of the suspension, after all, it had close to 200,000 miles on it.
As for the body, I've mostly "blacked out" everything except for a few key chrome pieces like the grilles, etc. I've bought the FE3X kit from Angelo Valenti to use on the car as well which has been the basis of this entire build. My goal has been to make somewhat of an "FE3X Clone" but done in how I think GM should have done it and using more modern technology than what they used at the time.
Below are a few of the build pictures.
Engine test fit -
Body side shot before engine install -
Underbody refinish on the rotisserie. There's roughly 2-3 coats of Cascade Audio VB 1-X sprayable sound deadening on the bottom of the car with a few coats of Rustoleum rubberized undercoating on top of that. On the inside the floors are covered in Dupli-color truck bead coating, 80mil sound deadener, Second Skin Audio 'Firewall' sprayable insulation, Second Skin Audio Spectrum sprayable sound deadener, two layers of 1/8" sound insulation foam and then the stock rubber sound deadener -
Picture of the frame:
A few interior shots of the redyed dash and custom gauges:
And last but not least, a few videos of the engine. First one is when I test fired it outside of the car with a standard vacuum advance HEI and 750cfm Speed Demon carb so that I could setting the timing and make sure it ran before messing with the fuel injection.
Second video is after I had the EFI hooked up and was working on getting it tuned. The second video I also put my mufflers on so that I could try to hear myself think a little better. It wasn't much quieter than open headers. LOL
Since the second video I had tuned the engine a little more and leaned it out quite a bit and its revving even faster now. 🙂 But I had a coolant leak at the intake and had pull it back off to seal it. Haven't fired it back up yet.
Well, that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post.
My car is an '87 Olds Cutlass Supreme that I bought as my first car when I turned 16. Drove it for years as a daily driver to high school and college. It started off with 69,000 original miles and the base 307 Y roller engine, TH-2004R and 2.56 rear. But it did have the F-41 suspension package and was always a decent handling car for what it was.
This is essentially how it looked back then (minus the cowl hood which was added years later)
Over the years I upgraded a few things starting with the transmission when it blew up at 104,000 miles. Then had the stock 7.5" rear rebuilt with an Auburn limited slip and Richmond 3.73 gears. When I was a sophomore in college and built a pretty basic 455 and dropped it in and its been down hill ever since. lol
About seven years go I decided to take it to a friend of mine to have a few rust issues fixed and repainted. The more we got into it, the more rust we found and then it just became one big "might-as-well" project. We found the rear inner wheel well housings were rusted and pulling away from the trunk floor. So since those needed cut out, might as well notch the frame. Also found that the frame had rusted through around a few of the body mounts so I decided to replace those. Then we figured it wasn't that far from just pulling the entire body from the frame. I believe that was the point of no return.
I ended up pulling the 455 and completely rebuilding it. Afterall, if the car was going to look as mean as I thought it was, I couldn't have a slow 13.9 second big block in there. I also decided at that time that I wanted to go with a manual transmission so I found a stock LT1 T-56 out of a '96 Camaro SS for a reasonable price and snatched it up.
And since the frame was out from under the car I might as well replace all of the suspension, after all, it had close to 200,000 miles on it.
As for the body, I've mostly "blacked out" everything except for a few key chrome pieces like the grilles, etc. I've bought the FE3X kit from Angelo Valenti to use on the car as well which has been the basis of this entire build. My goal has been to make somewhat of an "FE3X Clone" but done in how I think GM should have done it and using more modern technology than what they used at the time.
Below are a few of the build pictures.
Engine test fit -
Body side shot before engine install -
Underbody refinish on the rotisserie. There's roughly 2-3 coats of Cascade Audio VB 1-X sprayable sound deadening on the bottom of the car with a few coats of Rustoleum rubberized undercoating on top of that. On the inside the floors are covered in Dupli-color truck bead coating, 80mil sound deadener, Second Skin Audio 'Firewall' sprayable insulation, Second Skin Audio Spectrum sprayable sound deadener, two layers of 1/8" sound insulation foam and then the stock rubber sound deadener -
Picture of the frame:
A few interior shots of the redyed dash and custom gauges:
And last but not least, a few videos of the engine. First one is when I test fired it outside of the car with a standard vacuum advance HEI and 750cfm Speed Demon carb so that I could setting the timing and make sure it ran before messing with the fuel injection.
Second video is after I had the EFI hooked up and was working on getting it tuned. The second video I also put my mufflers on so that I could try to hear myself think a little better. It wasn't much quieter than open headers. LOL
Since the second video I had tuned the engine a little more and leaned it out quite a bit and its revving even faster now. 🙂 But I had a coolant leak at the intake and had pull it back off to seal it. Haven't fired it back up yet.
Well, that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post.
