Picking a Junkyard Engine for a 1973 Buick Century Restomod

Coming up on today's show, Meet Muscle Cars. Budget friendly new project. Visit Tommy's personal junkyard to pick out an engine, then see how it breaks down. Plus rick shows you how easy it is to replace your own new joints.

You may be wondering, am I watching muscle car? Am I watching an old episode of Kojak? Well, believe it or not, this is our newest project in 1973 Buick Century. If you're wondering why this thing deserves to be in the muscle car shop. Look at it this way. It's V8, it's mid size, it's rear wheel drive and it's got some cool lines to it. This thing's got a lot of potential. Plus it was stupid cheap when it came time to choose our latest victim. We listen to the viewers. You guys told us you wanna see a project that a working family can afford, can be done in an average Gearheads garage and isn't gonna take a bunch of years to complete. So we took those guidelines, laid down a budget of 10 grand and went shopping for a car when we brought this fine piece of Detroit steel back to the shop the haters came out of the woodwork, but that's ok because we have a vision and it's gonna live up to the name Muscle Car as Project Blue

Col Buick

by 1973 car manufacturers were being choked to death by the EPA and body lines were looking kind of bloated, but there were still a few bright spots in G M's lineup. This Buick has crisp body lines and could be ordered with a factory big block. It's not hard to look past that seventies funk to see that with the right paint scheme, wheels stands and a few other appearance tweaks. This could be a head turning street brew,

but we're not gonna stop there. It's not really a muscle car. If it doesn't have what matters under the hood, we're gonna swap out that small block Chevrolet for a big block 455 buick. But all that additional power means we need to upgrade the brakes. Now, you don't have to spend a bunch of money here. Just upgraded stock style of disks will give you plenty of stopping power throw in some additional low butt suspension tricks and this is gonna be one bad Buick.

The interior definitely needs some attention that bench seat has gotta go. So we'll swap it out for some buckets and console out of something to make it look a lot better.

The back seat just needs to be dyed or just recovered

the door panels they're in pretty good shape. Just need a splash of color. Yeah. Before we tackle any of that, we gotta go find a motor, man. You don't know where there's a lonely little 455 looking for a home. Do you? Not really? Probably about six of them. Let's hit the highway. Cool.

Well, Rick, this is my little stash, which I call big Body Ridge. This is a little stash, huh?

Well, it's big cars and a little stash.

I've got a couple of 455. I think I might have something that we can work with. Cool. Well, you got anything that maybe not just low miles but something that just runs halfway decent. We can freshen up.

Yeah, I probably got something cool.

Hey, man. What about this one on a cream puff? Well, you know how it is, um, this one was drove back and forth to church.

You

drive

in here?

No, no, this one's actually a 350.

Not really a 455 like we were looking for.

Plus,

I don't know nothing about this one.

All right. Keep looking.

Let's check out this old Ri

Rick. This one run.

I don't know.

No, we ain't gonna be starting this one. Well, we could, I just have to find the carburetor. Uh,

well, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, if every car around here doesn't have a carburetor on it,

you know, you can still check them out, still do a compression test on it. If you can get the thing spinning over, you can verify it, spins

stock compression, throw a gauge on it. You can even check oil pressure. Yeah. Good thing is it's complete. It's got everything except for the carburetor. So some of those brackets and stuff is pretty hard to find.

But, you know, we just did a special on the quadra

jets now, so the price is going up.

Uh, oh,

you got something that we can fire up and listen to. Yeah, let's check this out of the

app.

This one got a carb on it.

Hey,

our luck is turning around. Does it run? Um,

I don't know. Do you have keys for it? Let's see.

No keys aren't in it.

All right.

Let's,

let's check the oil out.

What's good and black. Maybe a candidate.

All right.

Well, let's all wire it in

after the break. Find out if this old piece of iron has some life left in it.

We basically brought with us the same tools we took when we went to go look for a car body.

We also brought along a battery,

a jumper box just in case we kill the battery compression tester

and a gas can.

There's a few easy things you can check to see if it's worth spending your time on to get it started. Like the oil.

If it's clean, great. If it's black, that's ok. You don't want anything that looks like chocolate milk because that could mean it's got a cracked head or a blown head gasket, which is repairable, but it's hard to repair a cracked block.

Now, another easy thing to check while you're under the hood

is the coolant.

Just make sure that it has some. It doesn't look like mud and there's no oil in it. Now. This looks pretty nice and clean and green. So we're good to go.

Another easy thing to do is to read the plugs. This one looks like it was running a little bit rich, but that's ok. You don't want any heavy carbon build up or greasy film, which can indicate a dead cylinder.

One more thing, which is a little more labor intensive is a compression test. If you were planning on buying this engine and dropping it right in, this would be a must. Our plan is to rebuild it. But you know, hey, it never hurts to have more information.

I'm using a remote starter switch from Matco. Super easy to use. Just clip one end to your positive clip the other end down to the wire that's leading down to your starter solenoid.

You ready to hit this thing? Sure. Let's give it a shot.

Uh No.

Whoa, dude, we got sparks down here.

Oh,

yeah.

I don't know. We got a problem with the starter. I'll grab a jack. All right.

Just look at

this.

Well, I think I found the problem.

Cleoid. Well, you could say, see this better day, I guess we'll find one on one of these other wrecks and see what we can get.

We got the starter swapped out and went ahead and stuck a longer lead on here. So I don't have to use the button. See what we got. You ready? Give it a shot.

At least it's turned it over. Now.

Where are we at? Not

good. Not bad. We got about 75 pounds. So

let's put some gas in it and see if it's due to fire. Cool.

Now, while we're doing the compression test, we disconnected the hot lead off the he I, that way there was no way that this thing was gonna fire up while we're spinning it over. But now we wanna try to start it. So we built up a little lead just to jump it from the ignition over to the battery. See if there's any life left in this thing

we've already removed and plugged the factory fuel lines to keep it from pulling up any bad gas. Our way around that is to fill the carburetor bowl through this port which give us about 30 seconds to run time.

Go ahead, man.

Ignitions hot. You ready?

Yep.

That doesn't sound too bad. I don't hear any rods trying to swap cylinders. You're right. And it's not really smoking that bad for it. Set as long as it has not bad at all. I'd say we got a pretty good candidate here. Good deal. You gonna pull it. No, you're gonna pull it. We can get back to the shop a lot faster if we both work on it. Come on, let's pull it. We'll, we'll pull it. Give it a shot

up next Rick and Tommy crack open the 455 to see what's lurking inside.

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Well, we got the engine pulled back to the shop. Now it's time to tear this thing apart and see if we picked a good one. If you got it out of a wrecking yard, then they probably pulled it for you. But if you get it from a private seller, you can probably pull it yourself and save a few bucks as for price. Well, I'm gonna donate it to the project, but normally these 455 Buicks usually sell about 200 to 3.5 for a good buildable core. So we're gonna figure in about 250 to our budget,

we got our engine up on the stand and now it's time to start knocking this dude apart. If you're planning on bringing it into a machine shop, leave the long block together because most shots prefer to have the rotating assembly and the valve train together when you bring it in to save a few dimes. Our plan is to only fix what's wrong and add a few small minor upgrades. So we're gonna go ahead and tear this thing down completely.

If you're planning on reusing these parts, then make sure to keep track of what bolts go where they are size specific and you don't want to get into a guessing game on reassembly

after 30 plus years of heat cycles. It's no surprise. The water pump bolts don't wanna come loose. But that's why we have drilled

a Buicks are notorious for cracked exhaust manifolds and broken exhaust manifold studs. So you can spend a little bit of time with a torch and save yourself a whole lot of time down the road.

The metal expands when it's heated. So the trick here is to heat the metal around the threads. That's what expands away from the bolt

anyway, I

gotta go.

No, just snapped off

and sometimes even with a torch and everything,

they still break off,

that's why they make easy outs.

Now, if you're reusing as many parts as we are, then be sure to keep track all those small pieces and hardware. And if you're worried at all about putting this mess back together, then snap some pictures of it before you take it apart. Can save you a big headache down the road. Time to start cleaning this stuff up. Buying an engine like this. There's no way to know it's true history, but there are a few clues to let you in on some of it. If you know what to look for. This intake has been sealed with red silicon,

we know this isn't factory. So this intake has been off at some point in time.

The time and change got some slack in it. So it's probably got a bunch of miles on it. Why does this matter? Well, if this engine's been re ringed a few times or got excessive miles, you're gonna be spending some money at the machine shop.

Hey, Rick, check this thing out, man. It's crazy clean.

Wow. Yeah, it is. It's a good sign, man. Maybe the bill at the machine shop will be a little less hope. So

our plan was to replace the push ruts anyhow. But you can see somebody was a little bit of a throttle junkie and been a few of them.

But these will have to be replaced.

Organization is important when removing internal parts. You do want to reuse every piece push rods, lifters, pistons caps and everything in between needs to be matched back to the cylinder that came from

now, you know, he said an engine will give you clues as to how many miles are on it. Well, one of those clues is the lifters. Now, brand new lifters will actually have a dome surface on them. And you can see that by putting the face of the lifter up against the side of another lifter and look for the light.

Now, the lifters out of our engine are either flat or just slightly concave as you can tell by putting them through the same test.

Now, generally speaking, the more of a concave, the lifters have the higher mileage. The engine is,

we've had a sneaky suspicion that somebody's been into this engine. Well, after getting the oil pan off of it, we noticed that the rods have been stamped,

that's a dead giveaway that somebody's done some machine work. So we're gonna finish getting this thing tore down and check out the rod bears. Hopefully all that stuff's in good shape

when you go to put these back together, make sure you match the correct cap with its right in the right orientation. If you get them mixed up or backwards, they will fail.

After inspecting the rod barons, they appear to be in great shape. So if the crank shaft measures out, that's gonna save us a boatload of money. So our next step is check those main barons out.

Normally, you've got to take the main cap off to inspect the main bearing

looks like we've had some bearing failure. It's not a good sign.

Hey, greasy. Come check these bearings out,

man. This thing looks like it was run out of oil. We got trip the machines out for sure. Yeah, it looks like a good luck. Ran out, huh? Uh,

no sweat. I'll give the machinist a call and give them a heads up.

Coming up a quick and easy fixer upper tip that could save you a tow truck bill.

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Hey guys, welcome back. You know, Buick engines aren't known for the horsepower as much as they're known for their stump pulling torque and one little often overlooked part that helps transfer all that power to the rear end is a U joint. Now, a lot of guys don't really understand them and they don't realize how easy they are to replace. Now, whether you've got a 200 2000 horsepower vehicle, all that power has to go through this. If you got your drive shaft out anyway, inspect it and if you have any doubts at all, replace it, even these heavy duty joints only run 20 bucks a pop and standard duty joints are even cheaper. That's pretty good insurance against a tow bill later on.

Build on a budget muscle car projects that save you time and money.

Now, this one's out of a big rig. It's pretty much the same as from a car is bigger and easier for you to see on camera. The inside of each of the four caps is lined with needle bearings which allow the cap to rotate on the joint. And when the caps are placed on the yokes, they allow the drive shaft to follow the movement of the suspension and still rotate without binding.

First, things to go are the retainer clips, new clips come with the U joints. So just pry these out. However, you can

next, you need to force the old bearing cups out of the drive shaft. A piece of pipe or an old socket can support the shaft, then just whack it with a hammer and drift until the cups can be removed.

After a quick clean up, remove the new bearing caps place the U joint in its spot, then slide on the bearings.

A sea clamp and a little patients will see the caps, then you can tap on the New Cliffs

last but not least screw in the Zerk bidding.

Now, if your U joints don't look exactly like these, then you probably have this style and these can be popped out with an old pair of pliers. If you planning on not using your drive shaft for a while, make sure to wrap the end up with some tape. This will keep the caps in place and help protect those delicate little needle bearings. Now, all it cost us was 40 bucks and a little bit of time to replace his U joints, add in the 250 that we spent on our core motor and the 1500 that we paid for the car and we burned through 1790 out of our $10,000 budget. But we're not gonna be spending any more money here today because we're out of time. So until next time we're out of here.