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182K views 574 replies 47 participants last post by  greencadillacmatt 
#1 ·
It's finally happening. I started my engine swap today. My Olds 350 is just about done, so I figured it was about time I got cracking on the car itself.

I think I am going to pull the trans along with the engine, as I have heard it is much easier than trying to hook everything up in the car.

I have everything disconnected from the engine except for the mounts and exhaust. And I climbed under the car and found that there is just one electrical connector to the trans, and one crossmember bolt. Well, that and the shift linkage. Should be easy.

I started with draining and pulling the radiator. The shroud and brackets came out super easy.

The electrical connectors and and wires are all unplugged/off, and the vacuum lines are off.

And my little brother and I took the hood off, just because it is so much nicer to NOT have it eating my head. ;)

Without any further ado, the pictures of the progress of a total engine-swapping newb.


One of the last pictures of the Horror-Time 4100 hooked up...


Where'd the hood go?


Oh, there it is :)


The MASSIVE hole where the radiator and fan shroud was.


My AC might have been slightly improperly vented. :shhh: ;)


And last but not least for tonight, it seems as though my car has decided to do wheelies. :lildevil:

I'll post more tomorrow. Thanks guys!
 
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#452 ·
I got my starter shims installed yesterday. I put all three of them in, and the starter isn't making that loud "clank" noise when it engages, but it still won't turn over. The battery I was using is a good one, and I do have the proper Olds flexplate in there. What I don't know is if I don't have the starter shimmed enough, or if my starter is junk. I noticed that the pinion drive doesn't want to disengage all of the way when you let off of the key. Here is a video of what it's doing.



Any ideas?

(Also, thanks to my lovely girlfriend Amber for turning the key for me. :cloud9: )
 
#456 ·
Doh! I forgot to pull the plugs this time. :bigroll: I put them back in last since I had all of the starter engagement issues. It moved that little bit the first time when they were out, but it didn't spin or expel any Mystery Oil. I can get the big breaker bar and spin the engine with the plugs out after work tomorrow. Thanks!
 
#458 ·
^This. Still though, if you've not spun the engine manually, I would start there.

Earlier, I asked you if you were certain that the starter was engaging.

At the same time, having seen a better video now on a computer, instead of a cellphone, while on a sunny highway, I am still not so sure. It looks (as Sam already said too) like the starter is not quite lining into the teeth where it should. This may just be the way the video appears. I'd say spin it a few times, then try again.

Though only the Gods (and maybe not even them) know when my engine swap project will start (being in the same state as my engine/Cadillac would probably help, but that is a luxury I seldom have) I can say that I actually turn the engine over essentially every time I look at it. May haps I can avoid this pain when the time comes.
 
#460 ·
Chamus suggested a bad ground on the phone. Any problem if I ground it to the cylinder head? I'll try and find a bigger bolt to ground it to either way. Also, I have been using the 590 cca battery that my winter beater has in it. (It's the wrong battery for my '93 FWD DeVille so it's REALLY wrong for my '84.) My local Advance has an 800 cca battery for 130 bucks. I could use a new one in the FWD DeVille, so I could buy that, try it in the '84, and then have a good new battery for my '93. I will take a picture of my battery connections, but my starter connections are clean and nice and tight.

I also checked the cylinders for any trace of the oil I put in before storage. They are bone dry. I hosed a little Marvel Mystery Oil into each. It can't hurt anything, right?

Thanks for helping me plow through this problem. My DeVille and I thank you guys.
 
#462 ·
I still don't think it's the starter. The noise it was making at the end of the video tells me that it's getting enough juice from the battery but the motor is just too hard to turn. I would rotate the motor one full rotation by hand just so you can get any crud off the newly honed cylinder walls. Didn't you mention that the motor had been very hard to rotate by hand before? I will say that there is no way I can rotate my motor by hand. It was so hard to rotate when I first built it that I thought my starter wasn't going to turn mine also. Probably why my starter was giving me problems.
 
#464 ·
It was at first. Once I got it rotating it was fine and I could turn it over with relative ease with the breaker bar on the crank nut. I took the plugs out today and tried turning it with the breaker bar, and I couldn't get it to budge. I will say that I had some crappy angles for leverage. When I got the engine turning the first time, it was on the stand in the basement, and I could get at the crank nut from any angle I needed to. Unfortunately I can't get a good angle in the car. Hence me spraying a little Marvel Mystery Oil into each cylinder. I will let that marinate for a few days and see what happens.

What confuses me the most about all of this is when I had the crappy ancient battery in the car and a big marine battery hooked to that to boost it (about a week ago), the starter must have popped into alignment once (it wasn't shimmed yet) and it turned the engine about an inch. I wasn't imagining it or just seeing things, as I had my hand on the crank pulley when it moved. My hand actually moved over and followed the belts when it lurched. That is why I am so persistent in thinking the engine isn't stuck.
 
#463 ·
Turn it by hand? I don't think that's possible with the spark plugs in it. When I took a serp. setup off a 350 in the junkyard, I could not rotate the front pulley with a breaker bar.
My dad said back in the day (i.e. back in the 80s when he lived in the hood....so its probably something he learned from some old guy), you'd use a breaker bar and try to turn the front pulley of the engine. If it turned, the engine had really bad compression. If it stayed put, you'd pull the plugs and try to turn it again (to make sure it wasn't seized).
 
#470 ·
I was going to say "you have no idea how amped I am" but then I remembered that you've played the engine swap game before. Haha.

It sounds (and feels) very very smooth as it rolls over.

Two weeks ago I sprayed some Marvel Mystery Oil into the cylinders, threaded the spark plugs back in, and let it sit. Sunday I took the negative cable off of my crappy ground location I had found and grounded it through an exhaust manifold bolt right to the exhaust manifold itself. Lastly, I finally got access to my winter beater SDV (the girlfriend has had it because her Malibu decided it hates it's intake gaskets) and I took the new battery out of that (820 cca) and tossed it into the CDV. We crossed our fingers and turned the key. It still made that "eeeeeeee" noise and I tried the key again and the starter went "er". I saw the alternator pulley wiggle. Tried it again, and it went "er-er". I tried it again and it went "er-er-er-er-er-er-er" and turned right over! I was SO HAPPY that it sounds and feels so smooth.

My next step is to get a longer negative cable and ground it properly on the back of the driver's side cylinder head. Then I'll hook up the trans cooler lines and plumb the fuel system. Once I get that stuff together, I'm calling up my old college auto prof. and he is going to help me wire it up properly (based on your wiring pictures, cs) and get my throttle cable and TV cable properly adjusted.

I'm going on vacation for a week, so there will probably not be too many updates until I get back, but I'm going to jump RIGHT back on it once I can.

Thanks for all the help guys! Now, who had money on it being a crappy ground? :hmm:
 
#475 ·
Sorry guys, I've been super busy as of late. Just a lot of running around and very little time to work on the DeVille. Here is what I've got from the last week or three:

This is what I have together for my fuel system plumbing. The regulator is the kind that when the needle closes on the carb, the rest of the fuel dumps out the bottom to the return line. That will be hooked to the factory fuel return line. I also figured that another filter would be a good idea. I will be mounting the regulator under the hood, as I REALLY don't want to hack into the factory fuel lines elsewhere in the system, since I can just run them from the old throttle body hard lines into these rubber ones.



Also, does anybody know if this regulator will work on it's side? if so, then I'd like to mount it something like this:



That way the fuel comes in from the driver's side, goes out and into the carb on the passenger side of the regulator, and the excess goes out the bottom back towards the factory return line. If that won't work, any good ideas for upright underhood mounting locations?

Anything else I should know about fuel system plumbing? I will try and use as little rubber line as possible.

Thanks for all the help and for being patient guys!
 
#477 ·
No issues with it being up against the brake lines right there? I know they can get pretty hot, I just don't want to melt the hoses. And thanks, I completely forgot about vapor lock. :thepan: I might be able to mount mine a little further forward. For whatever reason, my DeVille is a low-option car, not even having a rear defroster, and apparently not even cruise control. At some point someone put aftermarket cruise on it, and the servo for it is RIGHT where your regulator is mounted. I can get a picture if needed. Thanks CS.

Also, I'm probably going to be wrapping up work on the Coupe for the year, as it's getting COLD out and I need to push the car partway out of the garage to get to the engine bay. I'll be back at it as of first spring warm up, since my Challenger will be in storage then, and I will be going nuts to work on SOMETHING.

I will still jump in on this tread during the winter for tech questions though!

(And I STILL cannot find the fuel return line!)
 
#479 ·
Good luck on that. As I found out, even swapping in a "basic" 350 chevy brings its own set of hurdles (and as we found from Matt, so does a "basic" carbed olds 350). While BB Cad engines allow use of motor mounts and accessories, you have to swap trans, driveshaft, and rear end. Then someone did an LSx swap, which is by no means plug and play.

If only caddy had made a RWD version of the 4.9 :(
 
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#480 ·
Smog - Yes. I closed up all of the smog accessory ports in the intake with threaded pipe plugs, and even got a block-off plate made so I can delete the exhaust crossover.

Air Conditioning - Not it I can help it. I still have the HUGE A6 compressor that came with my Oldsmobile engine somewhere in the loft of the barn, but I made the mistake of completely disassembling the brackets, and cannot remember where I put them. There is an old guy a mile or two from my girlfriend's house that has an impromptu junkyard on his property, and among the derelicts sits a late 70's Cadillac Seville. If I remember correctly, those were Olds 350 powered, and being that old, it should still use an A6 compressor, complete with all the bracketry I need. He told me that everything on the property is for sale, including parts, so I'll be there yanking that compressor before the bees take over in the spring. I'd love to have ice-cold A/C by the time this project is done.
 
#483 · (Edited)
Hey guys, I've been looking at alternators for my '84. :shocked: I don't know if my car came from the factory with the 80 amp unit or the 100 amp unit. I would like to run a 100 amp unit, just in case I need the extra juice at some point. The alternator on my engine is a factory 78 amp unit from a 1983 Olds Delta 88 that was part of the accessory drive system from that car. (I used an '83 307's accessory drive and accessories for my 350.) I've been looking at new 100 amp performance alternators from Summit Racing tonight, and I just need to know if one of these would be a good idea: http://www.summitracing.com/parts/sum-810340/overview/make/oldsmobile/model/delta-88/year/1983

They are single wire units, and they have the proper clocking and fit for the 307 alternator bracket. Are single wire alternators hard to install into a car? Sorry if that sounds dumb of me, but I've never put a different model alternator into a different model car. (I've only ever replaced stock units with stock units.) Thanks in advance guys. I figured I'd ask around so I don't end up ordering the wrong thing and then have to send it back. :thepan:
 
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