Can We Bring the Most UNRELIABLE 1980's Engine Back to LIFE!?

ladies and gentlemen welcome to another episode of junkyard diggs i'm here with my buddy angus today at once again the abandoned seven-day adventist church school thing in nevada iowa today we're back here for a very specific reason what will depending on how the day goes potentially be our next project car that right there is 1981 buick century but it's not just any 1981 new century it's a diesel here we go again 2009 so 12 years this car has been sitting right here the owner drove it for a year after he purchased it then a seal in the transmission went out and he parked it meaning to come fix it and well 12 years went by and now we're here what was that your window oh yeah we do have a window busted out so unfortunately our interior has seen better days but overall it's not bad in there it looks looks pretty good for the most part so i'm excited to go ahead and take this sucker out set to work on seeing if we can get this 350 oldsmobile diesel to rumble back to life we're actually going to do this a bit backwards today i think step one is going to be pull it out of its grave so we can work on it because this thing is jamming there we can't even really get to the hood so we got 10 tools out here with us today helping out we got the old box loaded on the old the old ford the gurglematic let's get these casters and jack over there and set to work on digging this thing out [Applause] [Applause] radial steel belted traction xtc all right [Music] nothing a little violence won't solve all right okay now the uh the real fun part putting this over there [Applause] [Music] pushing uphill i thought let's see if we can go another two feet and then we can rip it out with a darcel okay we'll get the truck in here hook up a strap turn the wheels do a bunch of stuff and we'll be right back [Music] i mean it's slow and gutless and gets no mileage and it's terrifying because if it breaks down at any moment i'm not going to do with my hands so i'm starting to like it it really does have an old vintage work truck feel [Laughter] good ciao all right this is comfy hard this is nice tickling my back either it's bugs i don't know no bugs no bugs okay well hey i'll just see you around man okay bye ready yep [Music] [Music] [Applause] did we do it brother did you do a burnout no cabin you didn't notice well it's so soft and smooth riding in here actually this thing has brake pedal doesn't really you know looks really good doesn't go straight to the floor but i don't trust it this tire turned did it i bet they all turned i didn't pay attention it really actually it didn't fight me at all i just saw an opportunity and seized it put her in the ketchup all right let's open up the hood and see what we got at least wow that's a puppy engine so the first step is going to be check for spark um all right let's drop some batteries in these and see if our o'reilly's adapters are going to work because i don't have any side post batteries because i hate side post batteries and gm was a big pile of dummy heads for ever designing that oh okay so this was charged discharged we'll go ahead and finish up bolting these down and then we'll put the keys in this thing and see if anything comes to life all right we're going to take our intake off here just in case there's anything in here we want to make sure it's all clean before we do any cranking on this motor this is pure just dried yeah it's just poop there's a big honking flowmaster 44 intake i'm trying to do this without getting all the print in the engine oh there's a walnut there's the lines and hoses they help me [Music] okay here's what we're looking at this is a standard i believe standardized pump she still moves so that's good um i don't know if it's actually a standard dime brand i know it's that style though this is the same as like a six nine or a seven three or a six five or six two or all those sixes um this looks to be an egr thing even bob right here right in the intake blocking where all that air would go we uh we're good here but this was totally full of walnuts in here so that is why you take your intake off before you ever crank a car that's been sitting for a while because that would have went right into the motor and been a sad day uh well maybe not so much in the motor but into the intake and plug the air filter i thought for sure that was gonna let loose like a bag of chips and just cheer me into the intake air filter did its job kept the mice out so that's good uh i'm gonna go ahead and crawl inside and hit the key and see if we have power to the car um before we crank actually i just want to see if there's like lights and stuff but before we do that let's go ahead and check the engine oil so that we can crank when we get to that point here's some pose that's been taped off that guy right there oh yes the big yellow thing oh yeah it's got it it's just a shy below full sweet i'm just gonna go ahead and see if this cranks now remember this has been sitting for 12 years so it would not start in most case scenarios but it is a diesel so is under the circumstance the fuel system didn't let any air in there's a chance i hit this key and this thing lights off but i saw smoke coming out so it's trying to fire on at least one yeah yeah actually if you look at where the tailpipe was a bunch of black came out also the light's not going off anymore so it might have fuel and the glow plugs are just out of it which is entirely a case scenario um but let's go ahead and walk through a bleed procedure oh this is going to be a nightmare all the injectors are on the sides instead of the top so you can't even get to the damn things okay so what we need to do uh this is our return line right here we need to find our feed line which will be on the back side of that pump and crack that and make sure we're even getting fuel to our pump from the i'm assuming mechanical pump which is likely on the side of the block and at that point is right there is it oh yeah it is right there's our fuel pump so that's going to be pushing diesel in all sorts of directions and shapes so we're going to go ahead and pop the fitting off and make sure we're getting fuel to our injector on the back side and then we can go ahead and pop the fittings loose on all of our injector caps and get fuel or sorry diesel out over there i think this is our filter yeah this is our filter so that should be our inline because there's a line coming back out to unless it runs the return through it which it looks like it does not so i think this is our end right here what is this we call this all this emission stuff this is terrifying damn it i did it again [Laughter] the ac would have worked if i didn't drain it by leaning on it all day okay so we can pop this fitting right here loose to check prior to the filter if there's darsal now this is an engine that has pre-combustion chambers with pre-cups just like a six nine or seven three so they do not respond well to ether so we didn't even bring it okay there's a little fuel trickle in there i'm going to crank it a bit should i have to go much ready yep she's got fuel that's for sure uh this truck it's gonna be hard not to call this a truck this car has been sitting for what do we say 12 years so um thankfully it's diesel i think this fuel's probably still okay diesel is not nearly as volatile as gasoline so it should uh keep better which means this fuel is probably still good enough to run it looked clean coming out just now that's for sure okay so our next step now that we know our fuel to the pump from the diaphragm mechanical is to figure out how to help get a wrench in here just seems to be impossible and pop all these uh caps loose on the actual injector lines themselves at that point we will crank it over again and bleed everything out how the hell do you do this so one concern i have since this car's been sitting for 12 years is that the plungers and that pump might be stuck in their bores and they're not going to move around and let fuel in and out and that's going to be sad sad times for us in the immediate future aka this thing won't move fuel and won't run uh we'll find out here in a minute i actually have this one's actually leaking diesel the one i loosened down here so it might be okay there's just some of the lines who knows diesels of this vintage are very simple engines all you need is a working pump that has 12 volts to keep the shutoff solenoid open um a proper feed a clear filter make sure the pump's getting fuel with no air in any point in the lines and then no air between the pump head and the injector caps themselves down here and if you have that and everything's flowing fuel the way it should they should light off and run with minimal drama i say minimal because it's currently providing drama okay i got three um can you get three i might be able to get three uh six out of eight that's a passing grade in theory these would if they're the injector types i think they would eventually self-bleed if you're able to just wing this thing over for like a month uh so i think if we can get it to run on six it'll clear those last two out the problem is the diesels operate off of a non-compressibility theory that fuel in equals fuel out so anytime you pump fuel from the pump that same pressure same exact amount of pressure i'm bleeding is applied to the injector head and is able to press that valve open but when you have air in there that air is compressed and you have to compress that air really really high to get that to open with just air versus uh the already 2500 psi pump shot or whatever it is i don't know ask why it so we need to get all that air or as much air as we can out of these fuel lines and then we'll be able to force fuel into the pre-combustion chambers where the probably non-working glow plugs are and then crank it over with just blue smoke without the exhaust instead of it running or maybe maybe the glow plugs will work and we'll be driving around one thing i noticed this is weird the first time i turned the key is it ran a global cycle and turned off and since then it just the light stays on so that might be sadness okay so five out of eight yeah we'll see that'll give us an idea if it's getting fuel or not all right sir go ahead and crank yet all right go ahead nothing oh there's a little bit of fuel running down that one that's already wet and the one behind it's wet i want to see it spraying out which i'm not seeing not seeing the amount of fuel i want to well one thing we could do is take our glow plugs out to relieve all the pressure and get this thing really winging over um actually hey you know what turn the key on again oh no okay so this wire right here on the side this is your cold start uh high idle and this one is your your on off for the fuel i just want to make sure that solenoid is moving it sounds like he is all right crank again i mean there's definitely fuel but it doesn't look like it's under pressure worth of so we got a couple directions we can go right now we can continue to try to get the rest of the injector lines off and see if we have a fuel issue we can pull the glow plugs out and relieve our compression so that we can wing it over better not wear down our batteries and also maybe get new glow plugs in there um but i don't know which direction is the best direction to go so i'm trying to take a reading off of our glow plugs and since they're all grounded into the block i'm getting 12 volts all the time since they are the ground and the positive is the positive um let's turn the key on angus i've got this button an auxiliary button it was like wrapped around the uh parking brake thing i wonder if someone wired up the glow plugs to that all right this is that button oh okay got it so that goes up and round over the cowl over on top of the ac right to the solenoid for the glow plugs so that is absolutely a glow plug bypass so uh yeah let's tighten all these down and try that again probably would have started if we knew that that was in there maybe or maybe it never will and we're just gonna be sad forever it's a diesel it's a diesel we'll always be sad forever okay everything's tightened necked up i'm gonna climb in there and hold the button for an undiscriminable amount of seconds and then hit the key good luck oh my god we might hold this off oh i got the water oh [Music] works because the wires get yeah [Applause] just gotta get the air those last ones [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that's for sure [Music] [Applause] so um [Music] this thing sounds like a farm truck i never hooked the one close plug back [Applause] [Music] up [Music] [Applause] a little better look at that i never knew [Music] all right [Applause] blinkers [Applause] oh never mind we got the last of the beans out of the horn all right let's shut her down yeah what do you say we put some air in the tires and see if she moves yeah you do that i'm going to check the transmission make sure it's got enough fluid because we know it leaks and i really hate to burn that out because this might actually be a driving car you know the weird part listening to this and listening to that 69 idi under the hood identical both just knock knock knock knock kevin that's a decent sound yeah it's just weird hearing it from this small little luxury car looks really cool look at the car all right i'm gonna put some wind in the tires you put some cube in the tank let's see if this thing will move well i'd be lying if i said it had any because it appears to not so we're going to need some of them check in park trans hot engine idling vehicle level yeah we didn't do any of that who could've ever foreseen this besides the gm guy [Music] all right let's see if these take air it's not a but i am not going to stand in front of it [Applause] i don't know if this one's got a bead still son of a gun look at that well we're going to see how this thing drives because if it drives really nice we're just going to take her back and clean her up yeah all these all these vacuum hoses on all this smog stuff they're all cracked at the end it'd be kind of interesting to see what this motor would do without all this egr stuff on it if that's even possible i mean i think it would make approximately 10 more horsepower and get about three miles per gallon less if i remember right the first generation of the gm [Music] uh 350 olds diesel was the higher output one and it they got a mere 30 miles per gallon in these big ass cars oh no and then the next generations were the 10 or 20 horsepower less as they went on but got mid 30s on the miles per gallon of these huge ass cars but they all sucked because they were rusted production they didn't have all the testing time they needed the solution was to swap in a gm good wrench diesel which had everything redesigned a stronger block blah blah blah well we got aaron tires let's uh drown this thing in transmission fluid and see if she moves for the land speed record [Music] spongebob everyone i'm speed [Music] this ladies and gentlemen is the quality content you get when you subscribe to the junkyard digi youtube channel fun fact did you know that only 35 percent of people actually watching this are subscribed to the channel if you're not subscribed go down there and hit that subscribe button and if you are turn the bell on let's take this thing to the moon i'm fine because i have these coveralls hey a registration no better yet a title he couldn't find the title found it cause it was in the car oh give him a call tell him don't worry about it yep we can fire up the vacuum dude i just found a letter and 3-24-08 glenn here's the title and registration of the 81 buick the license on the car is not delinquent until march 31st 08 even though the current sticker is not on the car unfortunately i've been throwing them away so it must have sat a little bit i wrote 50 is the sales price if we say it's a gift we both have to sign it off debit if we say it's a trade we'll both have to pay taxes on 250 or whatever you said the bike is worth so you must have traded a bike for this happy motoring don't forget to put some oil in the transmission as i would bet a lot of the fluid has leaked out over the years also i noticed occasionally back in the dark ages when i used to drive it that if you slowed down from highway speed to make a turn or something the transmission wanted to stay in third gear instead of downshifting as you decrease your speed and that would happen i was simply shifting neutral and back into gear as soon as i got around the corner i had exactly the same problem with my old 88 cutlass and finally got it fixed don't remember how much it cost wasn't a ton of money but probably at least 125 dollars it's not too hard to slip it in neutral when that happens and spend your 125 dollars having fun once again happy motoring i'll try and find some more keys i'm sure i have them someplace good luck dawn that's pretty awesome and the title which was missing what a thesis it was underneath that piece of plastic stuffed in the side of the seat huh well with that let's see if she drives again for the first time in 12 years don't cut your butt i tried the radio it don't work it don't work it don't work what up here well nothing but sadness okay go back spider it do not work it makes one noise i think it's the speed and demonetized okay feels like we got a brake pedal here we go [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] oh [Applause] so what just happened is i bring the rpm up and i can feel it slushing here when it's doing that it's getting cavitation and air in the system which means there's not enough fluid so that means you need to fill up the fluid if you ever see that happening [Applause] well [Music] viper's no bueno good thought about it oh it's napkins and numbers look it it's the um it's the mileage they're doing calculations well she got 25 miles a gallon once 420 miles on 17 gallons oh diesel engine starting procedure press the button that someone wired onto the floor uh i like my favorite part is since that's disconnected you're all wrong it just says diesel weight all the time it's like wait diesel i forgot i'm a diesel check this out hi hey they both work you don't have the bags do you you're back here they're for independent young adults oh wait a second no that's the vet window what the what in the he double heck is going on how do you put the back windows down or do they i don't think they do because there's no here that's pretty thin on a door [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] oh i felt myself on the ground yeah so i just asked brian mctaggart one of my resident experts on g bodies uh how you put the back windows down and he said you don't they're permanent only the wing windows do stuff that's awful that's i don't know why that exists that's the big dumb oh i got it holy freaking i lift yeah there's a lot of things in here coolant i'll go before this the radiator we're gonna need it oh wow look at this color oh yeah this was like a really really dark blue oh wow dude we have to take this back to shop and buff it yes what's this week dude jesse has to take this back to the shop and buff it hell no i've got a broken foot well you don't need your feet to buff what do you how do you buff cars well let's drive her back to the shop what do you say we gotta dust off a couple windows just enough to see out of whoops [Applause] welcome aboard yeah it rides like a dream it runs really really good all their second gear [Music] let's get these back windows open there we go there's dust everywhere our speedometer works oh wow is it luggy oh man yeah i think the kick down doesn't work suspension test oh oh i might have to just start driving this oh god damn god damn it needs tires oh this is that's a bit loose there that's okay you don't need those steering's pretty tight though it's the suspension that moves do our wipers work yet oh oh they're alive they were covered in boops that's what it was just gonna shake all that poop off and a big old donut [Applause] well that's going to do it for this episode if you guys enjoyed and make sure you subscribe to the youtube channel subscribe to all of our friends junkie remove thunderhead 289 golden rust and bust the boss garage vice grip garage cars and cameras dylan mccool the whole gang we'll see you guys next week peace let's go watch this sucker for a part two what do you say it's a beautiful day see you guys in seven days where this thing gets detailed for the first time in 12 years you

Channel: Junkyard Digs

Views: 472,757

Keywords: buick, century, diesel, revival, most, unreliable, abandoned, first, start, cold, old, first start, cold start, vgg, 350, 5.7, deisel, run and drive, run, and, drive, home, junkyard, digs

Id: A5otuHiAjSw

Length: 34min 53sec (2093 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021