KITT's REAL Engine Revealed! PLUS Firing up our Screen Used Knight Rider Car After 25 YEARS!

[Music] i give you an inch and you take a mile [Music] most of you have probably seen the video we just uploaded about this car where we talked about um a little bit of the history of it the mileage we took you for a ride in it and most you guys were really excited to see it and then there's that handful of you who said come on i want to see the engine bay or i want to see this or i want to see that yes i did leave a lot out of the last video kind of on purpose so i could you know bring you another video so today we're going to go into some of those additional details that a lot of you guys are just dying to know we're going to pop the hood on kit and we're going to go over some of the modifications that were made to the studio cars [Music] so so before we pop the hood i think i should show you this on a lot but not all of the original night rider cars they replaced the factory um hood release with a locking version they were having issues back in the day with people getting under the hood of kit when they shouldn't stealing scanner bars and whatnot so they put in locking hood releases to help mitigate that problem all right so let's go ahead and pull it and pop the hood all right let's bring you in for a closer look what you're looking at here is a almost completely original and untouched motor from the days it was on the universal studio set we went to great pains to not alter anything not paint anything all we did was we cleaned some dust and dirt off of it that sock there is not original to the series there are some things we like to keep secret and one of those things is the trim tag which is uh factory you know on all firebirds and trans ams there's a riveted tag right there that shows the last uh six digits of the vin the options of the car some of those things we like to keep private so this car does have its original trim tag actually all the original cars do so we're just covering that just for our own privacy but what you're looking at here is the original numbers matching chevy 305 cubic inch engine that came in this car from the factory we were able to read the numbers off of it and confirm that they match the last six of the vin the transmission however as i've stated before is not original this car would have come with a four-speed 700 r4 transmission this has a turbo 350 three speed transmission all of the original car i shouldn't say all of them most of the original cars had their transmission swapped out for turbo 350s as a way of being consistent across all the cars and to help with maintenance and the reliability and things like that the turbo 350s were and still are known as just really excellent transmission so that's why they swap that out you can see here all of the emissions equipment is completely gone there used to be air tubes on the top of the exhaust manifolds but you can see that they've been capped off um the air the air uh pump down there is gone all of the lines everything's gone one of the things again they wanted to do is simplify these cars they didn't need any of the emissions equipment so they ripped all that stuff off the carburetor that you see here is a is a rochester quadrajet it is not the one that came on this car the one that came on this car would have been a computer controlled version this is a much earlier version it's from a 1970s gm vehicle and also the distributor would have been computer controlled this is swapped out for an earlier vacuum advance distributor as you can see right here and again they did all that they eliminated the computer from this car completely it's still in there but it's not connected to anything just as a way to make this purely mechanical and and much easier to maintain that is the original air conditioning compressor and the original alternator original water pump everything belts even the belts are original from when it was on the show air cleaner they took off the factory air cleaners off the cars and put these smaller ones on again to make it easier for maintenance on the carburetor this is the original one that was on it when it was on the show down to the air filter now before i get a bunch of nasty comments saying you need to clean that you need to replace that air filter it's so dirty you're gonna have all kinds of problems let me assure you that is not the case that is the original air filter yes it looks dirty but actually it's not very dirty it's been blown out with compressed air and remember this car does not get driven on the road it gets driven very very infrequently we did put when we first put this back together and got it running we did have a brand new air cleaner on it but frankly it looked completely out of place it was bright white amongst you know the surface rusted chrome lid we decided no we want to be a hundred percent the way it was so we put that one back on and we haven't had any issues not even with jay leno driving through burbank for two hours so that's why we have that original air filter in there original coolant tank obviously the battery is not original but what are you gonna do it didn't have a battery in it when we got it over here we've got the line lock solenoid this line lock solenoid was missing whenever we got the car someone had taken it for a souvenir to put in their own car the lines were still there the solenoid itself was missing all the wiring was still there just that solenoid we happened to find the exact one that used to be in this car it even mounted up to the two holes that they had drilled in there and we got it all put back in and it functions beautifully over here we've got well this is obviously the scanner um the scanner bar is a reproduction because as you can imagine it was missing when we got the car what's the first thing someone's going to take from a souvenir from a night rider car the scanner bar however this is the original wiring harness that was in the car that was still there completely intact and uncut and then the relay box that controls the scanner and underneath that we have a power inverter for whenever we plug it in it shows so we don't drain our battery the hood as you can see is your basic trans am hood uh they took out the uh what's it called the there's a an 84's there's a um uh module up there that connects an air induction system that's what i'm trying to say an air induction system that would connect to the factory air cleaner that's all been taken out so it's pretty basic all these bundles of wires back here are from its days whenever it was on display at the studio so what happened was um when it was on display they hacked up all of the factory wiring and they wanted to be able to operate the headlights the window motors and everything remotely so um they hacked up all the wiring so when we got the car we wanted to return it back so we could you know put the windows in the headlight motor you know the headlights up and the windows down whenever you know we're driving the car so we had to use some donor harnesses from another trans am but we kept all the original wiring there and just kind of tucked it in the corner to you know tell the story i suppose over here we've got the fog light relays there's one down there and one up there those are all original all the wiring is original um two and the fog lights are original so that whole setup is original to the show the other original cars also have those exact same relays so what else am i missing you'll notice the red here yes this car used to be red there's red from the factory painted black for the show this blue wire here is not original but we have photos of this car back when it's being built and we've recreated not only the wire but exactly how it was mounted there was that this this one strap here these zip ties are all exactly as it was that was to run a secondary battery there used to be a secondary battery on that side we are not running a secondary battery so this wire is actually part of our inverter system now but um exactly what you'd see same brand of wire same color same everything all right what else am i missing everything else under the hood is pretty much a stock firebird slash trans am setup this motor like i said it's probably it's got less than a thousand miles on it when we got the car it hadn't run in gosh over 20 years 25 years we took the motor out we pulled the intake and the valve covers off did a thorough inspection the inside of the motor was so clean and new looking there were factory stamp markings on the inside of the intake it's crazy so we just put new gaskets in put it all back together primed it and it fired up and it's been running amazing ever since and that was over a decade ago yeah yeah let them put some in it though all right it's gonna take a little while to pull it up hopefully that fuel pump works go ahead try it bro all right wait a minute okay [Applause] oh we're grappling uh [Applause] all right so i think that does it for everything under the hood what else am i missing that you guys want to see on the night rider cars let me know and maybe we'll do a third video thanks for watching guys we'll talk to you soon and now while we listen to joe's selection of night rider music that we receive directly from don peak himself we'd like to thank these patreon supporters we are featuring these fine supporters at our knight rider prop restorer level thank you very much for your support and for those of you at the knight rider history hunter level we're recognizing you right now in the description now if you enjoyed seeing this golden nugget of knight rider history being rescued from obscurity then please consider supporting us on patreon your support would empower us to bring you even more of these historical nuggets we are the night rider historians till next time take care everybody bye

Channel: Knight Rider Historians Official

Views: 84,418

Keywords: knight rider, night rider, screen used, prop, kitt, nbc, david hasselhoff, jack gill, stunts, universal studios

Id: zOZKk2f6zMI

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021