Roadkill Garage - S05 E04 - Fresh 500ci for the Caddy Gremmie

[Music] this is roadkill garage we're here at the roadkill ziptiedrags hunting for our very first win at our own event [Music] [Music] here's the saga of the car that we call the caddy gremmy way back a couple years ago my buddy brian lunz and i did a show actually for facebook called the 3k hooptie challenge it was a spin-off of the zip tie drags event where we make people race cars that are worth less than 3 000 bucks so a guy shows up with this 1974 amc gremlin and it's got a cadillac 500 cubic inch v8 in it all junkyard parts i fell in love with the car and bought it on site and you first saw it in episode 89 of roadkill where we picked the thing up at the end of the episode where finnegan got that big white older cadillac and then it was episode 42 of roadkill garage where dolce and i were gonna dive in and make it fast and i was doing epic burnouts out there and then i over wrapped it and it developed a really bad rod knock and it's been rotting ever since you can see the filth and dog prints all over the thing so this episode is going to be out with this cadillac 500 and in with a fresh one and theoretically we're going to drive it to the zip tie drags in tucson i think that theory would be proven in this episode and what happens when you prove the theory it becomes scientific fact that's right how do you want to start i would like to give it a minor power wash job i would suggest just using the air nozzle and blowing everything there's a lot of poop on there you can uh put on a mask to protect your lungs they used to do yesterday that's your job all right dulcinea's gonna blow off the poop and we're gonna roll this thing inside and swap out that action oh man really freiberger should be doing this it's his car my mom told me not to get into showbiz it's not all glamour boys and girls all right fryburger check it out i've stepped up our game considerably here with this i can spill much more water once you fill that up it'll be great i actually got this from a fan believe it or not really stopped by with this pan saying i'm tired of seeing you get splashed with water and water all over the floor i'm gifting you this pan and now it's going to be proof of concept because not one drop on floor or my person go ahead so we're going to start disassembling the 500 here we had nothing to do with installing this engine in this car so i'm sure we're going to run into some pretty surprising stuff along the way i guess i will begin by taking the air cleaner off can you pull that hose off from up top radiator hose off oh how'd it work uh this is minimal debris a little bit of coolant on the floor wow people ask why we don't have a lift that's a good question because our idea of an upgrade is to have a pan so we don't drain water directly on the floor [Music] leaking goo everywhere [Music] that's why i like water better than antifreeze even though it makes your engines crack [Music] [Applause] after scrutinizing the situation here it looks like the engine and transmission have to come out as a unit because the bell housing bolts on the transmission are right up against the firewall you can't even get a wrench on it and even if you could the bolts would just hit the firewall so zip the motor mount bolts off gonna drop the crossmember pull the drive shaft and pull the whole shooting match out as what unit okay it's on there i'm going in fryeburger are you ready for this yep i need angulation okay remember once we get some weight on this thing we still have to pull out the motor mount bolts right now all the way to the engine is on them so they won't come out we got to try and give it a mid dangle and there's almost no way to get to the one on the right side yeah you got to give it a little reach around okay are you having any luck oh that is just the genius of freiburger at work i'll just walk that bolt out with the impact yep oh if you can get the pry bar underneath the bolt head you might be able to don't bother me with all your jibber jabber oh fry burger so now in theory this thing should be completely oh uh-oh it's wedging against the crossmember you know normally when you put the cad 500 in the gremlin it'll just swing right in and out but for whatever reason the way this thing is put together the oil pan wedges right hard up against the cross member in a way that doesn't allow the engine to move enough to get the transmission anywhere so what we're trying to do now is get the turbo 400 separated from the engine in the car which is also not going to be any fun at all now all we need to do is lower the transmission then remove the transmission there it's free it's off the engine 100 oh no something's just falling horribly out of position we're losing transmission fluid at an alarming rate shocker that's gonna be fun to get back in oh it's capsized the transmission i can't even look is it puking everywhere yeah i'm just going to completely ignore the transmission debacle and move on to ruining the engine at this point it's just up and out remove that engine this doesn't install good no there we go all right check this out these are the homemade headers that the guy did so that he could get the cad 500 in the grammy this would have been really common in the 50s to do what's called a log manifold which is just like one tube with each of these dumping into this destroys power this is the worst but this one here is particularly entertaining that was more of a battle than i expected but here comes the tasty part we have a brand new freshly rebuilt cadillac 500 here came from courtney hines at cad500parts.com he's the specialist in these things it is the same exact engine as a matter of fact i didn't know that it was going to come all upgraded with like a complete pulley system hei edelbrock performer intake but of course it's all freshened up this thing has good connecting rods in it forged pistons nine-to-one compression he didn't tell us what the super secret hydraulic flat tap at camshaft is it does have fully ported heads on it he offers several levels of his cylinder heads and we were able to sort of finger the exhaust port here and feel that they are nice and smooth and ported he estimates this thing is going to make 500 horsepower i guarantee that does not happen through those headers but now we're ready to swap some parts over and dump this thing back in and i gotta clean up the engine compartment a little bit right i got to [Music] [Applause] [Music] you know dolce i have a philosophical problem with installing this cadillac 500 you do yes we did nothing to assemble this engine oh yeah extremely rare that we install an engine that we didn't have at least some part of building it's probably going to be super reliable and fast as a result so when the gasket has like a tan side or black side and an emboss side i put the emboss side towards the manifold what was your rule dulsich when in doubt metal out all right ready to put it in yes push towards firewall there you go oh something is scraping yeah forever this thing's almost in i know so at this point we got the engine about halfway in it's looking like it might actually go this isn't the nightmare the transmission is going to be the disaster there you go i'm on 100 how about you ah i am in like flynn buddy that is an install you know we weren't actually hired for our mechanical ability it was for my good looks and steve's comedy so i mean i when i was in acting school i'd never imagined that i'd have to work on cars no me neither yeah this jack doesn't roll swing her in there are you serious install it okay it's hitting the firewall it's gonna go more forward okay ready let's go there that felt good right that's line okay okay we got the transmission mounted up but there's a whole bunch left to do dolcich is doing the converter bolts we have to do cross member cooler lines all of that stuff but i had to do the shifter which reminded me that the shifter in this thing is really hokey i don't know what's broken about it but somehow it just goes right into reverse and i can't yeah see how it's got no ratchet action so i'm just gonna have to pull it out and replace it with a racier one [Music] okay this is kind of a cool side story remember the 71 plymouth satellite from a prior episode of roadkill garage dosage bought the thing it had a 3d3 in it we sort of cobbled the thing together in order to go do burnouts and stuff it was fun but then dulce sold the car to our crew guy wiley here and then he had to give him an engine because the 383 that was in it had a broken block but there's a hook he told him he would sell him the car cheaper if he could drive it all the way to the zip tie drags so while we're working on the gremlin he's out here trying to make it happen wiley what are you doing trying to figure out my fuel shortage issue runs bad and runs bad i got a fuel pressure gauge right on the carb and as soon as i punch it it goes from six pounds right down to zero oh okay and i know the fuel pump's good so i'm thinking bad sending unit dirty sock yeah something like that that's it either that or it's a clog up stream right you don't have a fuel filter before the pump do you i did and now i don't okay cool yeah he actually knows the fuel pump's good because i gave him one off the gremlin let me know if you need more free parts all right cool thanks [Music] this junk is installed first second third neutral reverse park man making progress consistent with the quality of this vehicle dulcing is about to stack five carburetor gaskets and one plate on this thing because the linkage hits the manifold is that the deal uh the accelerator pumps front and back oh yeah that happens yeah they don't intend you to have a double pumper in the performer intake you really like quadrajets these cadillac engines oh yeah that would be much better here is an 850 holley annular discharge so see these boosters in the carburetor these are different than the down leg boosters that you would see in a normal holley and they call them annular discharge because around here there's holes all around the underside of it in a circle like an angled [Laughter] there you go right install it use the right terminology here freiburger thanks dulce i was going straight for the crude joke and you went to the scientific factual information [Music] for some reason we can't get the starter to crank i must have cut a wire somewhere and we don't have time to troubleshoot it we're trying to hustle out of here so i just took some speaker wire here and what we're going to do is connect one of these to the positive battery terminal and the other to the start terminal on the starter relay run it inside and then simply inside touch the two in order to get it to crank when all else fails resort to butchery works virtually every time [Music] nice fun time making the grammy look like a race car i bought some super cheap wheels for these things these are from summit racing and i think the rears were like 99 bucks each they're really cheap they're from vision wheel i got a 15 by four in the front 15x7 with four inch backspacing in the back i got a 25 inch lightweight drag tire on the front and a hoosier street legal slick in the back that's 27 by 10 50 15. now we're gonna have to drive it to tucson on some uh radial rollers i put on the back we'll bring our slicks with us and then it's gonna look super cool [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i hope it runs good it's got oil pressure are all the lug nuts tight yup it definitely does not like to run good cold no but we didn't give it a super tune [Music] roll into it in first gear [Applause] wow we got to change the seating position i don't remember complaining about that last no let me see if it'll it'll launch you just have to give it a little rpm uh it's spinning them no it needs squirter it's got 250 cc pumps on it already somehow they're not working maybe it has a slow cam or something man it takes off pretty good okay that part is fantastic this thing has so much torque it's incredible i'm looking at the tachometer me too i shifted at 4 000 last time oh you did i'm scared i don't think you ever had her wide open though had to be careful that went to 55 i know what we're talking about is that i killed the last cadillac 500 by over revving it and developed a rod knock these things have a bad oiling system and cad company modified this one i don't know how but we still don't completely trust it he said 5500 i think i'm sticking to five i just don't you know we don't want to risk it we're already like down one 500 cubic inch cadillac engine maybe the caddy grummy is every bit as great as we remembered maybe it's even better now except for the seat position and the uh terrible off the line fog yeah [Music] okay that was kind of frustrating you saw us go for a test drive and i was super whiny about a couple things the seat solved by reclining it it's not great it's good enough then there was the engine bog that was really getting on my nerves so steve and i talked through it a bunch we were looking at the carburetor we were thinking maybe it had some dirt in it we were talking about the uh squirters in it and maybe how it wasn't getting enough fuel or maybe too much fuel and then we started to look at the ignition timing and what we saw is just like some weird nonsensical action on the distributor advanced curve that was telling us that something was wrong with the old hei distributor in the engine now i don't blame the guy we got the engine from he told us he was giving us a bunch of used parts and so that's why that distributor was bad it was old heis get something wrong with the module and you just can't solve it it's a mystery we solved it by putting in the distributor out of our old engine dulcets jerked it out while i was uh removing the old distributor we slapped it back in we set the timing hunky dory i'm so convinced that this thing is fixed that we're gonna go out there and verify it with some burnouts and some fun and then we are going directly to hitting the road for tucson [Music] this is one car you want in a straight line before you stab it yeah it's so short yeah the pistons brings the tires loose at will it has a hair of a hesitation a little bit but if you launch it off the converter i think he can get a pretty good hole shot yeah i think so we're ready yeah okay that might have been the greatest distance we've ever done i admit i was dragging the break that might have been the easiest burnout that we've ever done and i was making sure it was only 4 500 rpm i saw that you see me checking the test oh yeah i just fear the cadillac oil system do you think you can maintain wheel speed and a steady state burnout after a second gear shift from a brake stand oh yeah oh well i've got to see it [Applause] you convinced yeah that was pretty neat all right ready to go to tucson for the zip tie drags i think we're proven we're road ready for sure the gremlin is returning to its natural [Music] [Applause] home signing vehicles is always a part of our events which is weird to me but i appreciate these guys a lot we made it to the kickoff of the zip tie drags here at irwindale speedway in california now we actually had the crew tow the gremlin down here because we were all scattered yesterday but now we're actually gonna road trip it all the way to tucson your prediction my prediction yeah pure success you know how i know how you're driving okay so we got about a hundred cars here everybody's lining up right now and taking off and uh we're gonna jump in with the pack and hit the road and hopefully make it it's on you oh there's no problem at all what could go wrong [Music] where's our final pressure free burger are you serious i'm having palpitations now i was so excited about hitting the road for tucson and we got no oil pressure steve had this thing running fooling around getting ready to go hooting and screaming and revving and now it has no oil pressure at all remove the line off the back of the gauge and squirt it into that bucket right there okay we got to take it off the other end we tested the oil pressure by taking the line off the back of the gauge and it didn't squirt oil so now we've got the gauge line off the back of the engine i'm just gonna crank it i'm not even gonna start it and it should puke nothing seriously it literally has no oil pressure how is that possible let's hook up wiley's gauge i hate these nylon lines i was so proud of our copper line until i realized it filled us yeah that is still zero fuel pump's not on dude that showed zero the whole time it doesn't have any oil pressure okay i'm maintaining a remarkable amount of composure yeah i was gonna mention that but in fact there's an inner rage burning [Laughter] one which may reveal itself at any moment in a fit of uncontrollable anger and and pain and anxiety let's take a valve cover off that one's easier this one's got brake lines in the way everyone is gone except us oh perfect did it great oh look okay now we know why you have no oil pressure so there's a push rod missing here completely so is this one it was running on seven cylinders two push rods fell out of it which means it kicked the lifters up which is why it has no oil pressure see the end of this one is completely chewed up right there so the cadillac 500 is now junk and uh we'll be walking to tucson we can ride with wiley we could ride with wiley that's what's gonna happen all right boys buckle up [Music] and we made it to one of our favorite drag strips in the world tucson drag way for the road kill zip tie drags we kind of did it in shameful fashion though no i know i heart felt shame actually it was shame here's what happened we rode with wiley and the 71 satellite for a while but we looked at the google map we're like we're never gonna get here in time and there was like a thousand plus fans waiting to see us here so we hopped in the video van and we cannonballed and we got here and we had an awesome night it was great people pouring beers down our throats blind women and song it was amazing and we're like how are we going to end this episode dull sich and then we realized we've got the disgusting and the vanishing paint i've never taken the disgusting down the track anywhere of any kind i don't know what's going to happen but i know i'm going to beat you in my car because you're going to be driving the vanishing paint oh either way it's your car right i win either way all right let's run them all right [Music] yes i wanted to be in the caddie grammy but i got to tell you i am super excited to take the disgusting down the track for my very first time it's got a 410 inch small block it's got an american powertrain 5 speed 373s detroit locker and i've never taken it down a track so i'm going to build up the excuses right now and tell you don't ridicule me when i either bog it off the line or spin the tires and when i granny shift it because i don't know how to launch this thing and i don't want to break it but i'm going to beat dulce anyway i get to raise freiburger and one of my favorite cars the vanishing paint challenger under the hood a 360 mopar small block hopped up but nothing crazy transmission just a 727 torque flight automatic nothing special there in the back a nine inch forward rear end with 3-0 gears now that's going to hurt me here because i'm only going to go through the quarter mile using first and second gears i'm pretty sure it's going to be enough to take out freiburger in the disgustang wish me luck [Music] all systems go i'm super excited to race this car i hope it goes quick i really really do i can't even make an estimate because i don't know what's going to happen here [Music] all right i'm waiting on fried burger and this big burnout [Applause] okay burnout worked good [Applause] so [Applause] [Applause] yeah this guy's fun i'm gonna get good at this someday the stick makes it yeah man i left piling that time and spun the tires but this thing doesn't have any traction device has been no slapper bars no cal tracks none of that 160 degrees tons of oil pressure disgusting rule [Music] aha dulcing that was awesome i mean i'm happy i won did you see i went 12 21. i really wanted to beat you but there is no way that is the faster car for sure well i'm just super stoked that this went 13-19 yeah to run that at 3 500 feet of elevation with this is great and it tells me as i think i warned you that car will go 11.99 oh it will you're around 12 20. 12 21 and 112 wow yeah nothing scoops i can get that thing we may have blown up the caddy grammy we may have driven here in a minivan but you know what this zip tie drags is another giant win let's go hang out with some fans let's do it boom boom boom you may see gremlin failure all i can see is disgusting win running low 12s at altitude and the vanishing paint also stout below 13 but i have to admit the gremlin did snatch defeat from the jaws of failure as a matter of fact i think it's becoming the new roadkill rotson never failing to fail but after we got this thing home after the ziptiedrags was over we did tear it apart we found out what went wrong with that cadillac 500 and it wasn't the engine builder's fault and it wasn't even our fault you want to find out what happened you're gonna have to look for it on an upcoming episode of roadkill garage because we fixed that junk [Music] really this is just a precursor the real episode is about the road trip and and the zip tie drags event this is the precursor well i guess it is because the real cursing is about to begin yeah i don't know the history of donuts but i can tell you this this is a custard-filled donut i'm going to consume the entire custard-filled donuts and then i'm going to proceed into a diabetic seizure hey steve yes i'm going to have to handle something for you now give me away with me those are my own titanium scissors i know i use those on my hair [Music] you

Channel: Like Broadcast

Views: 209,485

Rating: 4.8881674 out of 5

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Id: PBgVmAWI30A

Length: 28min 48sec (1728 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021