Roadkill Garage - S05 E06 - Project Car Blowout

this common roadkill garage is a project car blowout with the commando the impala and the return of the daddy [Music] [Music] this episode's going to be pretty great lots of wrenching lots of project cars lots of tech and troubleshooting steve i call it mission impossible oh why because we gotta work on a different car every day for five days in order to finally get ahead on this season of roadkill garage because man i feel like we're just drowning in projects we got to get them going oh well maybe we'll get a little momentum going yeah i know the whole thing is like we've got so many project cars going on all at the same time and there just isn't time to like do a complete build like the clevo commando so on this episode we're gonna start getting a bunch of ducks in the row so we can complete the cars later in the season our first victim in this whole project car extravaganza is going to be the clevo commando it's a 1972 jeep commando so named because it is stuffed with a ford cleveland engine that makes 605 horsepower we also hung a turbo 400 transmission from gearstar in an atlas transfer case the goal with this is to make an asphalt drag racer that can also go to the sand dunes but it's got to be four-wheel drive in this episode we're going to throw a dana 60 in the back of it so that we can measure the rear drive shaft and i'm going to show you the solution on the front drive shaft and we'll get both of those ordered at the same time and then send this thing out for a roll cage okay going down clear yep oh that was a little bit of a quick drop it's all good it's teeter-tottering the wrong way is it um yeah that's not gonna work all right let's move them back a little boom how's the rock oh it's gonna be just fine [Music] okay okay there we go yep all lifted we'll pull it outside [Music] because we're making big stinky power we are going to blow stock axles to smithereens in the last episode we removed the stock front axle and put in a dana 44 and i just want to do a correction i think i said in that episode that the front was a dana 30. i believe it's actually a dana 27. now out back the original axle is a dana 44 and we're about to beef it with a dana 60. the 44 has an eight and a half inch ring gear the sixty nine and three quarters so it is pure beef it also has four tens and a limited slip and disc brakes and if you recall it all came out of dolcich's jeepster commando it should bolt right up ready dulsage i don't know how did you end up with the good stuff i'm just going to man-heave this thing okay right over that okay ah the thing is you don't want to strain yourself so you have to use care and technique [Applause] the good thing about this show is it proves anybody can do this because anymore i can do this is that what you're trying to say that's pretty good okay that's good enough for it to drop it is oh oh yeah i am dana 65. oh man that's too good for you fryburger [Music] okay it's official we got a dana 60 in this thing we know we're drag racing this and i need a traction device so we don't have spring wrap and i'm going to order custom caltrax bars from calvert racing so what i'm doing is first telling them what the spring eye style is the diameter of the front bushing the width of the front bushing they need the center line of the pin in the spring all the way to the center line of the front eye so once i get all that done once again i can continue to fester cache ordering parts for the clevo commando we had to install the dana 60 in order to measure the rear drive shaft because the pinion is longer than it is on the 44 and so now we've got the correct length in there and we've also got the rear leaf springs compressed with weight on the jack to mimic what it would be like if the car was sitting on the ground now to measure your length on your drive shaft you want to go from the flat of the yoke on one end to the flat of the yoke on the other meaning it's halfway in the middle of center line of the u-joint cup the other thing that i'm going to measure here is what the yokes are i've got a 1350 u-joint on the atlas transfer case and a much weanier one back here i think what i'm going to do is order a 1350 yoke for the rear end as well so i've got the same u-joint on both sides there's actually a lot more science to drive shafts than you think [Music] got it that's how you do it like a boss yeah i mentioned that i was gonna get a different yolk for a larger u-joint on the rear end well sometimes the pinion in the axle has a different number of splines on it than you might expect and so i pulled off the pinion nut and now i can see the splines here in the end and i'm able to count so i can order the right thing 29 29 in the back yeah and 26 in the front [Music] finally the fix for the main problem that was freaking me out on this whole project and that is the fact that if you draw the straight line from the transfer case yoke to the front axle yoke the drive shaft hits everything and so the solution is going to be a two-piece drive shaft like you might be familiar with in the back half of a long bed pickup or something like that we're going to come out of the transfer case to a pillow block that we're going to have to fabricate here on the frame and therefore that one segment from the transfer case to the pillow block won't move at all so it won't hit anything and then we'll go from that pillow block downhill to the front axle and that's the segment that will swing up and down a little bit and we'll end up not hitting the side of the transfer case so what i have to do is give these guys a dimension from the transfer case to the center line of the pillow block and from the center line of the pillow block to the front axle we've done all the work we need to do we've done an inventory of all the work we have to do and now we're going to drop it down move on to the next vehicle [Applause] [Music] the 69 impala is like my most happy accident ever see years ago we wanted to do a crossover episode with the guys from mighty car mods out of australia and we were going to build them the most absurdly american thing we could think of and they were going to build us a car that was like in their style and we had the blown big block that had been in the crusher camaro as a matter of fact the most popular engine ever in the crusher camaro it was sitting around and i needed a car to put it in and so i craig listed and i ended up coming up with this thing i think it was like 1500 bucks and we put the engine in the car complete hack job it was glorious this thing did burnouts for days i loved the thing and finnegan hated it and so naturally i decided to make it better and keep it around so in an episode of roadkill garage me and dolcich ended up like cleaning it up making it way better and going burnouts for distance we ran it at the drag strip against the rodson in another episode of roadkill and it actually ran 1170s which is perfect because it doesn't require a rollbar the car is just amazing and i just want it back whole again dulcet do you love the crusher impala as much as i do i do but i want you to tell me what you know spill it fryburger well as you know you and i made it glorious oh it was burn up for distance then it fell victim to the infamous roadkill outdoor storage lot down there by the beach and apparently it didn't get tarped and it got rained in it's been completely full of water the engine's got to come out we got to inspect the whole thing find out what's wrong and do whatever it takes to fix it and neaten up the whole installation while we're at it okay sounds reasonable i know i'm biting my nails because i don't know if this engine is going to be salvageable easily or not i mean it could have pitted cylinder walls blower case could be all rotted right i just don't even know and the carburetors could be corroded inside ah it could just be a complete disaster yeah thanks steve all right let's get to work we're going to take the hood off get the engine out of this thing oh man sorry for our burger [Music] this doesn't weigh that much i guess because i took three square feet out of it though i noticed that too that's a tight fit [Music] so this is a wyand 871 supercharger i'm guessing this is 85 to 90 pounds with carburetors and everything oh not good we're looking at mold in the intake manifold uh that white powdery corrosion is aluminum oxide yeah precipitated by water yeah if you want to hop out we'll put this over on the bench and flip it up and see what we got you can see is as the pulley turns there's two rotors in here and they collect air around the outside of the case and compress it and shove it in the engine thereby making boost and a whole bunch more power by more airflow now normally these rotors are what you see here for a street blower they don't have teflon on them they don't actually touch the case race blowers have teflon strips right here which is what wore out on our other supercharger i don't see any crud in here dolcic no i'm actually really happy with it yeah that passes tech inspection great [Music] wow look at that the reluctor's totally rusted up that's crazy neglect kills all right i think we got everything done up top now i just got to do some bell housing bolts motor mounts starter maybe exhaust and this thing's out okay go ahead and turn it no i'm not it's locked up are you serious yes 100 ah i'm truly devastated looks like we're ready to get the engine out we're gonna have to take it out with the transmission because of this disaster where the engine is locked up and won't turn because we can't get the torque inverter bolts off and we've tried a bunch of times to like pick an engine up and pull it out with the converter but it just turns to disaster so we're gonna pull the whole thing at once oh it's puking everywhere what is that that's water from what it's coming out of the temperature sender fitting oh okay yeah you'll notice i took the valve covers off before we did this those gold moroso valve covers are not made anymore and so they're precious and kind of fragile i didn't want to scratch or denim one big block chevy coming up all right now i'm going to grab a 9 16 pull the transmission out and the torque converter is going to stick with the engine there we go now we can get to these bolts to undo the torque converter [Music] oh it looks like bran spanking new in there you can tell there's been water in the ports oh the valves are all rusty this thing is junked okay let's pull a head off and see how bad it really is okay it's not a blind hole on the block do you have a bucket the fan pan [Music] all right steve pull it oh oh junk complete trash wow look at that pitted we just found out this engine block is destroyed from water well there's no mystery here on why this wouldn't turn over freiburger it's got a lot of rust and corrosion [Music] looks like i just have to get over my devastation on this thing we're gonna take it apart and see if the cylinder walls are so pitted that it can or cannot be overboard and then we'll know how we have to go about fixing it whether we need a new engine or can deal with this one ah look at all the water in that chunks it's not my fault it actually isn't it's not my fault we'll have to do something about this rye burger ah full milkshake that's a mess all right should pop off it's a one peach gasket you see that muck ah that's the froth you get when you mix oil and water [Music] [Applause] that was pretty hardcore duplex timing chain you know i always like to say that roadkill's got that never say die attitude make anything work keep going ahead and i've been super negative on this block it seems like it's just destroyed but steve has talked me into at least attempting to see if it can be replaced so we're trying to scrape rust out of the cylinders so that we can knock pistons out [Music] junk these would not be the correct connecting rods to use if you were really serious about your blower engine here's a tech tip these are aftermarket scat rods and when you take them out and assemble them again you always want to match the cap with a rod that it came from well the scat rod has a unique number stamped right here for both the cap and the rod so you can always make sure to put them back together where they came from the crank appears to have survived without too much rust on it it's got a little bit on the counterweights but the journals all seem fine you know pull that out and then we'll inspect the block as much as we can okay to appraise what's going on here a little better we're gonna clean off some of the loose rust and cylinders and then have a better view of just how bad things are i'm gonna use this rigid three leg hone add some lube and then that's just about perfect you want some lubrication flowing in there basically you squeeze it before you pull it out so you're not dragging the stones even though this isn't a real home job give it that kind of action and not too bad all right david i thought this thing was going to be pitted beyond redemption but i think we have a chance we're going to send it out to the machine shop and find out if uh if we're good to go i can virtually assure you that this is gonna be good now we just have a massive cleanup of garbage everywhere before we bring in the next project i'll get them off yeah what we've got here is our 1974 amc gremlin that i bought from a guy who had built it just for the road kill 3 000 hoopty challenge drag race it's got a cadillac 500 in it a turbo 400 transmission a chevy rear end in the thing and it was fast so we bought it for 3 500 bucks and then on an episode of roadkill garage dolcich and i wanted to improve the thing and we went out to test drive it and just fell in love with the grammy it did the greatest burnouts ever until i overrev the thing and rod knocked it bad so in a more recent episode of roadkill garage we got a brand new completely rebuilt cadillac 500 and we swooped it in the thing and we were all excited to drive it to tucson and we unloaded it off the trailer at the kickoff party and it was running on like six cylinders maybe even five and the only thing we really know is that it's had a push rod failure so this time we're just gonna pop the valve covers probably take the intake manifold off and get to the root of what went wrong all right so here's our major problem you can see right here that this push rod is all mushroomed out and obviously worn down and the one next to it is missing entirely yeah we'll find out what's going on here shortly there you go there's our missing push rod and there's the lifter kicked out so here's the reason for the problem the lifter came apart look at this one it popped out too but where's the piece oh i see it joyous moment about to occur this is actually good because that's the raising of the titanic right there oh and all kinds of pieces of junk look steve was successful in finding all of the parts in the lifter valley not down in the oil pan so we've accounted for both of these cups two of those a random piece of broken stuff one whole lifter and is the spring right here in the top of that other lifter we did the retaining bale is there that's pretty much all the lifter parts uh president accounted for so i feel pretty good about just changing the lifters getting a new push rod and going to town me too yeah pretty confident we're gonna have this thing running like a top in no time okay out of here [Music] i thought about this breakage all night long and the thing is we found the broken parts but there is a cause for it somewhere we know that those lifters couldn't have come apart on their own it had to have bent the push rod first or come up with some clearance in the valve train first so we really need to troubleshoot it we're gonna go through and have a look at the valve spring pressures and the push rod length which affects the preload on the lifters we're going to kick that all off by removing a valve spring from the engine while it's still in the car and dolcich is going to make a trick little tool to make that happen one of the things i want to have a look at is going to be the valve spring load that means open and closed load and i'm going to measure the installed height and estimate the cam lift to do that but first i've got to remove the valve spring so i can take it and bench test it i made this compressor tool for a mopar years and years ago and i can just make an adapter for a cadillac just insert the square tube in the round hole put it right over these studs on cylinder head like so now you can see the way this works i just can wedge the valve retainer with this tool but to hold the valve open you've got to use something to hold it up now the old school trick was to run some rope in there and crank the engine over but compressed air does job a lot cleaner and simpler so there you go use a magnet to keep take the keepers off there's one so i've got the spring out and before i can test it i need a reference point and that reference point is going to be the installed height which is a measurement of the spring height with the valve closed and to do that i'll install this height mic in place of the valve spring and i'll get that specification my number is 1.765 i'm going to take this spring and compress it to that height and then it'll give me my valve closed load okay i've got my spring in here with my spring tester and a caliper to measure the height and i can compress it to exactly the 1.765 that we measured with our height mics right there and i've got 144 pounds so actually that's very good that's plenty of seat load now to get an open spec i can subtract a rough number of 500 because it's going to be a half inch or less lift with this camshaft i'm sure but i've got 285 pounds which is pretty good for an open load i'm pretty sure this is going to be enough to control that mild camshaft so the valve springs they're not the problem everything there looks just fine steve checked those valve springs and decided that they were super good exactly dead on so the next thing that we've got to worry about is what's happening with the pre-load on the lifters which is going to be affected on this particular engine by the push rod length and also by the washers that are underneath the rocker stands which will affect the height of the rocker itself now the really good news is we discovered that the cadillac 500 lifter this broken one right here turns out to be identical to a lifter out of a small or big block chevy and so we had to set in stock and so what we're going to do is remove the rocker stands in a push rod and drop a dry lifter down into the engine we want this one to be dry so that that cup can move freely without the resistance the oil we'll drop it in there bolt down a rocker stand and observe how much this plunger in the lifter gets pushed down by the push rod the first thing that's critical before i start taking this thing apart is to find one push rod that is on the base circle of the camshaft that means the bottom half no lift whatsoever because you don't want lift from the camshaft affecting what's going on with the plunge and the height and all that other kind of stuff so i found this hole right here which is perfectly on the base circle so i'm going to take off this section of the rocker stands and use that as my test okay so i'm going to pull off this rocker stand which is an aftermarket setup and you can see here that he's got washers underneath the rocker stand right here which are spacing it upward and so we might end up adding or subtracting those or we may find out that it's perfect i'm going to remove this push rod right here and this lifter right here and i'm going to save that so that we can put it back in the exact same hole now i'm going to install my brand new lifter perfectly dry meaning no oil inside the cavity and it will go back on the base circle of the cam keep in mind i'm not installing that permanently we're not going to run it without lube and then put the push rod back in and now put the rockers back on and i'm going to have steve help me observe what the plunge is going to be on that thing maybe he can even engineer how we can measure it okay now left a little are you observing down there all right i'm gonna go all the way now okay yeah that doesn't look that bad what did you think i think it looks fine to me yeah push down on the uh rocker yeah no that's fine yeah it's got a lot of down travel for the piston to pump up but it's off the wire bill retainer yeah that's mint yep what we're doing now is just switching sides to make sure that the other bank of the engine is the same [Music] i think that's home it didn't plunge at all it didn't not a bit oh it's got it's got lash yeah if it had that kind of lash it would be a disaster yeah in the process of checking this push rod length we found something out which is a great lesson to you about really paying attention to aftermarket parts lifters often are not identical the external dimensions of these are identical and they're going to function however if you look in the end right here where the push rod seats you'll see that our original lifter right here is designed for a 5 16 ball on the end of the push rod whereas our new one is designed for a 3 8 ball now the cup for the 3 8 ball in truth will work also with the smaller push rod however that bigger cup meant that the push rod actually needed to be a little longer there was more slack in that hole than there was in this one so as we're going through doing our tests what we discovered basically is we can't judge what was wrong with the engine before but we can make it correct for what it is now with this new lifter and so in the end we think we've got it sorted out so that we know the right number of spacers on the rocker shaft to just plunge these new lifters just a little bit and get it right and so now we're going to pull all the old lifters out of the engine because we don't trust them anymore because we think they are the problem then we're going to throw new lifters in with plenty of lube we're going to use the old push rods we're going to use our new rocker arm spacing and we're going to button it up and find out if it holds together problem i've got here is the push rod ball's broken off and stuck in the end of the rocker arm so i'm gonna weld a washer to it so i have something to grip on to and then hopefully i can pry it out of there with a couple of screwdrivers or something like that out you saw we destroyed two push rods and i don't have any new ones and so cat pee it's fantastic i'm gonna start harvesting some parts out of this thing i hope that the stock push rods in this are uh the same thing as what we've got in that other engine every one of these engines that goes away is another one that will never exist again on earth and i'm responsible for killing it it's not a good feeling you can see how the stock rocker arm goes together right there and why this is such a flimsy operation for an aftermarket cam okay tech tip you saw how i went outside and did a pushrod ectomy on that motor and then proceeded to throw these directly in the dirt so i've got them all cleaned up now but here's something you should know about any engine that actually oils the rocker arm through the push rod there is a hole all the way down the middle of the hollow push rod and oil comes up from the lifter and then to the rocker arm through this now even when i have a brand new push rod or a set of them i always look through them like this and sight through them to make sure that they are completely open so that i'm not missing lube in one of those push rods and the other thing you can do is take some spray and just squirt clear through them like that just to make sure that they are completely open like that okay now i'm going to install them we'll wrap this thing up okay steve i handled the push rods rocker arms are on you well you haven't completed your job i have you put any lubricant on the tips of the push rods or the rockers touch that's a rocker arm job i don't know i know push rod no you said wear the rockers rockers it keeps those from galling in the rocker so you don't have to break the ball out again you don't have to even have the rockers in the shop to complete that task it's a job if you didn't have the rocker on there you wouldn't need the lube boom got me there what do you think steve check that out that's the most awesome job i've ever seen ready for me to plop that thing on there we got it all back together and unfortunately because we put new lifters on the flat tap at camshaft we have to break in the cam again all right let's fire this thing up the timing is right back where it was what's it never moved it what this ran perfectly last time is it because the lifters aren't pumped up turn the ignition off and crank it till we have oil pressure what happened did it run out of gas man we had it running and it was running perfectly we're breaking in the cam and then it ran out of gas and so steve filled up the gas tank and then it showered gasoline all over the floor remember when we took it to zip tie drags and it ended up failing immediately off the trailer well it sat there we had it flatbed at home and clearly somebody took one of those flatbed hooks that they put over the axle and gashed it right into this fuel tank and put a big split in it so i'm gonna try and fix it with the parts store two part epoxy junk first i'm to clean up the gash with a scotch brite well i got that packed in there about as well as it's going to the instructions say that you can let gas drip on it while it's drying but i don't trust it so we're gonna leave this sitting in here as long as we possibly can and even once i drop it down and roll it out i just want it to sit and make sure it's fixed [Music] think it's gonna be okay yeah okay i got a pocket full of sporters because i really want to fix that fog we had before it's super annoying [Applause] i'm gonna have an eagle eye on that tack [Applause] that's a 2500 rpm ship very conservative steve i like it what we're doing right now is just lowering the float level a hair trying to help keep it from glugging out of the boosters and i'm gonna go ahead and change the squirter too what are you doing i was gonna inspect this needle and seat but uh there is no needle whoa i've never seen that it just fell into the carburetor no doubt yep it's right there now we're stuck on the side of the road [Laughter] we're within walking distance start walking i'll be busying myself changing this squirter here's what just happened with steve when i got out of the car and looked down the carburetor i was seeing that fuel was dripping out of the boosters here after throttle transitions so he was suspecting that we had a problem with the needle and seat and so he went to adjust it and ended up bringing it all the way out and this is the seat and the needle fell out in there that's not supposed to happen they're supposed to be like one piece altogether now what this is is sort of the check valve kind of like in a toilet that adjusts the level of the fuel inside the bowl and with it in pieces like that we're guessing that it wasn't always sealing perfectly which is what was leading to some overflow or a high level which was dripping out of the boosters and so when he gets back we should be able to fix that and we're hoping that that fixes our uh off idle problem because it's probably glugging a lot of fuel then when you tip in it's just trying to recover and hopefully it also fix the big rich problem and makes it start easier maybe i'll take the back one apart while he's gone see it's not just you in the world of roadkill everything goes wrong all at the same time just when you fix your motor and make it super happy you find out your carburetor is junk and look this one's also in two pieces i've got you the goodies fryeburger all right so we have new needles and seats here steve is going to expertly remove the float bowl so that we can retrieve the detritus of the other one ah that sounds awful all right see we've got the needle just sitting inside there right in there okay well now that you have this off you can expertly set the float level so when you're bench setting your float which you need on the seat assembly you simply invert the float screw in the float now you can see how that floats rising and you set it so that the top edge of this float right here is just even with these bolt bosses in there for bowl retention screws okay he's lowering the float ball level and the other thing i was thinking is that it's got too big of a squirter on it this is the accelerator pump discharge nozzle and there's a couple things about it this one is a number 37 37 000 of an inch orifice where the fuel squirts out it's also called a siphon squirter see how it's got those little tubes on it which this one does not that does a couple of things it brings the discharge actually closer to the center of the barrel but also when you're at wide open throttle these things are in the air stream and actually pull or siphon fuel out of them so that can make it too rich so what i'm going to do is take out that number 37 and i'm gonna put in a more conventional number 31 without the siphon tubes and we'll see if that helps us a little bit by giving us less fuel on the initial hit all right fire up this pooch i'll see if i can make it run better and we can go do burnouts with improved chaos dulsage it runs a lot better we have a brand new car yeah okay air cleaner out of here [Music] right isn't it it shifted into third there didn't it yeah it's an automatic yeah so far the oil pressure is hanging in there quite nicely oil pressure's great the throttle response seems to be good yeah it's not bogging like it was before [Applause] perfect yeah you're a thousand you really have to look at the tech you know i didn't even look at where i was going at all i was sneering at the tachometer and i was just feeling and like out of my peripheral vision i'm actually happy with the caddy grubby now i am too oh yeah the satisfying smog of rubber vapor that was an awesome way to end our total project car episode steve how did you like those burnhouse fryburger they were really epic i think that was the greatest distance we've seen since the 455 buick crew cab chevelle that was good yeah and crusher impala was no slouch either well it really wasn't and that's well underway to doing them once again caddy grummy is a thing once again i love this thing let's get the heck out of here fryburger all right out of here [Music] so do you remember reading in hot rod magazine in the 80s about how if you didn't want to stick your carburetor gasket on there you would coat it in chapstick they actually said cherry was the best one oh really was that a tested result or a complete jealousy conjecture oh are you like just the plane uh well i tested it and uh all it does is congeals the chapstick in the fuel and turns to disaster ah that sounds awful all right [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Like Broadcast

Views: 102,303

Rating: 4.9126439 out of 5

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Id: VR8D0jSdb-Y

Length: 36min 55sec (2215 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021