Will the Most UNRELIABLE 1980's Car Return on the Road!?

ladies and gentlemen welcome back to another episode of junkyard digs today we return with our 1981 buick century which is equipped with a 350 cubic inch diesel this vehicle has sat abandoned in a shed for the last 12 years and today we're gonna be breaking out the pressure washers soap and hand mitts and see if we can bring this thing back to life and get it back on the road let's begin all right let's watch this sucker unfortunately we're missing a window so i gotta be careful about this area let's figure out what color this car is [Applause] [Music] that's actually beautiful look at that nice metallic dark blue all right ah [Music] [Music] we're gonna rob the bank wash this car and then disappear no one would have known so our camera died i don't know if we caught this or not but i was pressure washing this and the buick emblem blew off and there's the pontiac logo behind it run damn is that even the same car we drove here as you can see this is still really dirty so we're gonna go ahead and get some soap and some mitts and get in here and break as much of this hard dirt as we can off and then rinse it all down again and then we'll be ready for some actual paint therapy if you will it's been done many many times as you can see here with the buffer yeah yeah they burned the edge right here good call all right mr mitt are you ready to wash this car yeah man i'm glad we may watch this tour man oh that's cold yeah basically we're just gonna do this for a half hour or more and then we'll be back we'll see you then i'm terrified to know what's under here this whole floor pan is just like a fish bowl it just whoo i don't know if it's good or bad or what there's a lot of mouth poop in here i mean like a lot so oh that's gonna need a little extra something something there's glass everywhere in this car it's just one window why that actually looks really cool what wow what there's just uh there's just lap belts in the back because it was 1981. so this is what you get holy hell no and nomadic that's freaking excellent pull it pull it no no no no no no no no no yeah there's a little bit of djerm does to her how about this down here okay get the heavy stuff off give her a squirt give her a wipe what about the green does it turn it back to blue look at that done yeah oh is this supposed to be blue yes oh that makes so much more sense i'm gonna go with no but a little bit i'm sure it turns it back to doesn't have aids because this kills aids fun fact all right well that's their next step once all the vacuum's done i guess and then the interior is totally detailed i did one swipe on the dash holy crap do another apparently the dash isn't black it's blue whoa but watch this here it's just goof just do it's blue i straight up thought that was all black look at that i thought it was black too beautiful yeah come look at this whole side it looks amazing yeah it's blue versus that morning angus morning walking stuff yeah it was you i turned it off oh welcome to day two of putting this 1981 buick century limited back on the road uh this has gone from hey let's clean the car to hey let's spend way too much money on it and totally make it a reliable daily driver for one of us it wasn't my idea we've gone down to o'reilly's this morning and procured most of the stuff we're gonna need for today we got a water pump coming later we have oil filter uh we got sway bar links cause yesterday we threw this thing up on a lift and looked under it and the sway bar links are snapped off um anything that holds fluid doesn't want to hold the fluid anymore so we got to figure out what all that is yes we've got new rubber brake lines for the corners and the rear one of them is like sheared in half yet somehow operable beyond all that stuff to make this thing rotable we're gonna make it beautiful i went down the store and grabbed ourselves some perfect it 60 medium glaze some wax some window cleaner and a wool pad so i'm going to channel my dad here and try to make this car look at least similar to the quality level of the golden oldsmobile with probably way more burnt lines because i barely know what i'm doing despite having grown up with a father who did bodywork professionally for like 20 or 30 years but like this car is a really good candidate for learning that's the perfect practice card if you guys ever want to learn auto body and practice buffing do it on something that doesn't matter get your neighbors grandma's car or something and offer to buff it out or find one in the woods or just go get go get a fender for 20 bucks from a junkyard you don't care about and practice on that and then just throw it away it's going to be a lot less stressful doing that which is exactly my plans for the day so go ahead and get the buffer get the wool pad all set up and start digging into this while angus finishes up the interior and we'll bring you guys along for the ride all right let's get some before shots of this paint here as you can see there's a lot of haze in the paint a lot of uh impurities and poop a lot of poo bass in there here's a bunch of stuff in the rear panel the c-pillar here so there we go that is our before let's set to work and work towards and after all right so we got our buffer and our 3m rubbing compound ready to go i uh refreshed myself by watching the video with the 72 oldmill where my dad buffed that car if you actually want to know how to do this properly for someone who's been doing it for 30 years go check that video out it's a really good video for learning some bodywork buffing on these old cars basically what i remember is take it slow do a small spot at a time go off of each edge not into them to avoid um cutting the paint which you can already see is already actually happened in this car someone just rolled the buffer right over this edge this is going to be a bit of a learning curve for me i haven't done this in years so let's go ahead and set to it what the hell is this thing so this is i'm borrowing this from someone and it seems to have a pressure control where if it bogs down it speeds itself up so i don't know how well it's gonna work [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so so well it works at the same time that's going fast i know it is going to take a bit of work to get all this off because it's uh taking the immediate oxidization off and then clearly showing me that there's stuff under it that needs fixed look at that though it's gonna be a nine thousand dollar car we're done it's classic right don't you think that's a bit much one thing i'm suddenly remembering is dad said get a spray bottle full of water to keep your pad wet so i'm going to go ahead and do that [Applause] wow there's a lot of haze in this paint like oh my god see that look at all that haze wow oh there's no taking that out and it's all subsurface cracking but we can see ourselves now so we're moving in the right direction once again don't yell at me in the comments because i am not a professional i do not claim to know what the hell i'm doing right now really wish dad was here this weekend all right well there's our first panel a definite difference from the old to the new hell you can see the haze from here uh you can also see all the dents i found from here one thing i am noticing i don't think this is actually all me um i don't know if we'll pick it up on camera so if you watch the center of your screen right now that is dark blue light darker lighter darker lighter those are stripes in the paint and the difference is the haze is either absent such as right there in the center of the screen versus here where it's really really thick so i don't think that's actually my fault i think that was in the paint prior and as my dad said 100 times you can only make it as good as what's there all right so we're back under the hood uh we've got a couple things to take care of one we got a new set of batteries for this car that can be dedicated to this car and we don't have to use these revival batteries anymore and the second thing we'll do while we're under here is we need to replace our water pump while we were driving this thing around town we noticed that it had a squeal as you increase engine rpm we determined that it wasn't anything belt related as far as alternator power steering or air conditioning compressor and when we took a temp reader all over the engine we took a reading on this pulley it read about 100 degrees higher than everywhere else on the engine which told us that the forward bearing on the water pump was bad so remedy that we're just replacing the whole thing besides that it was literally screaming yeah it was absolutely screaming we started driving around yesterday and i just went like we're like oh i think something's wrong yup so that's what i'll be doing under the hood i think jesse you're gonna continue cleaning a little bit on the inside while kevin's buffing and we're gonna just tag team this thing let's do it i don't know what i'm doing still got the last bolt out which was kind of a nightmare of the water pump couldn't get the lower rad hose off just yet so i'm going to twist that off right now and make a massive mess i bet maybe yeah just cool well that's out and for those of you who are watching live the reason we're replacing we are replacing this water pump is because the front bearing squeals like a stuck pin it's so bad so we're just gonna throw a new one in there be done with it and for those of you who are not watching live you should definitely subscribe to watch live next time right here on joker biggs it ain't common but when it is it's a good old time why are you licking the water pump johnny gets lick oil i want to like something calamity resumes you just have our water pump off uh we have a whole crew working on this car now caleb my cousin's son is over here ben my cousin is here they are currently replacing the um blower motor that we saw that was uh not good earlier for lack of better words angus has our new water pump he looks confused everything's going pretty well what did you already open this no is it like covered in goo yes what look this has already been good it's already been gasket this is a return unit this someone covered an rtv and then took back to autozone what is this rtv or is it this it's that it's that like over this over-the-counter stuff sorry internet james well i guess we'll just cut all that off and correct so we've got most of our interior here done as you can see but just to give you guys a little example of how muddy this is we've got nice clean rag just wipe off the steering wheel holy [ __ ] it's everything has been just covered by this goo and it's so sticky so far we have to scrub it out of every single tight corner nook and cranny but as you look across the whole dash it is nice and clean except the rust on the thing what a beautiful car okay that might be pushing it hey all right so we went ahead got the old gasket scraped off of our new water pump and if you can tell that i'm maybe a little salty about it i am got the old gasket scraped off thanks to our wonderful helper here caleb and uh went ahead rtv the new gasket tried to drop some bolts and she's ready to go back on so you'll never guess what happens next the waterfront goes on yeah i cried a little bit and the waterfall goes on yes oh well i only guessed half of it so it's fine do you have enough rtv for all that rusty surface gosh i hope so we can put more on maybe you don't have to call me names there it is you got a new water pump in throwing the shrouds in right now should be wrapping this up nothing too crazy and then we'll uh top everything off and hit the key see if it blows cooling everywhere everyone clear sure all right gold plugs one two three one maybe she wants a little more than ten okay when the wire gets hot i think that's when it's good to go [Applause] well it used to be dead steady [Applause] well i take it that didn't fix it what the [ __ ] what the hell is that squeaky noise is it is it the alternator drawn we can pop the alternator belt off and find out against the alternator bearing yeah can we do that quick uh quick as a relative term for the internet out there it'll be really quick for us and that's quick we'll do that it's quick okay alternator belt is off we're gonna see if it still screams ready yep ready you gotta hold it but not burn your hands kind of like a weird game of operator but with way worse consequences [Applause] um well all that for nothing it was the god damn gm alternator once again get out of the way it's me a dying camel let me just hold it for a long time diesels don't have loud horns because you already know they're coming yeah i mean to be fair it kind of sounds like the engine yeah it's like here let me start my car you can't tell there's nothing like it yeah no you're alternators definitely squeaky how are you good day two bringing the paint back to life on the buick uh angus is still turning wrenches under the hood we're putting a new thermostat in it because that hose right there took the poop yesterday and replaced that you gotta take the thermostat housing off and if you're taking the thermostat housing off might as well put a new thermostat in any who why are we doing this to ourselves why are we restoring an 81 buick century diesel what have we come to at this point i've been saying that this whole time i must do that at least five times this is dumb i hate this motor the car is nice i like this car it's gonna be great thank you guys ah wow those non uh horizontal surfaces come out really nice that's beautiful hey angus yo shia labeouf yeah shiloh buffer i'm gonna go through and do everything above my pinstripe tape right now and then move my tape and do everything below oh new air filter no air filter yeah welcome back ladies and gentlemen you're joining us in the uh driver's quarter panel here i have done some actual like real true buffing to try to get these scratches out of here and they came out pretty well uh they're so visible because they're beyond the surface of the paint but there's still this dent here and we're curious if we can do some pdr some paintless dent repair uh with our uh specialized uh auto body whacker so uh mr wacker would you like to do some pdr to this panel please i've always wanted to punch this car i'm ready i'm ready not oh it's fixed there's one up a little higher and one below it so you might have to punch out that's the touch i tell you this one's on a body line so i think we might have to massage these out i'll get the uh the massageable hammer i'm telling you're dead on you actually though there's still a little crease because the metal has been folded but that's pretty good i'm okay with that for a little time just whacking around uh yeah unfortunately i made a casualty but nothing like glue can't fix right crimes that took me a century to think of that okay leave me alone somebody help me you know you're standing around living life and the next thing you know a century flies by time flies oh no what you doing angus dropping oil filters both literally and metaphorically but mostly literally that'll buff all right finishing up the oil change on this piece of junk um just such hatred i hate it i hate it so much and the more you like it the more i hate it i love it it's just such a good car i hate it it might be my favorite car that might be our best car mooc the wildcat is listening it can hear you but we're throwing some 1540 in of the cheapest variety it already looks dirty hi welcome to diesel what the hell uh anyway i'm taking off the alternator right now we've got one coming on monday which is tomorrow my math is correct we'll get a little bit of me doing the oh no he's gonna get called unoriginal say he's copying by strip garage because he whistled no that's totally true watched a couple of his videos and then i just started doing it and i hate it really doesn't convey the message i'm trying to get across all right we got one spinning skulternator sounds like a tiny little bird wow there it is it's the last panel for our cutting pad um we're gonna take all this tape off look for any spots i may have missed a little bit of hand work around the mirrors doors emblems blah blah blah and then roll this outside and wash the whole thing and then we'll have the shiniest turd in the toilet [Applause] got so weird to like work on this for like all day buffing it and cleaning it and being like oh we're here working on a car then you fire it off and it sounds like a dump truck it messes with your brain a little bit [Applause] i'll tell you what this is one beautiful color though should have brought my bikini [Applause] that must be what an earthquake is like because everything just went burnt no you are not i'll hand it just go ahead that's organized you're gonna shake them all i'm gonna be scatterbrained the rest of the night that's fine no there we are come here come on get all over here are you ready so as you've probably gathered by now it is time to wax this car it's time to go to bed well yeah there's that oh my gosh that is you weren't ready for that were you i was not that is that is quite thin i'm not ready for angus ice cream yeah i think there's some sugar food and whatever the hell is going on it's a wild ride that i i just started son of a god so that should be enough for the trump in entirety here we go this is far more satisfying than nothing yeah so basically i'm going to keep doing this for another hour and that much done all right this is the last car's actually coming out pretty good for as much as it fought me in the beginnings coming out away way better than i had anticipated so i am pleasantly surprised yeah so as you can see all that haze is still in there there's a lot of cracks right here this might actually be a bit of plastic work um i don't know if you guys can see it but it looks like there's almost sanding marks i think this car may have been painted i don't know though good morning sir good morning it is day three with our buick century dersil um we're gonna yank the tires off right now because we have new tires there is an alternator waiting for us at o'reilly's i think the only thing we have left here to do is uh the rubber brake lines and then bleed the brakes maybe those upper control arm bushings we'll see how much of a nightmare that is it's a good thing we have this lift to do such a thing yeah it's much nicer two post ten thousand pound lift thank you again you beautiful bastards rise you blue turd all right let's get these tires off and go get some new treads where are the other drugs going talk what our frame's actually good through here this is usually where these cars rushed out and this one's good to go so interesting shocks look to be well they still got paint on them so they're fine they're cylindrical yep still has paint still around check and check we're good to go to the road all right so this is what we're going to be replacing this rubber line right here as you can see has seen better days and that is a safety hazard now when we bought the car the guy said the transmission leaked and that's why he parked it uh so far the transmission has been the only thing that doesn't leak although we did have to put a few quarts in it so i don't i don't like it's wet but i don't see any specific thing that goes bad we also haven't let it sit for longer than maybe 48 hours in the same spot but it hasn't put a drop on the floor but usually when this seal goes bad it drops like three quarts while we're in here we also realize that this right here is the sway bar link so that's probably part of our body roll issue i got a couple a couple of those coming to replace both of these because sure enough we replaced that one and then this one explodes and then these up here are the upper bushings i had mentioned which as you can see or well you can't see them because they're not there anymore those uh those upper joints definitely need to replace so we're just going to burn off our brand new set of tires and that's throwing money away which i don't like to do all right i'm going to go ahead and pop the remaining sway bar link up here the fastest way to do this is not with a wrench if you have one it can be possible most times will snap off which is actually quick uh you're lucky in that case but a lot of times this stuff is so rusted that they'll just strip out or spin it's a nightmare so just go straight for the cutting tools and get these out of the way [Applause] [Music] there we go and i think i even managed to not hit the brand new brake line hindsight you should have done this first but we uh we survived with that being said we have all of our new rubber brake lines in those are nice and dependable now let's go ahead and drop this thing down to where we can reach the suspension and pull out the upper control arms ball joints get all those new bushings in and realign this thing all right we went down to triples our favorite tire store in the world if you're in ames the beta central iowa iowa at all and need car work done trickles automotive ames iowa no place to go here you go i guess oh you're not there [Applause] once again here's our new tires put on by trickle automotive in downtown ames i'm gonna throw the rears on this car before we start working on the front suspension because we know we're gonna need to load up the front lower control arms to compress the springs so it doesn't explode in our freaking face so we didn't want to put too much loading on the rear of our two post lift otherwise it might just go and topple over on the car so we're gonna zip these on right quick and move hey there it is yeah i always knew one of these leads if you rounded it out it would it would zap but it didn't do it when i took it off so it's like maybe that was my imagination [ __ ] that's still doing it why is that on fire all right i've got our ball joint busted loose of our uh spindle here everything looks okay or at least to the point you would expect from 136 000 mile car from 1981. i'm going to push this guy all the way up so i can get to these two the impact uh buzz those off i'm going to take careful inventory of what uh spacers are there for our alignment so i can put everything back and hopefully everything just lands the way it's supposed to probably won't but i can dream all right checking in a couple hours later we have our ball joint press set up to press all these uh cups and rubbers and studs out and what else and whatnot i've got one done already it's pain in the ass a hydraulic press would probably be pretty nice but if you're inventive enough you can get it done without one exhibit and then from there i'll just pound that out throw our new ones in put the new ball joint in and we'll be good to go all right there we go i put the camera down so that i can get this done and hopefully finish this car tonight because tomorrow we're pulling a vehicle mooks in and starting a revival on that so i need to get this sucker out of here tonight but long story short we have new upper ball joints and new upper control arm bushings in the front of the car on both sides at this point i'm simply going to take these wheel bearings uh clean them out re-grease them re-pack the spindles and everything fully grease put it all back together slap the front tires on it and move on to whatever the hell we find next actually you know what this is a good time to address something um revival cars being put back on the road we tried to do a video of that with angus truck just kind of showing you what there is to put stuff back on the road in the end that video made it look really easy and actually for that vehicle it was and this one honestly kind of the same story not a lot of work goes into putting some of these cars back on the road at the same time other vehicles take a ton of work it's all very vehicle specific so if you're wondering how do you do your own revival and how do you put your own vehicle back on the road it is all very vehicle specific just have a general basis knowledge of what needs to be done to make it reliable and grab yourself a flashlight crawl around search to the vehicle and see what is wrong and then if it's wrong fix it exhibit a these bushings now i know this car is going to be good for another probably a hundred thousand miles before it needs those it's not gonna last that long but in the weird chance it does it'd be okay and it's one less thing for me to worry about out there on the road and you're not gonna find everything some stuff will remain hidden from you and you'll never know and then you'll probably find out at the worst possible time and break down on the road somewhere and that's that's just part of it but for the most part when you're digging around working on one thing inspect everything in the area clean up everything in the area and leave whatever area you're working in better than you found it during that kind of general cleaning inspection is when you're going to find what's wrong with your vehicle you're going to see stuff you haven't seen before you're going to know stuff that's starting to go out that you haven't been able to feel on the wheel or notice a noise or vibration about yet when something's wrong get into an area clean it inspect it take note of what needs to be fixed in the immediate or near future and then move on to the next thing and that is how you put old cars back on the road you just keep wrenching and wrenching and wrenching and wrenching and wrenching and wrenching wrenching and wrenching angus is throwing our caliper back on this side we got our bleeders loose we had to take them off and drill them out and get them to move fluid again we're gonna throw those calipers on and i'm gonna throw the sway bar links in put the front tires on and we're done well that's that that is our front suspension totally redone we got ourselves some new sway bar links new uh upper control arm bushings new upper ball joints new grease and the what is going on i think there's like debris inside the hubcap there's new stuff i'm tired i don't know that would be everything but unfortunately i gorilla armed this freaking bleeder right off on this side before we put any heat into it i was like oh it's moving and it just snapped in half and then the easy out snapped off inside of it so pretty much just sad times over here gonna go down to o'reilly's get ourselves a new caliper tomorrow they're 22 bucks might as well heck it day four four and a half if you counter over time yeah yesterday was a long day but today our hood struts came in so we can get rid of our rather uh nice wheelbarrow handle actually might might miss this it's pretty i don't know it's got termites in the end i don't know okay that's that's fair that's right not the best road trip buddies i have ourselves a new caliper i'm gonna throw that on quick we'll bleed our brakes throw the tires on and then we should be good to go for a little cruise and figure out whatever we forgot oh a window we need a window well so let's get her back together and finish this up up down yeah flew it everywhere all right there we go brakes are bled everything seems to be working let's put these tires on and get this thing moving around again here we go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's still smooth help good what the hell did that possibly be there's a possum in the hood i mean the only thing left at this point is the power steering pump does that doesn't run off the alternator belt did it no because we took the alternator belt off and squeaking away maybe your new alternator is bad i hate you and i hate that horn and i hate this car all right let's clean up the shop a bit uh and then we'll be back to this car in a couple days to figure out what the hell is screaming under the hood all right we're back hopefully the final day here got a few things to wrap up we have the window to put in there i have the power steering belt and then we're maybe gonna do a quick alignment and this thing should be good to go joining me today is my father if you don't know him this is my dad obviously and he was a body man for 30 years and was the guy who got me in the cars so he's gonna go ahead probably take about eight seconds and look at this car and find anything i did wrong or telling me the history of the car that i could not pick up on all right what do you see you bought a diesel no yeah well that was my first mistake yeah i don't know i'd say that a lot of the car has been repainted sometime in this in its life do you think all at once or a panel at a time or no i think all at once i think they painted the whole car because you see a lot of uh if you look across the roof i don't know if the camera can pick that up but you can see a lot of d a um we had words for that but i can't say that on the internet it's just you can know yeah there's a lot of deformation but you know what it's a pretty darn nice shape for an 81 any other clues or things that you can point out and teach people to find to see if a car has been or painted here at the trim instead of removing all this trim i can actually pick it off is paint um i did notice that here where it was blatantly obvious i was able to pick up on that here is a crack but this isn't nothing they did this is actually you gotta go back to 60 70s 80s this is actually put in with lead and when it starts cracking here it's good chance this was a southern car at one time is that you know intense heat how's the interior is it faded pretty bad no it's actually really good so i know it's been up here since 01 ish 2000. it's a nice car oh there's some plastic in the hood here i did notice that crack again yeah the same kind of deformations on the hood is the roof line and the hood's hazed but nothing else is yeah so yeah dad's here today to help me put a window in this door uh being a body man it's gonna go a lot easier for him to do it and show me what's going on and show you guys some tips and tricks i haven't put very many windows in cars honestly i just avoid bodywork and i've been pretty fortunate with glass in my life except for the stint in high school where i drove fort rangers and for whatever reason our lawnmower hated ford rangers and i put four windows in in like three years i'm gonna go to uh brian g body garage's youtube channel you can check this guy out on youtube and instagram he has got a ton of these cars and i'm gonna watch exactly how he gets this door panel off so we don't screw this up okay well that's a cat once we watched the video we figured out which way which pieces needed to slide got all the necessary screws out and popped the door cards off in no time at all we then got the vacuum out and cleaned all the broken glass out of the bottom of the door we then started fiddling with the window mechanisms to figure out how to get the old rail out and get our new glass in i could go into detail on this but we're short on time and the chance that any of you guys have an 81 buick sentry with a broken window is probably pretty low long story short every car is going to be wildly different uh there's plenty of stuff on the internet you guys can look up to find how to do this on your vehicle and i have to say i was surprised it wasn't terribly hard we had to be a little ingenuitive to figure everything out but in the end it all came together and our car had a window again there it is we have ourselves a replaced window and everything seems to function just fine let's go ahead and move on to the power steering pump belt all right we got our old belt out this thing is nice and shiny as you can see there that means he's definitely been screaming on us burning up the edges here we got our new belt which is actually a v-belt with teeth on it so we're gonna put that in that should fix up our squeal and then move on to the next step for taking this thing on a little road trip all right new power steering belt is on taught us another lesson and make sure you actually truly go through the effort to diagnose stuff before just loading the parts cannon and letting it rip exhibit a and exhibit b but those aren't really a waste of time and money because those are nice things to have changed one of our last steps back here is we have a tail light out um i believe you can pull the lights dead yeah we just got one bulb out there other than that everything works well bulb was just bad found one of my toolbox and we're good to go well i'd say that right there is as shiny as you can make a turd what do you say mook yeah go for a little cruise around town see if it even makes it yeah [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] okay i do not know what that is pissing me off [Applause] it's beginning to show its true gm diesel colors and just turn into a pile of [ __ ] faster than i can get it out of the shop it's pissing cooling all over the place probably leaking power steering fluid and something is screaming in this belt assembly oh and it is burning hot again what the frick what's hot the pulley all right so so much for that test drive tuck our radiator hose off found a big old crack right here so we're going to get a new radiator we could have that brazed but looking at the rest of it and remembering that it was half full when we got there it is yeah you can see all the blue over there it's well and hecked up so that radiator is going to need replace which might be a fun time because it's special because of this guy right here it's a cooler on the front and then there's this huge transmission cooler i don't know that's that's probably gonna be a nightmare to find likewise the uh fuel pump failed which i knew it eventually happened because anytime you get an old diaphragm pump to come back to life start moving fuel it will usually move fuel for a little bit and then they will fail so replace your fuel pumps on revivals but yeah it's dripping on the ground leaving some fuel down there so that's bad bad radiator bad fuel pump something is still streaming on that center pulley so i don't know if those are wobbling inside of each other or what the hell is going on but i'm about to take all this apart and figure it out mooc what what day is it tuesday it's tuesday i have no idea we're back with the buick we just took a one week hiatus to work on what had been previously sitting here and is now sitting out there we got invited to an open house down in des moines and thought well we gotta take something cool so we took a one week break to absolutely thrash the 68 gambler lemons together and we did it and we made it all the way to des moines so keep an eye out for that video next week either way we're back with the buick new radiator sitting here ready to go never did get a fuel pump ordered i had one ordered they're all out of stock across the whole country so that sucks and the one i did order they refunded me so i didn't know that yeah i was like oh yeah this will be here a couple days late and then it goes you've been refunded and i'm like okay excellent so yeah these are pain in the ass i've had a fuel pump for yeah without further ado let's wrap this damn project up get this radiator in there i'm gonna shot blast that stupid pulley and we're gonna replace the one remaining belt that hasn't been replaced and see if it stops screaming for its own death well it's been all of like a day and a half now nothing's really changed uh i have had to fight this radiator was originally right here for the transmission cooler on the front of the radiator was a 1 8 national pipe thread male into a inverted flare 3 8 out to a hard line but this radiator once inverted flare sorry 5 16 inverted flare 5 16 for both and i need a 90 because they're right next to that the ac condenser they don't make that so i had a drill and tap 5 16 like inverted flare fittings don't know if that's gonna work but it'll work for now yeah i also had to bash some things in to clear this radiator because it's bigger so yeah if you guys need a radiator for your buick diesel don't get the one off rock auto because it does not fit without some modification to the car and about two days of busting your knuckles and looking at every store in town for fittings the good news is in the meantime my fuel pump showed up which i didn't think i had ordered because i didn't think i could find them but there's one here now i don't know so we're gonna go ahead and change that fuel pump and then get everything back together finally maybe all right so there it is our radiators in i've got some soft lines ran from those crazy fitting things i made to the unions with bar fittings um our overflow's hooked up bottom radiator hose is on i gotta get all the accessories put back on before the top one can go in i took the pulley down my buddy fenix's and we sand blasted it quick so that should reset the surfaces for the belts so that they will have a chance to hopefully not scream and howl under use we'll see all right there it is our new radiator is finally in this damn thing all the hoses are hooked up we got some fluid in it doesn't seem to be leaking at all for once that's a nice change of pace we'll see if that belt still screams like hell of course since we put a new fuel pump on this vehicle we need to re-prime the injection system i've gone ahead and unplugged power to the injection pump so it should not move fuel past the pump and then i've taken the inlet for the fuel filter off so that the mechanical pump on the side of the block which is driven by engine rotation will be able to prime and pump to that point and if there's any air it'll be about me that much in the filter so in theory this should work and then we'll get it to fire and just open her up and get some rpm in it so that if there is any air it'll just rip through the injectors before the motor wings down to zero in theory go ahead moot oh the batteries are dead and they're side posts god damn it why why are they dead your lights dim or get brighter or darker or anything when i do this turn the headlights on i cannot get this side to connect on the positive there we go looks like our positive battery terminal on that side was loose and we were only running off potentially one battery this whole time so we turned the headlights on and see when we had amperage and uh it was doing nothing until i wiggled this line that comes all the way across from the passenger battery to the driver so looks like we lost continuity over there we're probably just running on one battery for a while or at least while it's been sitting oh you know why it's because this is loose because angus took it off to do the alternator or something that it's loose because this just stripped out let's find out go ahead and crank it all right we got fuel we'll tighten that down and hit the glue plugs and see if this thing lights up it's actually probably a good example of what people sometimes assume to be a dead battery is just the continuity is enough to turn all the accessories on the car once you hit it with a high amperage load it will not be able to hold that high amperage load and then lose the connection so if you ever see that check all your battery connections and grouts and stuff because like six times out of ten it's not actually a good battery all right let's try it [Applause] [Applause] i do not understand what the is going on right here i have replaced every single component and it is screaming to the high heavens and we've put a thermal camera on it and the only thing that gets hot is those back two pulleys nothing else no bearings no belts just those pulleys it's like thursday at 5 00 p.m and i wanted this video out in like 30 minutes and it's gonna be a big video to edit and this thing won't stop and screaming i i don't i don't get it like is it hot already it's already it's already hot all right we've got the flare camera out as you can see that right there is the water pump pulley uh it is nice and warm in comparison to the power steering pulley which is also warm but nowhere nearly as warm 31 degrees celsius where this pulley in the center is about 53 so somehow even the back pulley is the same temp and there's nothing on it what the [ __ ] so yeah i don't know what the hell is going on but this is pretty cool that uh orange line up top that is the glow plug wire the orange glow in the middle is the headers and then this here is the positive battery cable these things are pretty neat it's called a flitter one this is an older model flare if you're watching this i'd love to love to work with you guys because this would be something that is really nice in the shop but yeah i don't know what the hell is going on here it's not the fan there's no heat in the fan it's not the power steering pump it is something to do with this pulley right here it's just mad at the world to anything and pray about this then we'll be back yeah booger scope all right in the name of science i've removed the alternator belt we did this earlier in this video and it stops screaming and we're like oh it's the alternator and we replace the alternator after replacing the water pump after replacing like everything else like i i've gone through everything and i can't figure out what this noise is but either way let's see if the noise goes away when i take the alternator belt off again [Applause] okay so it has something to do with the alternator belt i just don't know what all right i have gone over to my bench and developed the spinomatic 950 it's a pulley off of i don't know what with a bolt from i don't know what shoved into it they just happened to fit really well we'll see if it works i'm going to independently test the alternator see if our new alternator has a bad bearing or something crazy i've seen it before walking out of o'reilly's with one for angus truck i just was walking out the door and i spun it and it went dink and seized so we just stopped and turned around and set it back on the counter and grabbed a different one so it happens [Music] that seems as if to not be a problem one thing we do need to test though is that under a load so i'm going to turn the key on it's going to sense that it needs to charge and then it'll probably be really hard to turn there we go under load yeah it doesn't work very well you can hear it mechanically engage when it got up to speed no noise another thing to be is a clutch fan but it seems to be just fine so i have no idea um we'll just keep spinning stuff till something screams and then punch it in the face i don't get it that seemed to be just fine and that's the belt for the alternator you think it might be the crank pulley making noise but the crank pulley goes from crank to water pump over to power steering that's it and the alternator belt the one definitive thing that i can change in the noise stops goes from water pump to alternator and that's it that's all it does i need one of those cameras that can see sound we need angus are you on like 12 rip it's to get in here and look and tell me where it's coming from see the sound waves i've had three i'm 25 there all right power steering pump seems to be just fine we all have problems stop screaming don't understand all the heat is in that center pulley which makes sense because that's where all the belts converge and there's gonna be a lot of friction there i've never seen one get that hot that fast but it could be because it wobbles or it's a gm or who knows but the outer pulley is the one that stays cool of the three and if you take that belt off the noise goes away i am running out of ideas quickly okay that belt is nice and tight as well but not too tight so we can probably roll that out let's see what it does the the weirdest part to this whole thing is that when we got the car running it did not make this squealing noise and then as we drove it around town because after part one we just started driving the damn thing and ran so well we drove it all around town at one point it started squeaking a little bit under load and then it started squeaking under a little less load and then it would kind of squeak at idle and as we changed more and more parts and put more and more new parts on it got louder and louder and louder until now it's just bellowing at idle god damn it's so close that's your time called pedestrians i know so if you get a little oil on the belt it stops screaming until it dries that back off uh i don't think it's actually a bearing because it i could put it down on the fan side and it still shuts up i don't know what's happening it might just need some belt dressing i don't even know where you can find that anymore it's not 1983 it's not no fun fact all right i've loosened the belt because screw it um it's now got a little flop in it see if that makes a difference i am literally out of ideas where as you rev it it chirps that's normal belt squeak this thing is falling apart faster than i can fix this car like we drove this pile of [ __ ] in here and it was fine and now it is just [ __ ] on us and falling apart faster than i keep together let's get a car with america's most notoriously bad engine and see if we can put it back on the road it'll be a great time i said i'll have fun i said this would be a great car i said [Applause] nope i've gotta wonder that if because of the fact that we took that compressor belt off and cut it through it out because we thought it was what was squealing was a compressor if there's not enough tension on the one belt that's on the crank pulley to drive all three accessories the squeaking at idle is down now with that old belt on now it's just screaming if i crack this model open so i'm thinking it's because it used to have two belts driving the center pulley so that it had to do half as much work as the one belt driving it so it's just it's just not enough belt to keep up all right i've gone ahead taken all the belts off cleaned all the pulleys got the brake clean out make sure you get all the grease and wd-40 out of the belts they are back to a dry status uh i put all the new belts back on to include a ac pump belt so that the center pulley because i can't i can't really show this to you guys but this is essentially the crank the water pump the ac the power steering and the alternator and the belt pattern goes crank to water to power steering just those three the second belt for the alternator goes water pump to alternator so in the previous setup we only had that power steering belt running to the crank so everything was trying to ran off of one v belt now we have crank water pump ac compressor crank so now we have two belts driving the central pulley that runs essentially everything so that should in theory help with some of our slippage if it's a load issue which it may be because i'm sure this is a huge ass alternator that is trying to charge to mostly dead batteries all right here goes no idea if the batteries are charged enough it's been about an hour i've got nothing inside the car what the [ __ ] i have headlights but i have no accessories inside the car why is it like this why does it hate me this car does not want to come back to life on the road this was supposed to be done literally a week ago yesterday we were supposed to have this car done like wednesday or tuesday last week and we're still working on it and it's still closer to running we have results a set of wires right there as you can see they follow that loom the big loom is the positive battery cable they all go into the starter area and then gm pulls their positive power off of the starter instead of you know up here would be nice off the solenoid like a ford and then they feed that into the car and there are two power feeds for most vehicles one for a safety measure you will always have lights and you'll always have brake lights even without a key in the ignition so if your brake lights and headlights work that means you have power to the car it may not be powered to all the car but the car has a ground and enough of a positive contact to power up that high of an ampere system your key toggles another input which is the accessory and ignition and all the main power input comes to the key well to a relay it's controlled by the key and then out to the vehicle so if you have headlights but nothing happens when you turn the key that means your feed from that starter or from the starter solenoid on the fords into the vehicle has a problem somewhere it could be a big ass fuse could be the main relay that's supposed to lock closed is broken something somewhere is wrong in the case of this car i was taken by power probe and stabbing it into wires to see if there's continuity in the wire as i went like such and tracing it down and went to stab one way down yonder and i heard dink and something must have been loose or some [ __ ] because sure enough now we have power to the key so we can finally see if the belt stops squeaking now someday i'll actually make a diagnostic video talking about electrical systems and cars it's going to be a wild ride and a lot of people probably won't understand it but i'm going to try to make it as simple as i possibly can i just have to develop a method and some examples to portray all that knowledge to you guys to pick up easy if electrical is not your thing anywho let's see if these belts still scream and cover them with belt dressing [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] um finally complete ish i think i don't find out the biggest difference seemed to apparently be getting that other belt on which makes no sense because when the issue first started three weeks ago right after finishing part one all three it was literally just like this but with old belts an old water pump and the old alternator and the dirty center pulley still wobbling so nothing has changed really like like nothing big change just now besides i put the one belt that was there when the problem started back on it doesn't like the spark plugs you used it doesn't like this yeah we use the wrong spark plugs all right let's put this thing together and uh wrap everything up i guess it's completely pitch dark out now so we're going to wait until the morning to go drive all right today's the day again for like the fourth time this car should be done we're gonna try to drive it i've spent the whole morning editing this video so i gotta relive all the pain and suffering that we've gone through to get to this point so it's all really fresh right now so don't fail me again that's probably the worst engine i could ever tell that to like that's definitely not going to start now it's [Applause] check them out gently [Applause] okay how can i say no to that [Applause] all right let's let me off there it is 40 mile an hour normal menial amount of smoke coming out the back it's just old diesel things it rides even better than before the steering's way tighter uh still a lot of body roll but a tiny bit less now that we fixed the bushings and the fact that it had like no sway bar essentially which is kind of sad that that's all that changes it's just a little bit but we're moving right along we fixed the uh vacuum line off camera so the kick down works now on the trans it's surprisingly quiet and incredibly comfortable and hood shakes a lot but here it is america's most hated diesel back on the road tormenting more people right about now is probably a good time for you to be thinking why the hell did you guys go through all that work which was a lot of work for an 81 buick century these cars aren't going to be around forever and if people don't start saving them they're not going to be around at all and it was unique being a diesel and it kind of i like that and despite it being what some people may call a very ugly unreliable terrible car that's a piece of [ __ ] to work on and it really hates me for every fiber of my being i kind of like it still in the end right until it breaks down about a half mile thank you guys for joining us on this unnecessary adventure of bringing an 81 buick century darcel back to life and putting it back on the road where it probably doesn't belong feel the total i'm just gonna say it's low on trans fluid anyway if you guys enjoyed this episode make sure you subscribe to the channel here junkyard digs leave a like and a comment check out some of our other great episodes and videos and whatnot uh leave as a prayer for making it the one mile back to the shop i'm gonna need it uh we'll see you guys right here next week subscribe to all of our friends junkyard mooc thunderhead289 the boss garage vice grip garage cars and cameras classic mustangs 429 doing the cool uh golden rust and bust the whole gang peace goodbye all right see you in 10 years you

Channel: Junkyard Digs

Views: 397,885

Rating: 4.9394011 out of 5

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

Id: rWCp6kDJnvw

Length: 78min 20sec (4700 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021