Project '64

1964 Chevrolet Impala

Old cruiser gets a transplant.....

The projects around here have thinned out a bit lately.

Right, and if you believe that one we have a bridge that you might be interested in buying too.

An old friend of ours Dennis Williams had contacted us previously about the possibility of putting a replacement engine into his son's project car, a pretty nice '64 Chevy Impala. The story went that they had purchased the car a few years ago and it had a 307 small block for motivation. That engine was on its last legs, keeping the mosquito population at bay just about anywhere the car went. We agreed that replacing the power plant would be the best and easiest thing to do as this was a cruiser, not a race car. We went through a number of dates for the project before all of the stars and planets aligned so that he could drop it off at our house.

The car was delivered around 6:30 pm on a Friday and the first order of business was to get the car in our garage, get the hood off and start removing the old engine. The normal process of unbolting, unhooking and sometimes just cutting stuff loose was used. The old engine was out and sitting on an old pallet in about 3 hours time. We then had the chance to take a look at the muck and grease that had accumulated in the engine bay over the last 40+ years - what a mess!

The next morning, we rolled the car out to the outer edge of our driveway (some kind of attempt to keep the mess down had to be made) and fired up the power washer. Several good coatings of solvent, washing solution and the attending blast from the power washer removed the bulk of the dirt and grease from the engine bay. Tough areas required a bit of scrapping and an application of more solvent, but after a couple of hours we had an engine bay that was fairly clean. A better solution would be to use a steam cleaner if you have one available, but in a pinch our method works pretty well.

Once the engine bay was dry (and that didn't take long as we had picked one of the hottest days of the year!) Phillip started the process of masking off the body and any other areas that we did not want to get paint on. He then moved along to spray painting the firewall, fender wells, radiator support and some of the attending pieces that he felt warranted being covered. We used up about 3 cans of Krylon Satin Black for this and I would say that this paint is a very close match for the satin black color that GM used for most of it's engine bays in the 60's and 70's.

While Phillip was masking and painting, I busied myself getting the new GM crate motor up on the engine stand and starting putting some of the new parts on it. A new balancer was added to the front of the motor and an Edlebrock intake took it's position on top. We had to loosen the stock valve covers as the intake would not seat correctly with them in place, but no matter as a new set of chrome GM Chevy covers were going on in their place. We then cleaned up the old fuel pump, pushrod, plate cover and attached them to the new engine with a generous wad of grease on the end of the pushrod. It's just an old trick of not only lubricating the pushrod, but keeping it in place while you put the fuel pump on.

The next step was putting an oil filter on the engine. Normally you wouldn't think this would be much of an issue, but what do you know, crate engines do not come with all the parts and pieces you think they do. We had to pull the old filter mount off of the 307 engine (good thing we hadn't gotten rid of it yet) cleaned it up and bolted it to the new engine. Now a large oil filter could be screwed in place. I emphasis large filter simply because anytime you have the chance to put on a large filter versus a small one, go for the big one. Big in this case is always a good thing to do. The larger filter can trap more debris over the same life cycle and is just cheap insurance. With the engine flipped back to it's upright position, we poured in 5 quarts of Valvoline synthetic 10-30w oil. Good stuff - not maybe as good as Amsoil (shameless promotional plug) but good stuff. This is where we realized that with the new valve covers and the new intake, there was no provision for adding oil to the engine without taking out the distributor or removing a valvecover. We checked one of the covers and realized that if we put a breather on it, we could remove the baffle underneath which would allow oil to be added. Wow, a major issue avoided but just one of those little things that can trip you up.

A few more parts were bolted up, water pump, pulleys and the thermostat housing. Fittings for the heater were sealed and put in place. A clip for the throttle spring was fabricated and one of the intake bolts was used to hold it in place. The EGR mount was blocked off with the kit that came with the manifold and then the distributor was dropped into place. Save for the carb and flexplate, the engine was now ready to go in the car.

On to Part II of '64 Chevy...