Project '64

1964 Chevrolet Impala

With the engine bay finished and the engine ready to drop in, we still had a few issues to cover before combining the two. Phillip set to cleaning up the stock exhaust manifolds and then giving them a nice coat of black VHT paint. It took some work on his part but wow, they looked a thousand times better. I worked on cleaning up and painting mounting brackets, small parts and getting some of the wiring squared away. Back in '64 when Chevrolet built this car, the alternator was on the driver's side of the car. Whenever the car received the 307 engine, it appears that they just pulled the factory wiring harness across the engine to plug in the alternator which was now located on the passenger side of the car. This issue, plus about 10-15 other locations in the harness where connections were just wrapped together and mummified in a thousand yards of electrical tape all needed to be repaired. Funny, but I remember wiring a car or two in my past so we got out the tools of the trade and proceeded to put things right.

Most of the connections were easy fixes, just cutting out the bad connection and performing a good solid splice of the wire fixed most of them. Once we had all of the connections taken care of, we then proceeded to build a 5 foot cable to run from the new alternator location, through the radiator mount across the front of the car and back to the original alternator wiring where we spliced everything together. If you didn't know the difference, you would think the wiring was there to start with originally.

The next order of business was fitting the new radiator. We decided to see how this was going to go without the engine in the car so that we would have a bit more room to work. As it turned out, although the radiator was sold as a straight bolt in upgrade, we had to do a minor bit of massaging to get it to fit properly. The size of the new radiator was quite a bit more than the stocker, but we got it fit and it should have no problem keeping this engine nice and cool. One item that we decided to abandon was the stock cooling fan and shroud. We went with an electric fan and thermostat arrangement that really cleaned up the front part of the car and let you actually see the forward part of the engine.

We also pulled the transmission convert or and replaced the front seal on the transmission. It's an easy piece to get to with the engine out of the way and might save a headache or two down the road. With that detail taken care of it was time to drop the engine in place. And you would think that it would just drop in place. And you would be wrong.

The new motor mounts proved to be a real bear to get bolted in place correctly. With virtually no room to drop them in place as the engine was engaged to the transmission, it was quite a struggle. We finally resorted to opening the holes in the mounts a bit with a grinder to get things lined up. If we bolted the mounts to the engine then they would not line up with the chassis mounts. If we bolted them to the chassis mounts first, then they would not line up with the mounting bosses on the sides of the engines. My next project car is going to have motor plates front and rear - it's got to be easier to deal with than stock type mounts.

With the engine finally in place, we could then start to finish off the connections to the fuel line and transmission cooler, along with hooking up various items such as heater hoses and throttle arms. Some items needed a bit of work to fit up properly, but that's just part of the game. Everything came together except for the starter motor.

A brand new starter had been ordered for the car and was installed. When we turned over the engine, the starter handled that job one time and one time only. The top part of the solenoid came apart on the second attempt to turn over the engine, which actually causes us some concern. Before proceeding, we turn the engine over by hand just to make sure that everything internally was okay. Our next move was to install the old starter, it had worked previously on the old engine so it should be okay - right? Wrong.

No, the solenoid on the old starter decided that it would work occasionally. One time it worked, the next two times it didn't, then it would work again a couple of times. So, we pulled the starter out again and replaced the solenoid with a good spare unit that we already owned. That finally took care of the starter issues. With a few spins of the engine to get fuel pumped to the carb, the motor came to life. It sounded good, nice and even and certainly much better than the old engine. We had some smoke from the exhaust but was positive that it was left over oil from the previous engine. We ran the engine for about 5-6 minutes when we noticed that we were getting hit by something. It turned out that the belt for the alternator was the wrong one. The belt was riding just on the outer edges of the alternator pulley and the friction was destroying the edge of the belt sending small bits of rubber flying off. After 40+ years of playing this game, this was the first time that I had ever witnessed a brand new fan belt coming apart at the edges. I guess no matter how long you do something, you'll always run into something new.

So, a few days later we finally have the correct belt in place, we fix a minor water leak and then take the car out for a short drive. The engine is responsive, gives good power and moves the old Chevy along very nicely. Tapping the pedal a couple of times results in a nice surge forward so the extra torque and horsepower of this engine compared to even the original stock one is very impressive. Overall I would rate this engine upgrade package (350 CI w/ 295 HP) to be an excellent choice for this type of car or hot rod. The cost of the package was well within reason considering that a rebuild of the 307 would have been a bit more than half and you would still have just a 307 engine with some questionable parts in it.

Our original plan called for having the car for a weekend, and then we extended that to at least a week. Due to some issues and ordering delays, we had the car for a few weeks. But still if you had everything you needed to make this swap, it would be quite easy to do it in a weekend. A few minor items had to be fabricated or modified but none of that was difficult or very time consuming. We enjoyed having some of our neighbors stop by and they really appreciated the car for what it was and is - a nice cruiser that we hope Dennis and his son will have a lot of fun with in the years to come. We certainly had some fun putting this together for them. Check out a few more pictures of the car on the next page.