All about the

1970 SS 454

LS5 & LS6

Chevelle

All About My Chevelle

My Chevelle unlike my dad's needs a LOT of work we got it from a body shop in Oklahoma City. Its black with white stripes. It had no engine or transmission it has hail damage on the roof. The right quarter panel has been cut off and replaced it sound like a hunk of junk from the above but the main reason I wanted it was what came with it. They included an interior kit, intake manifold, wiring harnesses, new GM "Cowl Induction" hood, and many other parts which kind of just twists your arm to get it. It needs a lot of work but it will kick when its done.

Restoration

I began work on it today January 1, 1999 and there aren't very many suprises about it the grill was cracked and one inner fender well had been patched (under the battery). I decided that it would be best to do a ground up restoration because the frame has some rust on it. So I got it unbolted no easy task because the bolts had rusted to it so they didn't want to turn. So we got the body off of the frame and looked at what we needed to do. It needs front suspension which we have all of that a new rearend it has a 10 bolt and they included two other rearends when we got it. Both were 12 bolts one with the correct gears even 3.31. So we put it together so we can chemical vat it.

The other day 12/30/99 we completed the frame it has all new suspension new springs, which are very heavy duty. After we had sand blasted it we made a discovery about it the frame was cracked on the left side by the front wheel. Luckily we knew a welder who was able to weld it and then grind it smooth.
We also began work on the engine. We got the cam bearings in it and went to slide the cam in and it didn't fit! It just slid through the first three but when it got to the third one it wouldn't budge. So we had to pull it out and we measured it and it wasn't the right size so we went to stick one of the old bearings in it and discovered that the hole had smashed the bearing down a little bit so we ended up sanding the bearing out a little bit. Next week the rest of the engine parts are suppose to be in so I will update it then.

Well we have completed the engine except for the harmonic balancer. We primed the frame the day before yesterday and are going to paint it tonight 2/17/99. The frame is completely together and ready for the engine and tranny as soon as their done. I also found a picture of it...

Okay a long time later I finally get to updating my page again.  A lot has happened since I last updated my page.  I now have a digital camera so it is easy to take pictures and post them so I am going to try to keep my page up to date now.  So I guess its time to get started with what I have done in the past year and a half!

Ok well let’s start where we left off.  We completed the engine and when we went to fire it on the engine stand it was running extremely rough and wouldn’t idle down.  We couldn’t figure it out and we couldn’t figure it so we put our had over the carb and it leveled out some so we took and put silicone around the head and intake seam to try to seal it and discovered that the leak was little bigger than we thought.  It sucked the silicone in so we took the intake off and found the problem.  Oval port heads square port intake and wrong gasket.  So we put the right gasket on and it worked just fine. 

Later on we bolted the transmission on to the engine and set it on the frame to where it was ready to go when we got the body finished believe me we were soon to discover that was the easy part…

I first began by stripping all the old paint off of the car that was quite a project it took about 2 weeks even with replacing the front fenders and not doing the hood or drivers door.  There was plenty of paint stacked up on it and I got every bit of it off.  That’s when I discovered well sort of discovered I kind of already know that I was going to have to probably repair the drivers quarter panel, but at least all it needed was a patch panel so that got cut off and replaced.  Along with the trunk and the back seat floorboards.  We lifted the car up and sand blasted the bottom and blew through the back seat so we had to replace it and we already knew that it needed a new trunk so we got those on order so we could put them in.  In the mean time we also sand blasted the inside of the car so it would be ready to paint it to and so we could get rid of all the old caulking.  After we got rid of all that we had to put new in its place which took a while but made it look a lot better.  So after that we painted the inside GM restoration black which did wonders for the car since the body work was getting close to being done and was getting nearer to paint.

Well the next stage was to paint it. The color that I decided on was silver with black stripes.  I am going to kind of skip some steps and show you some pics of what it looks like this is after it has been repainted 3 times because on silver if dirt gets on the paint it repells the metallic in the paint and leaves black circles…

Well more to come when I get a chance!!!