Unfortunately it's not the good kind of blown....
Back in early June I took the Nova out on a Friday night for a nice cruise through town and then was heading back to my house on some back roads in the prarie, from a stop sign decided to lay into it... and well, it didn't end well. It was hesitating a bit pulling through first gear, hit 6000 rpm and BANG she went. Pulled over on the side of the road and flipped the hood, sure enough, there was a rod sticking through the oil pan. So my Dad came down, picked me up and we ran home to get my truck and the trailer to tow it home.
Cummins to the rescue!
We got it home and unloaded and immediately starting pulling the engine apart to find out what happened. Definitely an easy car to work on when you can pull the entire nose off it.
As soon as we pulled the pan off we saw the main cause of the failure... a stock cast crank and rods. Parts that definitely can't handle 7000 rpm or the power that the engine was putting out. So obviously the previous owner was completely full of it when he said it was a stroker.... but how do you know unless you pull it apart right? Part of the gamble of buying a car built by someone else. It ended up spinning the number 6 rod bearing which then broke the rod, took out the block, wrecked the crank, and shot the piston up into the head bending the valves and push rods. Definitely good and broken....
Here's some of the broken parts we ended up pulling out of the engine. There was even more shrapnel in the bottom of the pan but I didn't feel like pulling more of it out of the sludge.
So just like that it looked like bringing the car to Ashcroft was over for me... definitely a big disappointment after the push to get the car all ready for it. Saturday we made a few calls to different people we know to try and buy a new engine for it but no luck.
Then our luck turned around... Saturday afternoon we headed over to one of my Uncle's shops to see how they were making out on a car they were getting ready for Ashcroft. Walked in the shop and looked over in the corner and there sat a 350 Chev on a stand... It was my cousins spare engine for his stock car (circle track racing). Long story short, he decided to let me borrow it for the summer for a small rental fee. So by about 6:30pm we were back at my shop ready to get working!
Didn't take us long to pull the engine and transmission out of my car (around an hour or so).
From there we swapped the flexplate and transmission over to the new (actually 8 year old) engine, and threw it back in the car.
By about 11:00pm that night we had everything buttoned up and ready to run. Just needed to get a new rotor for the distributor and it was ready to go!
Definitely a bit of a crazy weekend to go from blowing up an engine and thinking the car would be sitting for the rest of the year on Friday night to throwing a new engine in on Sunday night. A lot of thrashing to do a full engine swap in a few hours. Especially when it was only 3 days before we were leaving for Ashcroft. Very stoked to get it all done and be able to race though!