The Impala Project

My sister came down from Canada with her husband and kids, as well as my best friend growing up. Naturally the girls wanted to do nothing but shop and the guys had better things in mind, like a day at the junk yard. I spent a bit of time trying to find a good classic car junk yard before they got here and found Leon’s Auto parts, in Leon, Va, just south of Culpepper.

The place was a bit hard to find, if you are driving too fast you’d whiz right by it, which we did, and had to circle back. Leon’s Auto Parts is so big that they don’t allow anyone in after 10AM because they need the time to look around the hundred acres of old cars before the place closes. We needed every bit of that time too, and we were glad we packed a lunch as well. They close for lunch and if you are out in the yard, you are locked in til they get back at 1PM. It was a hot day, and we should have brought more water but we endured.

The yard map was interesting. The owner said that since there was no real plan to start a junk yard, it just sort of happened, that the cars were not organized in a way that was not self explanatory. If you wanted to find a 64 Impala, they were scattered all over the 100 acres. The yard was mapped out in a grid of sorts with a numbering scheme to follow. The trees had letter markers on them to give you an idea of where you were on the lot but the map wasn’t all that accurate. We had to wing it.

TW and CG were with me. BW had to work. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, I was just there for the fun. TW was looking for a few Dodge parts, and CG was looking for some 69 Chevelle stuff. TW has a 69 Dart he is working on back home, and Leon’s had what he wanted. The trick was getting the parts off of the cars since they were generally parked too close together for removing interior parts like bench seats, and having to work around the thorn bushes and other overgrowth.

CG almost bought a 64 Beaumont convertible. After taking a second look at it though, it was pretty rusted out. There wasn’t much left of the floor pans. A convertible,…go figure.

If you’ve got a day to spend checking out the old classics I’d recommend goin in the spring while you can still see the cars and won’t risk heat exhaustion. Some of them are so covered in brush you wouldn’t know there was a car in there if it wasn’t for the glare off the windshield. It was fun, for a handfull of gearheads like us.

I’m no emissions expert and replacing the motor in my 86 GMC with all those vacuum lines seems to be a challenging proposition for a classic car guy like me. Even though the vacuum lines are documented on the sticker in front of the radiator, I had to make my own drawing. The sticker shows the same lines but each of the devices are noted using names and acronyms that don’t make sense to me. Like I said, I’m not an emissions guy.

Luckily for me it wasn’t too complicated. The entire system seemed to be comprised of 3 basic sections. There were 2 tempurature sensitive vacuum switches controlling or regulating most of the vacuum, one on the thermostat housing and one on the intake manifold next to the thermostat housing. The third section is the vapor canister recirculation system.

I’m not going to try to decipher this for you, but I will provide a couple of drawings to help you decipher your own vacuum line spaghetti bowl. For the most part it pays to realize that each of the vacuum lines has a memory and retains a shape that will tell you where it was most likely connected when it came off the engine. As long as you don’t try to roll up the vacuum lines or shove them in a box or bag where they will develop a new memory, you should be OK.

For those of you who are obsessively forced or compelled to understand how this stuff works you can check out this article on Automotive evaporative emissions systems written at the University of Southern Colorado.

Wow! It’s been a marathon 2 weeks. The Chevy 305 motor in my 86 GMC seized and I had to swap it out with another Chevy 305. At first I didn’t realize the engine was seized and thought the problem was the starter. I bench tested the starter and it seemed to be working fine. The motor still wouldn’t turn over after re-installing the starter. I decided to remove the converter cover and try to turn the motor over. That’s when I realized the motor was seized and had to come out.

I was lucky enough to get a running Chevy 305 with all the whistles and bells still attached. I got the replacement 305 motor through a series of people after I spoke to someone on Craigslist. It turns out the guy works at Sport Chevrolet in Silver Spring, Md. and heard I needed a motor. We went down to his house the following Saturday and yanked it out of an 83 GMC.

Maybe BW can fill us in on the clown story.

He had a project of his own too. He has a 1960 Ford pickup truck. He’s had it for a few years and used to drive it daily. He wanted the frame from the 83 GMC to put the Ford body on. The disc brake setup and smooth riding A-Frame suspension of the 83 was going to replace the I-beam front end on the 60 Ford.

BW and I got the 305 motor out of my 86 GMC and dropped this one in the following day. The removal would have been hell if I didn’t have the room in front of the motor. Since I couldn’t remove the converter bolts, the torque converter had to come out with the flywheel/flexplate.

It took me a few evenings to finish the installation after work hours.