The Great Engine Swap

It was the summer of 1979. Jimmy Carter was the President and everything seemed to be falling apart. Overseas hostilities and anti-American sentiments were on the rise at an alarming rate, and our covert military operations in the Middle East were embarrassing failures.

Stateside, the economy was in shambles. Mortgage interest rates were topping 13%, inflation and unemployment were both at double digits, and the price of gas was over a dollar a gallon, about twice what it had been just a short time before. A good paying factory job paid less than six dollars an hour. There were occasional gas and food shortages, and general uneasiness was everywhere you looked. If you had a job you hoped to keep it, and everything our government did only seemed to make matters worse.

My wife and I had been married for seven years. We had a three-year-old and a new-to-us house in the country that we had just bought three years before. Even though we were both working full-time, money was very tight.

Our main car was an old 1970 green Nova with a good body but a poor V8 engine and an even poorer automatic transmission that didn't always like to shift gears. I bought a 1971 blue Nova station wagon, the only one I ever saw, for $90 from a co-worker and we used that as a second car for awhile. It had a straight six engine that was good on gas but its body was completely shot. You couldn't drive it in the rain on wet roads without getting soaked, and in the winter it was even worse. It did have good ground clearance, for some reason, so it never got stuck in the snow, but anyone riding inside always got drenched. And it had no heat. Nevertheless, both the engine and transmission in it worked just fine.

Since our garage had a steel support I-beam running along the rafters, and a friend of mine had access to a hoist, we decided that it would be a good idea to take that good engine and transmission out of the blue Nova station wagon and install it in the green Nova over a weekend. I had never done anything like that before but my friend had, once, so how hard could it be? Being in our late twenties, we weren't afraid to tackle almost anything, especially if the need was strong enough!

Some of my friends at work were highly skeptical that this could be done over a weekend, especially by us. In fact, some were even betting we couldn't do it, and the proof would be in my not being at work on Monday morning. However, I had a problem with punctuality anyway in those days, and was usually late for work at least once or twice a month, mostly on Mondays, although rarely by more than half an hour. But not this time, not if I could help it.

The first thing we did Friday after work was bring the blue Nova into the garage and pull the engine and transmission out of it. Then we pushed that car out and parked it next to the garage and pulled the green Nova in.

When we pulled the engine and transmission out of that car we noticed that even though the V8 was a bigger engine the straight six was actually longer, since it had six cylinders in a row on top of the engine rather than four on each side, like the V8 had. Although it was much narrower, the straight six was also taller, by several inches, due in part to a very deep oil pan.

We measured as best we could and determined that we could still get the straight six in the green Nova but the oil pan would probably rest on a cross member (basically a flat bar connecting one side of the car's frame to the other side) under the engine. I could have a huge problem if that wore a hole in the oil pan before I could afford to buy another car.

By now it was late so we decided to take a break until the next morning. Maybe by then we would come up with a way to avoid this problem.

That night I got the bright idea of taking a piece of rubber from an inner tube and laying it on the cross member as a buffer, cushioning and protecting the oil pan. I hoped by morning I wouldn't forget about it.

Saturday morning we got an early start on what promised to be a long day.

The first order of business was to install the straight six engine and transmission in the green Nova. We began by removing another cross member located under the car below the front seats. When the engine and transmission were lowered into place, though, the drive shaft didn't quite reach deeply enough into the transmission for them to click together. So we re-bolted the cross member we had removed to the passenger side underneath, and then bolted the center of it to the transmission mount. The cross member was now angling slightly toward the front of the car.

We then hooked a chain and a come-along to the unattached end of the cross member and hooked that to the trailer hitch on the rear bumper of the car. Then we cranked on the come-along slowly until the holes for the cross member on the driver side lined up with the matching holes in the frame. This pulled the engine harder and harder against the back of the engine compartment, right up against the fire wall. It also pulled the transmission back against the drive shaft.

Just when all those holes lined up we heard the drive shaft click into place, so we bolted the cross member to the frame, holding everything together.

One benefit of the tight fit against the firewall was it kept the engine from lurching and breaking the motor mounts, which didn't really fit anyway, being held in place with only one bolt on each end.

Only now did I remember about the inner tube buffer, but it was too late. We had had so much trouble wedging the engine in place we weren't going to pull it out now, not even a little, for it. The oil pan was bent a little by the cross member and laid directly on it. That's the way it would have to stay.

Another problem was the blue Nova station wagon didn't have power steering but the green Nova did. We had to figure out how to attach the power steering unit to the straight six engine since there wasn't a bracket for it nor a pulley for the extra V belt it would need (this was years before serpentine belts came into use). We couldn't just let the unit hang there next to the engine unused.

Originally the straight six had only one V belt, and it was powered by the crank pulley. That V belt was also wrapped around the fan pulley and the generator pulley on the driver's side of the engine, powering those, as well. Each of those pulleys had room for only one V belt.

The lone bracket for the generator consisted of two parts, a lower part to connect the generator to the engine with a bolt, and an upper slotted piece which allowed you to adjust the tension on the V belt wrapped around the generator pulley by swiveling the generator, using a tire iron for leverage, until the tension was tight enough, and then tightening the bolt so it wouldn't slide along the slot.

Since there were no extra brackets nor room for another V belt, how could we get the power steering unit installed and working?

I glanced over at the V8, lying off to the side on the garage floor, and noticed that the crank pulley on it was a double pulley. I removed it from the V8, drilled two more mounting holes in it, visualizing without measuring where they should be, and flipped it over and used that as the new fan pulley on the straight six, replacing the single pulley that had been there.

A shorter V belt, going from just the crank pulley up to one of the grooves in the new double pulley, would be needed, and one from the V8 just barely fit, popping on like a bicycle chain and still being tight.

Now we had a place for the extra V belt to go. That belt would go from the other groove on the fan pulley to both the generator pulley and the power steering unit pulley, if we could manage to somehow mount both units using the same bracket. But how could that possibly be done?

It turned out that there was a way. I bolted the generator to the lower part of the mounting bracket and then bolted the power steering unit to the upper slotted piece, and then connected both units together, attaching their free ends with two flat pieces of steel, bolted together in the middle. The two units were practically on top of each other, connected virtually as one piece, only a couple of inches apart.

Not only did the pulleys on them line up, they were also in line with the free groove on the fan pulley. All we needed now was a V belt to fit over them all. Again, one of the V belts from the V8 took care of that, fitting perfectly as if it had been made for it. Amazingly, all of that actually worked.

During the course of the day one of my friends from work stopped by to see how we were doing. Not to help, just to check our progress. It was impossible to tell if we had a chance to finish on time, but he was surprised and actually impressed that we were trying at all. I guess he expected to find that we had chickened out. Wishing us good luck he left, and it was back to work for us.

Since the engine sat a little high we couldn't put an air breather on the carburetor. In fact, the rod the air breather goes on made a small dent in the hood, but it closed anyway.

The accelerator linkage was held in place with a muffler clamp. We also had to swap radiators because the hoses and transmission lines didn't match up. But that radiator from the blue Nova station wagon was a little bigger than the one that came out of the green Nova, and mounted differently. The only way to make it fit was to wire it in place with metal coat hangers, so that's what we did.

Not only did the engine sit a little high, it was also tilted a little upwards toward the front, since the back end was wedged in and down so tightly. This resulted in the fan just barely missing the radiator by no more than an inch. Not much leeway if the engine lurched at all.

By now it was late and time to take another break until the next day, Sunday.

My help had other plans for most of that day and couldn't come over until later in the afternoon, and we still had plenty to do to get the car on the road, but at least the hardest part was over.

Rerouting and modifying the exhaust system and gas line was fairly easy compared to Saturday's work, but it was still time consuming. Nothing happened quickly, and it was amazing how long it took to do everything we needed to do. But we were trying to be careful and thorough.

It was now after dark on Sunday night, and the moment of truth had finally arrived. Would everything work together? Did we forget or overlook anything? Were we really done or were we actually far from it? Was the car really road worthy for the morning?

I slid behind the wheel, inserted and turned the ignition key, and the engine fired right up. I pulled the knob and the headlights came on. I pushed the gearshift to 'R' and the transmission shifted seamlessly into reverse. I backed out of the garage and applied the brakes and the car stopped smoothly. So far so good. Turning the wheel, I shifted into drive and drove to the end of our long driveway and headed down our old country road for about half a mile and then turned around. No problems. On the way back I opened it up a little and then coasted and pulled back in our driveway. I could feel the engine vibrating a little since the back of it was so tight against the firewall, but that was okay. I could live with that. All systems were 'go!'

We had started on Friday afternoon and were all done by late Sunday night, just in time for work Monday morning. From the outside of the car you couldn't see any of the 'solutions' we used to solve the problems we ran into. Everything looked normal. But I was completely exhausted.

Of course, I missed my alarm Monday morning and ended up being about half an hour late for work. During that time everyone hooted and howled about what an idiot I was to try such a difficult job in such a short time, but their tune changed when I pulled in to the parking lot. They were all amazed at how perfect the job looked, at least until you popped the hood.

After about six months a hole was finally worn in the oil pan which leaked like a sieve, and I wondered if that rubber inner tube I had forgotten to use as a buffer would have prevented this from happening. It got so bad that I would have to add oil almost every time I got in the car to go anywhere, especially if it had been sitting for a few hours. We left oil spots all over town, and our babysitter's husband asked us to stop parking in their driveway.

I got a plastic oil catch pan to lay under the car when it was parked, and I would pull it out and pour the oil it caught right back in the engine before going anywhere. A local hardware store was selling bulk oil in inexpensive two gallon jugs, and I would buy at least one of those jugs a week. Man, did that oil stink! I can still smell it. But I really needed it.

Even though I was always re-using the oil the catch pan caught, there was a reason we still went through so much oil a week. Internally, the drain holes next to the lifters in the engine were fairly plugged up. What that meant was that while driving down the road for a mile or so after refilling the engine with oil, it wouldn't drain down to the crankcase fast enough, and so a tremendous amount of blue-white smoke would come billowing out of the exhaust, so much that it reminded me of the smoke coming out of a coal-fired train in an old western movie.

I wanted to clean out those drain holes by reaming them with a screwdriver. However, the tappet cover over them was held in place by about a dozen small bolts, and when I tried to loosen the first two the heads just snapped off. I reluctantly decided it would be best to leave well enough alone. I just hoped no additional oil would shoot out past the broken bolt heads.

One Friday after work I stopped at the bank to cash my paycheck. When I got back to my car I refilled the engine with oil as usual and then pulled out of the bank's parking lot and stopped with one car ahead of me at a stop sign. The wind that day was very strong from my car's rear to the front, and the billows of smoke coming from my car enveloped the car ahead of me. I could just barely see the driver look up and around in shock at all the smoke, thinking it was coming from his own car. I had to laugh!

Like always, though, by the time I drove a mile or so down the road the smoke would stop and then everything would be fine until I got to wherever I was going. Then the whole process of refilling the engine with oil and the car smoking like crazy would begin again. I drove that car that way for several months and never did get stopped by the cops, even though I drove it through town to and from work every day.

By March of 1980 we finally bought another car, a 1975 Monte Carlo. It turned out, though, that the 1971 blue Nova station wagon still had one more opportunity to be useful to us. The vacuum assist for the brakes, what we called a pancake, on the Monte Carlo began leaking, letting in air, and amazingly enough the pancake on the 1971 Nova station wagon was exactly the same size. That car was still parked out of sight behind the garage, so we swapped pancakes for another free repair job that worked. I definitely got my $90 worth out of that car.

As I think back on it now, over thirty years later, I'm amazed that we actually had the nerve to attempt that engine swap, and even more amazed that we actually succeeded, especially with all the creative engineering we had to come up with in such a short time. That is, if you can call what we did a success. I'm also amazed that we drove that car for almost another year, but those were difficult times and we tried to get by the best, and cheapest, way we could. But they were also exciting times and a lot of fun. I wouldn't trade those memories for anything in the world.