.....to start assessing the condition of this old 389.
Pulled the valve covers and saw a fair amount of sludge buildup, pretty much what I expected to see on a 56 year old engine that had no PCV system for it's entire life.
All in all not too bad nor too excessive, drivers side shown here.
The passenger side clearly has some thicker sludge buildup compared to the other side.
Someone must have removed the driver's side valve cover fairly recently during the engine's lifetime and cleaned out most of the sludge from the underside of the cover.
I had soaked both breather caps in Simple Green for about a week, they're now quite clean inside after a good rinsing. They were completely clogged with crud, obviously contributing to the sludge problem.
The larger drivers side breather has horsehair inside, the passenger side looks to be filled with stainless steel wool.
I removed the carb and saw that a small amount of water had made it into the intake manifold. Not enough that it ran down the intake runners and into any of the cylinders, just enough to leave a small rust puddle right under the throttle plates.
The topside of the throttle plates show some surface rust buildup from the water ingress, but nothing too excessive that won't clean up fairly easily.
Bottom side of the throttle plates look pretty clean, looks like the carb had been recently gone through not long before the car went to salvage.
The carb is actually a 1964 unit from a 283 HP 389 with A/C and auto trans. Pretty much a perfect application matching replacement for the 280 HP 1958 A/C auto carb, only 5 years newer.
Spark plugs (Bosch WR9FC) must have recently been replaced, they look almost new. Cylinders look to be pretty healthy, but the fact that they were not run for very long doesn't really give me a true indication.
Cylinders 1, 3, 5, 7.
Cylinders 2, 4, 6, 8.
I'm going to lube up the cylinders and begin freeing up any sticking piston rings with a little dose of Marvel Mystery Oil.
I used this 3oz oil bottle to squirt a little into each cylinder, trying my best to evenly distribute the contents of the bottle between all 8 cylinders. I'll do the same thing again in about a week to give it time to soak in.
I lubed up all of the rocker balls and pushrod tips with some 10W-30 motor oil.
Surprisingly enough, the distributor not only turned back and forth freely after loosening up the clamp, it popped right out after removing the clamp. No stuck distributor nightmare for me, needless to say I'm pretty happy about that!
Overall the carb didn't look too bad, it just needed a good external cleaning.
After about a half hour of going over it with a toothbrush and some Simple Green it came out looking pretty good.
It took a little wire brushing to get most of the rust off of the top of the throttle plates.
The way I see it, this carb's a runner now.
I did manage to pick up a cast iron 1960 stick shift bellhousing in good condition from a fellow PY member. In order to use a stronger modern stick trans you need to use a 1958 -1960 bellhousing, any of the 1955 - 1957 bellhousings just won't do if you want to use a 'good' trans.
Using a stick trans behind the early 389 eliminates the need for any kind of adapter. If you want to run a modern auto trans like a TH400 you would need to spend about $700 for an adapter from Wilcap.
Here you can see where the starter mounts to the bellhousing, there's no way to bolt a starter to the 1959 block.
Let me tell you, this sucker is heavy!
