[north]

As I mentioned elsewhere the exhaust manifold on my recently acquired 1bbl 69 Firebird ragtop was cracked in a bunch of places. A search for an NOS or good used one went nowhere so I looked into welding but the only guy in town who has a good reputation told me I’d be looking at nearly a G note (almost a foot of linear crack-actually several cracks-to repair) with no guarantee and it would look awful.

Luckily I found on the local trader a pair of 68 OHC engines and a 2speed automatic for sale.

$800 dollars later they are in my garage. And one nice intake manifold for my car basically paid for the two engines. It has a different part number but looks identical other than a heat riser (which I removed and plugged).

Both engines are 68 model year (one early and the other late production), both are 1bbl auto trans engines. The seller was restoring a 68 bird. He rebuilt his engine (the clean looking one) but let it sit for 20 years. Now it’s seized. He found another engine (the dirty one) from a 68 LeMans with AC and was going to use that one but bought a 400 instead this year.

I figure I’ll dress up the clean one as a display engine and keep the other as a parts supply. Apparently it ran well.

Apart from the heat riser on the exhaust the other changes I noticed are the air cleaner looks different than the 69 and the 68 block has a different part numbers, likely related to the change in the coolant bypass? (69 doesn’t have that line going from the thermostat housing adaptor to the water pump.