We made some progress over the last couple of weeks. Last Sunday I dug out a starter and generator to rebuild. I’ve found that if we do some of the smaller projects that we can completely finish in a short period of time it helps Cade feel like he has accomplished something and keeps his interest up. I decided on using a generator for now for a couple of reasons. I have several generators lying around from doing alternator conversions and for now, it’s only real function will be as a tensioner for the fan belt (when the engine goes in a car I’ll probably change over to an alternator). I also figured I’d start Cade off with the basics on how a generator works and then build on that later when we do an alternator.


Both the starter and generator were bench tested and were actually worked so this was basically be a tear down to clean, paint, lube and reassemble. Yes I purposely picked the nastiest looking starter I had…..remember this is partially about Cade getting his hands dirty LOL. Other than finding a loose bushing in the starter, there were no surprises when we tore them down.




During the week I got the stuff cleaned up, painted and ready for today.









On the engine itself we got as far as getting one head off last weekend and Cade got to see me screw up. I was using the impact wrench to pull head bolts and rather than grab the impact socket I used a regular chrome socket ……yeah, it split. I got to explain to why we use impact sockets.

When we got the head off, we found the bore is still standard and surprisingly had very little ridge. I also found out that instead of a soft plug or pipe plug in the oil galley at the top of the deck, the older 283s used a solid plug about a ½” long.



We initially drilled and tapped the plug for a ¼ X 20 bolt and tried the slide hammer on it…..it didn’t budge. The next trick was to redrill and tap the plug for a 3/8” bolt. I put an oversized nut over the plug and then screwing down a nut to pull the plug out (something like pulling a rocker stud) which worked well.





Today we got the other head off all the head bolts came out nicely except one. It was the only one that was rusty (I’m guessing that maybe it somehow got put in without sealer?) and yeah, it snapped off.



I suppose next Sunday I’ll show Cade how to remove a broken bolt. LOL.

We also got the pan off, but ran out of time before we could get a main cap and rod cap off to see if the crank is still standard. One thing I found that kind of surprised me was that the engine doesn’t have a harmonic balancer, just a hub with a tin shield riveted to it (it sure looked like a balancer until you saw the back side). I do have a good balancer on the shelf that will probably go on it when it goes back together.



So that’s where we are at the end of the day.


.