Hey, you want conversation? I bought a '73 Vega wagon NEW for about $2600 and paid it off with money from a summer job. I paid about $125 extra to get the "Rally Pack" which turned out to be a decal stripe on the side and a decal on the speedometer which allowed the needle to read killometers/hour as well as miles/hour. The wagon was a beautiful light blue and we liked the space but the rear windows were fixed and you could only roll down the door windows. At 17,000 miles I took the car back to the agency for routine service and had the oil changed; about 1000 miles later the oil light came on! It smoked from then on and "changed it's own oil! Since I had research contacts with Reynolds Metals which had a lab in Richmond I eventually learned that the aluminum engine was developed by them in Richmond, but they blamed GM workers for not doing the process correctly. It seems that the idea was that they added 17% (SiO2)x (glass powder) to the aluminum alloy, poured the block, machined the block AND THEN poured nitric acid down the bores to etch away the aluminum and leave a porous matrix on the cylinder walls so that "the pistons ride on glass". The only problem was that the porous matrix held oil so that on the firing part of the cycle the flame would burn the oil off the walls! That was a hot potato that my friends at Reynolds Metals did not want to talk about. It is true that concentrated nitric acid will react with aluminum to form a hard oxide surface so wear properties were reasonable but apparently the problem of oil in the surface of the walls could not be wiped away by the rings even when new. Later I found out that GM "saved" $4 per hole by not installing steel sleeves as were in the little aluminum V8s. Actually that little four cylinder engine was pretty good and I knew at least one person who had steel sleeves installed and then the Vega was pretty good. It is amazing that the bean counters would "save" $16 by scrimping on the sleeves. Even then there is a long term corrosion problem with the galvanic effect of putting steel (Fe) into large surface contact with aluminum (Al), but that problem would not show up for a few years while the oil consumption set in very early in the life of the engine. That Reynolds lab has now closed and been absorbed by Alcoa but the lesson is to use steel sleeves in an aluminum block! If you still have a Vega that is running and smokes, the fix is to pull the engine and have the block sleeved and you can rebuild other things while you are there and end up with a nice little engine. In the good news/bad news department my wife was forced into a pole on a narrow street and my son hit the windshield when he was about 2 years old but the baby seat restrained him enough that he was OK. The car was totaled and we took an insurance settlement when the car was only about three years old.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder