The great thing about having a couple of project vehicles beating around here at BangShift.com is that our pain and suffering gets to become your entertainment! This is the first of a two-part story on what we’re calling a “one cylinder rebuild” on Goliath, our 1966 Chevy C50 monster truck. We had not intended to get into the engine at this time, but as you’ll find out, the automotive gods love to lay waste to well made plans. Follow along as we tear down the 292ci inline six in the truck and discover that all is not well in horsepower-ville.
Our problems began a while back. After owning Goliath for a couple of months we noticed that the truck was running worse and worse. It finally left us stranded about a half mile from our house while on a joy ride. Because the truck is not properly registered with our DMV, we were waiting for an officer of the law to come by and nail us for our stupidity. Luckily we limped the truck home before disaster struck, but we needed to get on figuring out why the truck was running like junk, acting gutless, and getting worse.
We rebuilt the carb, performed a tune-up, and sorted out the ghetto rigged firing order that a previous owner had “figured out” when they stabbed the distributor in wrong. It ran worse than before we did anything. That called for the next step. As it turned out, the next step was a biggie.
We performed a compression test and found 20 psi of compression in the number two cylinder. That’s basically a dead hole. Using the old timey trick of dumping some oil into the spark plug hole and running the test again, we determined that there was a failure with the piston rings in that cylinder. We immediately went to the redline and started scheming on rebuilding the entire motor.
Luckily for us, Chad Reynolds, the other half of the BangShift.com brain trust, slapped us back into line when he demanded we do the BangShift.com approved fix and repair just the one hole that was junk. We’re headed down that route for a couple reasons. The first is that most of our budget for the truck is going to be tied up in replacing virtually the entire floor of the cab, which has rotted away. Secondly, this isn’t exactly a fire breathing, high performance motor. It’s stone stock and will stay that way for the near future. Thirdly, this is a very budget solution to a problem, and frankly, it is the way the repair would have been made back in the day. Money trees are pretty bare these days, so this will illustrate a cheapo way to get your junk back to running without breaking the bank.
All that being said, we still had to have most of the motor apart to get us to the point for being ready for the ring job on the number two cylinder. This first installment will take us from the discovery of the problem, through pulling the motor apart and being ready to complete the repair. The only thing that has stopped us at this writing is the continued shipping delays on our single cylinder ring pack.
Like all good things, we find a couple suprises on the way. At the end of the project we’ll give you the whole cash outlay for this repair. We’re definitely going to be under $125.00. Can we keep it under $100? Stay tuned to find out!
As we like to do, we’re telling the story through photos and captions. Make sure to click the link below to see the gallery and read the captions for a blow by blow account of peeking inside an old 292.
