We know that the coil is mounted wrong, the spark plugs are only in hand tight, and the vacuum lines are routed like some sort of Chinese maze, but Goliath lives once again! Our big 1966 Chevy C50 truck rumbled to life a week after a mad thrash to reassemble the engine on a weirdly hot Spring day. The poorly timed 292ci six sounded bad ass through a wide open exhaust manifold in our residential neighborhood at 9pm on a Saturday night.

But we’re jumping way ahead. Last we left you, the cylinder head had been rebuilt, the valves had been lapped and we had received our replacement piston and ring set for the motor after we decided to re-ring the whole engine instead of our diabolical plan to only do our “bad cylinder.” We knew that the rings on the number two piston were trashed, but we discovered that most of the rest of the rings were junk too. With our total dirt ball budget plan blown up, we upgraded our spending plans from hobo to transient.

We honed the cylinders with an ancient three stone hone that was encrusted with saw dust when we got it. We liked the way to bearings were looking so we made the sign of the cross on them with 30-weight oil and stuck them back in. We protected the crank journals for the week or so that the oil pan was off the motor with oil soaked t-shirts, and we scraped carbon from the piston grooves with a nifty old tool our dad-in-law dug out of a tool drawer he forgot he had. It was BangShift.com approved goodness through and through and it culminated on a 90-degree Sunday that started with us torquing rod bolts and ended with us being cross-eyed from dehydration and cursing the fact that the damned truck was sneezing through the carb when we tried to start it.

BangShift.com forum member Caveman came by early in the afternoon in his killer ’56 Chevy truck and we commandeered his day all the way through a scrumptious grilled dinner prepared by our sainted wife.

In retrospect we would have done a few things differently on thrash day. Mainly we would have slowed down, but lured by the prospect of hearing the truck run and mentally whacked by a lack of water, wrenches, gasket sealer, and potatoes were flying willy-nilly.

The truck was sneezing through the carb because the timing was completely jacked up. We stabbed the distributor in wrong and after letting our head clear for a few days we knew it immediately after hitting the key again. After putting the distributor right and, making a blind guess at the timing, we hit the key and were met with a massive fireball out of the open exhaust manifold and seeing as there is no floor on the driver’s side of the truck, it looked pretty cool under our feet. We were a little late with the timing.

A quick bump ahead and the big fella rumbled to life and made glorious noises until we decided to stop before having an elderly neighbor call the cops. Stupid grins and triumphant phone calls ensued. We also drank beers. Lots of beers.

So as of right now we need to do some cleanup regarding stuff like the coil mounting and line routing. We need to properly set the timing and then finish rebuilding the steering column to we can take the truck for illicit rides. Illicit because we now need to wade into the murky waters of registering this behemoth in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. If you thought the engine process was painful, wait for this!

We’re going to tell you the rest of the story and fill in the details of our thrash in a gallery. Hit the link below to check it out and make sure to read the captions for all the good info on how we finally awoke our truck from a long winter’s slumber. Goliath lives, and he sounds pissed!