Does anyone know where they sell repro. old style Rocket valve covers w/ the wire loom that fit the 455? I saw in one of the Rod magazines, and Charlie Brown told me of, a place that makes them f/, of all things, small block Chevys, but not big block Olds'. I'd really like to have a pair f/ that 455 in my old pick-up. They'll go along w/ the basic theme of it. Thanks in advance.

 

The wire looms work on the early Rocket motors because they are center-bolt valve covers. That's why they also work on center-bolt SBCs (the "fauxsmobile" valve covers). You can buy just the looms and tack them to your own 455 covers by welding studs to the covers.

 

Somebody is reproducing those looms/covers. I contacted him and at the time he had not tried them on a later style olds cover. Found them on ebay.

 

Jim--What you are thinking about is "do-able". The 1970 442/El Camino custom that is owned by a guy in the N Texas Olds Club has this setup.

He used a chrome stock style valve cover (ie...the kind found for example on a '70 Olds 350/455) and he mounted those wire loom things on top. Basically, he drilled two holes through the tops of the covers and used bolts/nuts/washers to hold the metal loom plates onto the top of the covers.

I think the covers he used are actually aftermarket repops as they are chrome and don't have any baffles spot welded into the underside. He added a sort of "old school" cast aluminum breathers that he attached to each vertical outboard side of the covers. The whole thing could be seen as a little "overdone" with all this stuff added on but it looks alright (the breathers look a lot more out of place than anything).

You might be able to avoid putting breathers on the valve covers anyway if you could find one of the older setups that has a breather on top of the oil fill tube instead of a regular oil fill cap. That would add to the "old school" look without "busying up" the valve covers with too many appendages.

 

You've explained why they're available f/ the SBC, something that I thought was out of place, but as I see now, applicable. If I have to get the looms and attach them to whatever valve covers I use, maybe I'd go f/ it, but I was hoping that someone reproduced the old style valve covers, original shape w/ the wire loom, to fit the 455 Rocket. I don't want the chrome covers. Besides the wire loom, the Olds colors (paint) on the old style makes the valve cover. On the thread: "Just Scored a '50 Olds Futurmatic" (very similar in wording), the old style valve covers on the engine in that car, w/ the original color paint is GREAT looking. The paint (colors) and the loom together is the look I like, and they say, "Rocket" on them.
Where could I buy the wire looms themselves?

 

Jim,

funny you should mention this as I was planning on doing this when I get the 455 for my olds. I have a '55 model and was tossing up on what to do with valve covers that would suit the age of the car. I had thought about using the Offy finned ones, but wanted something that looked 'original' I'm not one of those 'it must be original' kind of guys, more I wanted to have the engine bay look like it is, enough to fool those that didn't know what they were looking at and those that did enough to scratch their heads.

I had decided to either get another set of '55 valve covers and cut the 'OLDSMOBILE ROCKET' out and weld into a stock set of 455 valve covers , or do as you suggested and run the 303 plug wire covers that you can buy on ebay exactly as '70post' described above, but I was going to have the actual valve covers painted the stock green and the chrome covers withe the olds part painted green too, or the yellow they used.

The only thing I didn't know about using the wire covers was the length of them compared to the 455 covers, as in are they too long or too short? so was going to wait until I got the 455 to see.

So if you find anything else out about these I would be interested to know.

 

http://www.shiny-hiney.com/rocket.html