Hi All,
I noticed that a lot of build threads seem to make a lot of progress in a short period of time. This will definitely NOT be one of those. Time and money never show up at the same time. Anyway, a bit about my car:

I bought it in the mid 90's as my first car. My shop teacher was talking about how much he liked the 442, so I ended up finding one (no documentation that it is a real 442, so I am stating it is a cutlass S, but younger me was optimistic) Image below from when I brought it home.
It came with the rocket 350 and Th350 transmission, open diff. Ran great! Seemed fast at the time, but for some reason I wanted more power.

I sold the 350 and bought a 455 from a delta 88 that I had to pull from the car while it sat in the owners driveway. I remember selling the 350 for cheap and being very disappointed in myself. I delivered it to the new owner, and his engine hoist broke. So I took the engine apart so I could lift it out of the pickup. We were amazed at how clean and smooth everything looked. One of my many mistakes.

I promptly bought the Mondello technical manual, which I still have, and started the process of rebuilding my engine per that manual.

I had a local shop do all the machine work, though I spent my Christmas vacation porting the heads, and eventually put the motor together. I also bought a used muncie 4-speed, and rebuilt that.

455 Engine Specs:
Compression: 9.7:1 (I think. Younger me didn't record this, but based on what my pistons look like, and the table in the Mondello manual, I believe it is 9.7:1)
Heads: G heads, home port/polish, spring kit from Mondello
Cam: Mondello JM-22-25-10 (230deg intake and 236deg exhaust at 0.050")
Torquer intake manifold
Hooker super competition headers (1 7/8 primaries, 3.5" collectors)
Carb: Holley 600 cfm (it was what I had and was planning on upgrading once I got the car road worthy again).
Engine is balanced as well.

stock open diff with 3.23 gears

transmission: munci 4-speed (no, it's not a stone crusher), rebuilt. Younger me thought it was a good idea to put the stiffer detent spring in there to REALLY hold it in gear while you are doing some wicked launches!!!


Me and my first car! 1972 olds cutlass S with rocket 350 and TH350

Christmas vacation porting heads. Air die grinders get REALLY cold, especially in New England winters!

Rebuilding the 455

 

25 years later, I finally had time to try to get the car back on the road. So the car sat for 25 years.

I spent some time updating the brakes. It needed a new master cylinder, I rebuilt and powder coated the front calipers.....unfortunately it wasn't until I tried putting them back on that I figured out the car somehow had 2 passenger side calipers!!!!!
I replaced the rubber brake lines, parking brake cable, rear shocks, cleaned out the fuel system, made new rubber exhaust hangers (old motor cycle tire donated the rubber). When I last used the car, I must have known that it would be stored for a while, because I filled the cylinders with mystery oil. I got the motor to turn over by hand (though not with the plugs in), then got it to spin on the starter.

Put it all back together and started it for the first time in 25 years.

 

It was having issues staying cool, and it was smoking out my garage pretty good. It seemed like unburnt fuel more than anything else, white smoke that burned the eyes and smelled like fuel.

I started messing with the cooling system a bit, and didn't like what I was finding. I took the radiator cap off hoping it was just air. Every time I would rev it up, then let off, it would puke coolant across the garage.

I did a compression test and a leak down test, and all looked good. So I figured I could just flush the system out.

Here is an image of what the intake manifold looked like (sorry, too lazy to get the actual image off the borescope

Example of the crap that was in my coolant system after letting it sit for 25 years.
). Lesson learned, do NOT let coolant sit for 25 years!!!!!

 

After finally realizing that I can't flush the engine, I decided it was time to pull it. Sadly, it only had about 3-4 hours on the motor. A good portion of that was me trying to flush the coolant system.

Pulling the motor after it sat for 25 years.

 

Time to start taking the engine apart! I found some interesting things when taking it apart. The first thing is one lifter had a nasty scar in it. The other thing I noticed was that cylinder #2 rod cap was on backwards!!!! I think that younger me put that together, so no one else to blame but myself.

I also noticed that the rod bearings that I used were not fully grooved. So what did younger me do? I matched up the grooves so that some of the rods had a full groove, and others had none. Geesh.

Crank journals do not look good to me for having so few hours on the motor. So I'm sending it all to the shop to have them investigate and hopefully save what I've got. I already had the shop go thru my heads, because I didn't like how the intake valves looked. Sure enough, they said the valve job on the intake wasn't good and it needed new intake valves (I didn't tell them about that, I just asked them to go thru the heads and look them over).

Starting to take the engine apart.

Scar on the lifter

Cam from the engine

Cylinder 1/2 journal. Looks pretty bad to me, especially considering the low miles on the engine.

 

Next steps are to fully strip the block. Clean up all the threads, then ship it off to the machine shop to have them check everything out.

I did buy a performer manifold to replace the torquer, and an AVS2 800 cfm carb to replace the itty bitty carb I had on there.

I will be in the market for a new camshaft, but could probably use some help in that department. So if anyone has a similar build, and intend to use their car on the street with some occasional "spirited" driving, I'd love to hear what you are running.

I will eventually look into changing the rear gears as well. But I that will be after I can drive this up and down the street again. One wheel burnouts will bother me pretty quickly though.

Performer Intake Manifold

 

I have run the Comp XE274, 230/236 for years, thousands of miles,no issues, however vacuum for power brakes is not the best.
Good luck with your rebuild!

 

Cool story and glad you still have it.

Not surprised, nothing beat factory quality. And not surprised at the wanting more...human nature.

Unless I missed it I did not read any positives on the 455s performance after build and swap in. Fell short of the mark your mind had envisioned ?

 

Thanks dc2x4drvr! Good to know. I'll see if you posted about your setup to see what you are running for manifold, headers and carb. I am looking to keep the power brakes with my setup.

69CSHC, I never got a chance to really run it. Once I put it in the car, broke in the motor I was only able to drive it up and down the block a few times. Managed to smoke the clutch completely (line lock test gone bad, heh), so swapped out the clutch and resurfaced the flywheel then ran out of time and money. So it just sat for 25 years. This summer I tried firing it up to get her going to see what she was like, but didn't like the way it was running and figured that I'd better just take it apart and check everything out. So far, I'm glad I did. But it will be a while before I can get it back in the car and drive it around. I'm hopeful I can get it back in the car around June. That is probably very optimistic, especially considering I have to paint the house. So we shall see how it goes!

 

Had a little bit of time today, so I built an engine cradle for the motor so I can more easily transport it to the shop. No pics though, cause it's just a wooden box. Hopefully can drop it off at the shop next weekend.

I put my engine spec into comp cams, and they came back with the following recommendation:
"Based on the information given, we would suggest our Xtreme Energy 230/236 flat tappet camshaft, part#42-224-4 for your setup"

Which might be the exact same cam that you have @dc2x4drvr ? Interestingly you said that it doesn't work great with power brakes, but I put into their form that I have power brakes.

At one point I had sent a message to CutlassEFI and he suggested something in the 220 duration range. So I guess I need to do some more research and talk to the shop I'm dropping my motor with.

 

Finally had a chance to load up the engine and get it over to the shop. They ballparked around 2 mo. That's still probably not enough time for me to get everything done that I want to (yard work season is quickly approaching, and I took apart my kids afv that I now need to put back together) , but at least I'll have a fresh engine!

Loaded up and off to the shop!