T Type Century Wagon

MNcarbturbo

What's Fuel Injection?
Joined
Mar 9, 2009
When I was like 12-13 there was a blue malibu wagon in town that was pretty toasty but I still loved how it looked. Wanted a GN for my first car when I was 15 but didn't have 10 grand for one. Didn't know what a G body was I just liked both at the time.

Ended up building a drawthough cutlass that I slowly worked on in HS and finished early in college. Gets good fuel mileage, looks good, runs great, but is pretty slow.

Bought a 2+2 2 years ago. Had an LS laying around, horse traded some other parts, and that is basically done now.

Found almost all the lc2 parts I needed intending to swap that on my longblock in my cutlass but I couldn't tear that car apart. I put so much time getting the AC, wiring, ect to work as well as it does now.

I needed another project car like a fat kid needs a doughnut but I stumbled upon this mint 80 century wagon up in northern MN couple months ago. Real nice car. Virtually no rust, ran nice, interior is super clean. Had the 3.8 too. Plan was to daily drive it this summer and bolt the LC2 parts on the stock 3.8 and run like 5 psi until I built an engine next winter.

Drove the car 500 miles last weekend and found it gets 500 MPG on oil. It's thirsty!

So that moved the schedule up to now. Found a pair of 4.1's local. One was rebuilt and had a few thousand miles on it that was stuck. Other was a shortblock.

Now the plan is rebuild the 4.1 cheap, throw the LC2 stuff on it and run with the stock th350/10 bolt until I want to turn it up a bit.
 

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Took the 4.1 apart, yeah it broke the crank. It spun a rod bearing and the guy had a shop spray weld the journal up. Must have messed the metallurgy up because it broke clean at 2000rpm cruise. All the bearings looked good, just locked up.
 

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Spent money where I didn't need to (now) and got some new tires for the T wheels I had.

But I don't care, its totally a different looking car now. Something that I can be proud of and not those steel 14's. Blah.
 

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Man, that's ugly!

Just ugly enough for me to want one now, too..........

Ya' friggin' bastid!;););)
 
This is going to scare most turbo buick guys but I am reusing slightly different pistons on the engine :O

The complete engine had a set of speedpro 30 over hypers but the first 2 got nicked by the crank.

Good thing is the shortblock I bought for the crank had 5 good options for replacements. They are also 30 over, but are a different brand (or at least older version of a speedpro). They weighed in within a couple grams of the speedpros so I'm going to clean them up a bit and slam them in.

My bearing and ring kit is dropshipped from the mfg so I'm just waiting for that. I honed the block this weekend and cleaned it up. Still need to break down the heads and get my comp 980's on them.
 
Made good progress. Cleaned the heads and put new seals and comp 980s in them. Drilled the block for turbo return. Cleaned and prepared the block. Dropped crank in, cleaned the 4 pistons from this engine and 2 from the short block the crank came from installed rings and slid them in. Luckily they were both .030 blocks. Bolted heads on.
 

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Did the earl brown timing cover mods, painted the longblock and started bolting stuff on.have a few missing bits but the only big thing that stopped me was the cracked balancer. Tried pulling the reluctor wheel off and putting it on an na one but it just bent.

I have missing brackets i have no idea where they sit and another what looks like crank sensor that has 4 wires going to it.
 

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Any idea where these go?

Otherwise everything looks good. Need to rebuild one good turbo out of the 3 stock junkers i have. Missing some vacuum lines, heater houses and i think the turbo car dipstick is different as my 4.1 one doesn't fit. Throttle body is missing the blade and i don't have an oil filler neck.

But damn the car looks good on t type vectors :)
 

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The y bracket is a support bracket for the alternator. The L bracket is the rear support bracket for a/c pump. The horse shoe bracket is the support bracket for the ignition module plate.
 
Thanks for that!

Good news is i installed the harness and it looks like I am only missing a few sensors, (tps, oil press sensor, and a few other little stuff. Mostly I have half a dozen plugs that I dont know what they are for.

I also filled the oil up, primed the engine tonight and did a good cleaning of the garage.

Next I have to figure out fuel system for the wagon. I picked up a TPI 90 astro van sender as that apparently works for in tank EFI pumps. We will see.

In other news the wagon is officially on a used oil diet. That whole burns a gallon of oil every 500 miles thing is eating into my wallet haha. Only the best 4000 mile used oil from my girlfriends fusion for it now!
 
Well I haven't done ton of work. Just rounding up missing parts.Drove the car a bit more this summer. Just drives smooth (slowly) with no real issues. Mostly put away for the winter. Back to the winter beater Rainier.

For anyone that knows, will a 84/85 GN dash harness and cluster work with a 86/87 engine harness? Local guy is parting out a rusted SBC swapped 85 GN and was considering buying the speedo cluster and dash harness out of to swap into my century. Save some time with the wiring and repinning stuff.
 
For anyone that knows, will a 84/85 GN dash harness and cluster work with a 86/87 engine harness? Local guy is parting out a rusted SBC swapped 85 GN and was considering buying the speedo cluster and dash harness out of to swap into my century. Save some time with the wiring and repinning stuff.


Here's the skinny on the dash harness. Many people have reported running the hot air dash harness with no problems but a couple of us have run into a problem with the fans not working. Near as I can tell they changed a pin location or something and it depends on the year of dash harness vs engine harness. I know for a fact my 84 dash harness and 86 engine harness didn't allow the fan to work. The actual load bearing wire for the fan relay gets powered from the fuse links at the starter (on the engine harness) but the relay needs a 12v key on hot to close the solenoid (no load) and this power comes from the dash harness.

If it doesn't work it's an easy fix. Splice in a jumper wire from any 12v key on source (I used the charcoal canister solenoid wire) and run it to the fan relay. Problem solved. There's other minor differences but they're inconsequential. I think one difference was the aldl port on the 86/87 has an extra wire that runs to the egr to be able to test cycle it with a scan tool or something to that effect.
 
Haven't done a damn thing in the garage this winter. Combo of cold, and being busy stopped most of it.

Have done some research though-

Did decide to swap the 80 century dash over to the 86/87 lc2 dash.

Besides the dash harness, speedometer cluster, cluster support plastic support panel, gage surround, is there anything else that is needed?

I've had cutlass dashes apart and swapped my 81 to an 85 interior and there are some minor stuff like light switch and wiper changes, but what is different on the 80 vs 86/87 intercooled car dash?

Unless there is an easier/better way? Mainly, having the lc2 dash makes it more a "complete" swap in my eyes, but not ever going through the lc2 dashes, and my minor experience with my cutlass dash doesnt seem like the swap would be hard, but I could be horribly mistaken.
 
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