Buick Big Block Info Dump

[electra225]

I like this guy's videos. He is a car guy, not necessarily a Buick guy. That said, I tend to disagree with his affection for the Buick 455. My experience with real Buick guys is that the 430 is the most potent Buick engine ever built. The 400 is "okay", but it is a little Buick engine. The 430 is a relative of the 401, the 455 is a relative of the 425. Both of the larger engines, the 425 and the 455 suffered from the same malady. They would make a lot of noise and burn a lot of gas, but their performance was not superior, and in many ways inferior to their smaller brothers. Whenever we built a Skylark GS tribute car, we used a 430 with 400 stickers on the valve covers. I had Marty at the machine shop do the "Stage 1" valve trick on a 430 head. We would use hardened valve seats in the rebuild, so boring out the valves then installing Stage 1 valves was no stretch. Uncle Tony also praises the "big port" heads, while real Buick guys avoided them due to their tendency to crack. Marty was a paraplegic, a Vietnam war vet. He had his machine shop set up so he could operate it from a wheelchair. The man had golden fingers. He could run his fingers across a casting and almost tell exactly how "far out" it was. He was a machinist, not a hotrodder. He balanced and blueprinted Buick nailheads for me so they idled like a Packard. Big Buick engines has lumpy cams and, in the case of the nailhead, uneven firing order. An issue that must be addressed in any Buick 400, 430 or 455 build was their wimpy oil pump. At least Cadillac and AMC used the same oil pump in an aluminum timing cover setup. Neglected maintenance would cause grooving of the timing cover, and lower oil pressure. There is a hardened steel insert for the timing cover and new gears that would pretty much fix the issue. This video shows a Buick V-8 in a pickup. My thinking is that an Oldsmobile engine had more torque. The only similarity between a Buick 455 and an Olds 455 was they were both V-8's and both were rated at 455 cubic inches. And they used the same oil filter......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zLLrmfbECw

[Firedome]

And Olds V8s didn't have oiling issues. In fact Packard 320, 352 and 374 V8s are recommended to get an Olds 455 oil pump swap when rebuilding them, as Packard V8s also had oiling issues, corrected only very late in production, and then not always successfully. As if Packard didn't have enough issues to deal with in '55, with the Ultra-traumatic and Torsion-Level.
Ask me how I know.. LOL (I can laugh about it now).

[walyfd]

I was always told the Packard torsion-level was the finest ride available.

Want trouble? Look at the GM air suspension from '58-'60. Worse was the Eldorado Brougham system.

Why they used pure AIR rather than a freon is beyond me... moisture was the enemy.

[electra225]

Packard V-8's and the 1957 Buick V-8 had a similar oil pump, and had a similar issue with them. There was a vacuum pump as part of the oil pump, there to bolster the vacuum at low engine speeds, ostensibly to help the power brake booster primarily. Secondarily, was the operation of the vacuum windshield wipers. The diaphram in the vacuum pump would rupture, allowing the oil pump to pump copious amounts of oil into the intake manifold. Naturally, the engine would smoke and consume oil like crazy. A non-1957 oil pump was the cure for a Buick, an Olds pump was the cure for a Packard. For a time, nobody made engine bearings for the V-8 Packard engines. Marty found that Case model D bearings were dead on, you just needed two sets for a V-8 Packard. We used those until Bill Hirsch started making Packard V-8 bearings again. Packard V-8 heads didn't breathe as well as the Straight 8 flatheads did. Porting and polishing the intake and heads did wonders for performance and smoothness. They also had aggressively mild cams so the engines would run as smooth as the old Straight 8's did. That wasn't going to work no matter what they did. NO engine ever built on the face of the planet ran as smooth as a Packard Straight 8.......

Not only were the oil pumps stouter in a nailhead engine, so was the block and lower end. The crankshaft in a nailhead was entirely inside the block. That arrangement made for a dinky oil pan, but it was a stout setup and you had to work really hard to blow one up. Johnny Johnson blew up a 322 one time, but he was running it over 6,000 rpm when it went. That is only 50% above what it was designed to run. He worked out a solid lifter setup for a nailhead and got amazing power out of one. The hydraulic lifter setups that were standard were about done at 4500 rpm, where they would start to float, kind of a built-in governor.....