This is a 1971 Pontiac GTO Judge. This customer had an engine built in New Jersey and had nothing but problems with it from day one. He enlisted us to get this thing straight once and for all. We found NUMEROUS problems. Some with the engine being assembled incorrectly (to be nice about it), some with the engine installation (again this is an understatement), and some with the poor selection of, and mismatching of parts, but mostly a TOTAL lack of attention to detail. Here are some shots of the car before we began.

On a vehicle that is not driven a lot, bare aluminum and chrome is NOT the way to go. I had the intake manifold powder coated as well as all of the accessories and valve covers. We are not satisfied with the looks of the valve covers and will be doing those over, but you get the idea…

We are converting this 455 to electronic fuel injection. I selected the FAST engine management system and this Edelbrock EFI intake. This combo will be naturally aspirated and will be limited to a bit less than 500 hp so I selected 36 lb/hr injectors.  We will be using this Accufab 1000 cfm throttle body…

Some assembly shots. Keith Black hyperutectic pistons and file fit rings were used. On the Keith Black stuff make SURE you look at their specs for ring gap…..Those pistons require a considerable amount more ring gap than a traditional cast or forged piston…. That is a Comp Cams hydraulic roller shaft. I speced out and set up the springs to match. Those are unported Performer RPM heads.

Here are some shots of degreeing the cam and checking piston-to-valve clearance…

This is just one example of the attention to detail I was talking about….These are ARP head bolts….great bolts no doubt, but they rust….We paint them to keep them looking good longer, they will still eventually rust but it will take WAAAAAY longer….

Valley cover going on…

The valve covers from above being redone. We used the actual paint code of the car body color for the Pontiac lettering…  Pictures can’t capture how good this looks!

James reinstalling the powder coated brackets on the power steering pump.

A bit more progress on the engine….

On the lift for the fuel system install. We removed the fuel tank and installed the AN fitting then plumbed to the inline pump.

Here is the wiring harness as supplied from FAST.  The coil of wire to the right is the battery power….As supplied it was designed for a trunk mounted battery, for this project the battery will remain in it’s stock location so I had to modify the harness.

Here’s the grommet where the harness will pass through the firewall. I had to remove all the covering and route the battery power from the inside-the-car side of the harness to the outside-the-car side.

Here the harness mods are done.  Now the battery power is on the outside section of the harness as it needs to be.

These Weather Pack connectors are the best thing ever invented….We have been using these for years on all our custom wiring….The FAST harness uses these as well. I will be using these to wire up the fuel pump, cooling fans, etc on this project….I just placed an order to replenish our supply…That is the biggest factor on a project like this….Hurry up and wait……BUT that is what it takes to do it right….Better to miss a targeted ready date than to half-ass some areas….

Motor going in…

A shot of the factory return line that we will use for the EFI return line. We simply flared the end and used an Aeroquip tube nut and collar and a 6AN to 4AN adapter. The pressure line is 6AN steel braid from the tank to pump and pump to the fuel rail.

Just a shot of the fuel pump power wire going through a grommeted hole in the trunk. Most guys would simply run this wiring along the frame under the car…..We removed the back seat and carpet in order to run it with the factory wiring going to the rear of the car. Stuff like this may double the time it takes to do an install versus just simply just getting it all hooked up…..The latter is the way this engine was installed before….We are finding unexpected things DAILY that we are having to redo…It adds a lot of unexpected time, but so be it….We are not going to just overlook something just to save a little time.

A couple of front shots of the motor dropped in….YES we WILL be doing away with those ugly red heater hoses!

In order to facilitate hook-up of the Lokar throttle cable the accelerator pedal rod had to be modified. About 2″ had to be cut from the length, then the rod had to be heated red hot in order to re-flatten the end where the cable hooks to the rod….

Then the hole was re-drilled and the pedal assembly reinstalled in the car and the Lokar cable installed and adjusted. It is unexpected things like this that make it IMPOSSIBLE to give an accurate completion date…

Here is our Weather Pack connector kit replenished…..Here we have installed a connector on the MSD distributor pickup leads….This will plug into the FAST harness. That is a composite distributor gear from BOP Engineering for use with the roller camshaft. The crank reference angle was set to 50* in the FAST tune. The centrifugal advance was locked out as well. The distributor was installed at 50* BTDC and the trigger reluctor aligned with the pickup…….

Here I have begun the sensor calibration procedure in the FAST tuning program.  Here the fuel pump relay is installed and wired in…

I even put a weather pack connector on the center relay terminal for use as a “fuel pressure test connector” just like what is on some factory GM vehicles…. 

Well there it is all put back together….

The College where I used to teach was closed at the time I was ready for tuning, so the final tuning on this deal was done by Earl Schexnayder on his Chassis dyno. Earl’s shop is in Arnaudville, La. I highly recommend Earl for dyno tuning FAST systems, GM and Fords.

Well it’s been several months, a few road trips and some in town cruising and the GTO is doing great with a very satisfied owner….He came by the other day just to say hello….Here are a couple of shots….