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Rebuilding the Park Avenue

Here's the Park - its look OK, but at this time, it had a cooked motor

It all started when the water pump failed and John drove home from the OSU campus, apparently a good portion of the way with the temperature light on. When I checked I started it up, I could hear that a head gasket was blown. When I checked the oil, it looked just like a milk shake, and so I knew we had serious trouble. We parked it and I told John he had to go buy his own car, which he did.
I let it sit until the weather warmed up, and in the mean time we used a couple of different parts from it to try to fix John's '88 Park Avenue. So, probably about April we rolled it into the garage and I took the heads off. It took a couple of days to get it completely torn down, but in a couple of weeks I had the heads off, and ready to go into the shop.



Here's a shot of the heads ready to go to the shop.



Here is the engine, sans the heads, and of course intake manifold. I put the pushrods back in place, just to keep up with them. I eventually pushed them through the side of a cardboard box in the same order they were in the engine.



Here's one of the heads after it was reworked. The guys at the shop said they had to flatten the heads, replace the valve seals and knurl the guides. One of the valves was bad, and when I was putting the rockers and push rods back, I saw that one of the rocker arms and push rods were goofed up, so I had to go to the junk yard and get replacements.

This was probably all back together about the middle of June. In fact it was right before we went on vacation that I had it all back together and started it up. It ran great, so I rolled it back out of the garage and started adding water.

I added water, and added water, and added water. I knew something was wrong. I pulled the dip stick out, and no oil showed on the dipstick, only water. I just about cried. I figured the block was cracked and the thing was a total loss. So, I drained the water out, and went on vacation.
When I got back from vacation, I told Dad about it, and he said that maybe I could seal the block up with epoxy or something. He said to pull the oil pan off and see where the water was coming from. So with that, I had a new perspective and dove back into it.
I pulled the oil pan off, and started putting water in the radiator. It was immediately apparent what was up. Water poured out from behind the timing chain. I quickly dawned on me that the leak was from the water pump, not the block. The leak was huge, but I was relieved that the problem wasn't in the block. This baby could be saved!