Originally Posted by williamwestmo

The block came out of a 67 Bonneville...

Originally Posted by sofakingdom

This is a Pontiac V8. One of the older ones.



This is a small block Chevy V8.

These are 2 completely different things. A Pontiac motor, ANY of them, is NOT a small block Chevy. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER interchanges between these engines. Not blocks, heads, pistons, rods, cam, valves, external tin, accessory drives, ... NOTHING. As said, a few bolts, maybe the spark plugs, and I forgot originally, the alternator (with minor tweeeeks), certain internal distributor parts (points rotor & cap), and lifters in certain cases, is all that is common between them. Putting a Pontiac motor into one of these cars is nearly as "foreign" a transplant as a Frod or Xler motor would be. Since these cars were never offered with a Pontiac motor, there are no factory parts to fit one in. There are, or have been, $$$aftermarket$$$ things to enable it, butt I have no idea whether any such still exist. They were always VERY expensive and of limited variety even back when available.

Back in the day, every GM division had its own engines. Chevy, Buick, Olds, Pontiac, & Cadillac. Don't ask me why, I wasn't the one that made the call to let that stuuupidity go on for as long as it did: their US competitors with multiple badges on otherwise identical chassis had slain that dragon DECADES earlier. None of the GM divisions' engines was really inherently "superior" to the others; they all had pretty bright engineers, butt they were all different. Each produced essentially identical torque & HP for any given displacement and year model (emissions configurations etc.). Each of their designs had strengths and weaknesses: size, weight, distributor placement, bore/stroke/rod length ratios, design details like the oil pump and exhaust routing, and so on. Butt ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER interchanged among them. It was deeply weird. It was as though each division defended its engine identity "turf" literally to the death. The beginning of the end of that happened in the mid-late 70s one year, 77 or 78 if memory serves, when they ran out of Cadillac motors due to a strike or a factory fire or something, and put Olds ones in a bunch of em; which then they didn't have enough Olds motors left for all the Olds cars, so they put Buick and Chevy motors in lots of those. Some Pontiac cars got Chevy engines. My wife screwed up and bought a 78 or so Buick POS around 1990 that had an Olds motor in it. Buyers were outraged. It was a scandal. They got hauled into court over it and it cost them DEARLY.

Lots of late 2nd gen Trans Ams had Olds motors: if you ever see one with a "T/A 6.6" badge on their hood, that's an Olds 403. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from a Pontiac motor, which the Trans Ams that came with Pontiac cast-iron, it was either a 455 or a 301. Regular Firebirds around that time mostly came with some kind of 6-cyl or a Pontiac 350.

In any case, the 400 had Pontiac's original "tall deck" height. That engine's last year was somewhere around 70 butt I don't recall exactly anymore, butt regardless, it has NO provision for modern fuel (moderate compression, hardened valve seats). Their 370, 389, 326, 400, 428, & 455 were this height. The 301 & 350 were "short deck". All had the same bore spacing and thus were the same "block size". That is, there's no such thing as a "small block" or "big block" Pontiac V8; only tall deck & short deck. They're all kinda "big". On top of that, there's LOTS of year-to-year differences among Pontiac blocks and other parts; lots of stuff doesn't interchange across the whole range. Timing covers, water pumps, intake manifolds, and so on, varied widely. Not at all like SBC. Arguably, internal interchangeability is one of the Chevy small block's greatest strengths; the other divisions weren't even close in that regard.

Chevrolet had their bell housing bolt pattern, which matched their 6-cyl engines originally; Buick Olds & Pontiac had a different one, commonly referred to as the "BOP" pattern. The 700 transmission is Chevy pattern only since by the time it was introduced the GM brass had finally wrangled the asinine divisional engine efff-up to submission and standardized on the Chevy V8, therefore an engine w/ the BOP pattern won't bolt up to it. There are adapters but they come with their own issues. The 6-cyl 700 has yet another bolt pattern that was specific to 60° V6, and thus won't fit a BOP motor flange, either.

The exhaust systems are different, at least as far back as the cat. Chevy exhaust won't bolt to Pontiac heads. Not even close. Engine mounts are different; there are no factory mounts for a Pontiac motor in a 3rd gen F body, although again, there are/were aftermarket solutions, and it's not a horribly difficult thing to fab up either. Butt it's extra work and/or money and/or opportunity for error. Accessories (PS, WP, AC, alt, etc.) are all different; whether any bracket system you can readily find off of a junk motor would fit into one of these cars, I have no clue. Again, as I've said over and over, there are / were / have been / might still be aftermarket solutions, butt they won't be cheeeep or eeeeezy to find, and certainly not "turnkey" as in one-stop shop, packaged, fully tested and ready to install, specific to putting a 67 Pontiac motor into a 86 Camaro, guaranteed to fit, "buy this kit and it's all you need". No.

I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons they standardized on the Chevy V8 was its compact size. I'm not sure whether the Pontiac engine will fit without "adjusting" the firewall, or whether things like AC (the evap housing), power steering (the pump vs the steering gear), and power brakes (the booster) will interfere.

At EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, this will fight back. People who are long-term familiar with Pontiac motors, have networks of friends and parts sources to draw on, their own garage stash of old stuff, and experience working with them, have trouble enough accomplishing this swap. For someone without all that, I'd put the odds of successfully completing this swap, for ANY amount of money, at less than 10%; and ABSOLUTELY ZERO for doing it on a $3k budget even if the motor is "free". I doubt you'd need more than ONE hand of fingers to count the # of people on this forum - of all candidates, the most likely - that have completed this swap to the point of COMPLETION: running, driving, full exhaust, AC, PS, PB, and so forth. Given that the engine proper is the SMALLEST cost and difficulty in any of this, it would make NO SENSE AT ALL to stick a 400 - a 60s motor that requires 98 octane fuel, doesn't have hardened valve seats for unleaded fuel, uses a rope rear main seal from the Stone Age, and so on - when you can get a 455 that takes EXACTLY as much $$$ and effort to install butt is just better to begin with.



Something close to "assume"; and we all know what that word results in when broken down into its 3 components.

Sorry to burst your bubble, butt ... It Is What It Is.

Originally Posted by sofakingdom

Holy Schmoly, I remembered!!! I actually found both of my brain cells and rubbed them together, and to my surprise, THEY FIRED!!!! Might be the last time of my life at the rate things are going.

It was the "Parisienne".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac_Parisienne

Originally Posted by sofakingdom

Ummmm... no. The first ones that came to light were Olds with Chevy motors in them, closely followed by or contemporaneous with the Cadillacs with Olds in them. The same Olds and Caddy motors passed emissions just fine in both CA and 49-state configurations, both at the time and for YEARS afterwards. My memory was in error as to the cause of the swappage however, I'll admit to that.

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/03/15/a...sinful-to.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebadg...sional_engines

The one that sparked the lawsuit was from Chicago. A 77 Olds with a Chevy 350 in it.



Ummmm... no. They were nationwide. Where I was living at the time (SE US) they outnumbered the 455s. My brother-in-law had one.

You're right about the Canada Pontiacs that had Chevy motors. No idea what was going on there: this was before emissions were enough of a thing to kill off Pontiac engines. There were domestic ones as well. Give me awhile and I'll try to think of the name of the particular model that came that way, exclusively as far as I can recall.

All of this of course was in chassis other than 3rd gen F body. Most of those were engineered to accommodate any of the divisions' engines, and vice-versa. SO for example the Caprice/Impala, Chevelle, Nova, and F body up through 2nd gen, were all sold with different badges by the different divisions, with their own engines (or not...) in them. The 3rd gen was not designed that way to that extent: there are rumors that Pontiac was initially going to put their motors into Firebirds but was overruled; whether that's actually true I have no idea. But even the SBC had to be altered to fit: the exhaust manifolds are different from the other chassis at that time, the accessory drives are different (PS pump had to be moved to clear the front-steer gearbox), and so on.

Originally Posted by dmccain

Worse dog of an engine i ever owned was a canadian built one year only 267 in i believe an 81 or maybe 83 Grand Prix. Sounded great with true duals but it felt like a 4cyl and not the turbo 4cyl either lol

Originally Posted by Fast355

My buddy had an ElCamino with that slug. First thing he did was put a Weiand 177 on it. That woke it up a bit. Then a couple of years later, the car got a nice 355 with Dart heads and the supercharger got a new upper pulley. 267 was not a half bad engine with 12-14 psi of boost on top. Could have had worse engines though, 260 Olds or 265 Pontiac or the horrible odd-fire V6s. I drove a customers Fox body Mustang once that had a ~255 V8 in it, what a lazy dog.