Hi All,
I thought I'd drop in and introduce myself since I've been surfing around here learning stuff for a while. Looks like a good forum so far, and I'm happy to have found it.
At the beginning of June this year I bought two '97 Cadillac Cateras. I got a gold one with 67k miles and a dead engine, and a black one with 134k miles and a dead transmission. Both are very good cosmetically and both had leather interior. I planned to fix them both, keep the black one, and sell the gold one.
I rebuilt the transmission in the black one and drove it for several months and several thousand miles, then two weeks ago it slid off the road during a teenage snow driving lesson. Oops. It doesn't have much mechanical damage from this, but the whole left side of the car is wrinkled up.
I recently started working on the gold car. The previous owner said it came to him with a bad head gasket, and it also had low oil pressure, and then it had developed a cranks but won't start condition. When I got the car it would crank forever without starting and the cranking sounded a little uneven. The other day, before a real compression test, I did a "crank and listen for unevenness" check. After cranking for about two seconds and thinking to myself, "this doesn't sound uneven at all", the car started! Odd, indeed.
It has a bit of a knock and I currently believe this to be a connecting rod. It also appears that a previous owner has bypassed the oil cooler by cutting off the lines right above the oil filter and looping a piece of rubber hose between them. This leaks pretty significantly when the car is running. I have a feeling that I'm going to discover more and more the farther I dig into this motor.
That brings me to the change of plans. I believe at this point I'm going to transplant in the motor (and freshly rebuilt trans) from the black car, then sell or part out the black car.
So that's my story so far. I'll be asking some more specific questions about the engine swap, but wanted to drop in here and introduce myself first.
Doug
Author
Topic: Two Cateras and a change of plans (Read 4065 times)