The Shade Tree Mechanic: Engine Repair

A lot of us are shade tree mechanics working on our vehicles and our garage. That's what we want to look at now is how here in your own shop with kind of run of the mill tools we can get a good tuneup accomplished on this vehicle. Brent is here to help me. I do a lot of my own wrench spin in but when I get in trouble, I fall back on Brent. He's helped me out a bunch of times, got a lot of expertise in this area.

First, Brent, tell us about the car we're working on today. Well, it's 1966 Buick Skylark. It was purchased locally brand new, 1966 obviously, by a doctor and his wife. It was his wife's daily driver until 1974. They then stored it winters until 1984 when they gave it to their grandson.

He had it in storage for a few years, worked on a little bit, and then in 1997, I purchased it. So it's pretty amazing, you're a third owner, I'm the third owner and I bought it from the original owner's grandson. Now that is not a real big engine that that's got in there but it's original, right? It's the original motor. One of the interesting things with this car: in 1966 there were about 4,000 convertibles produced, only 608 of them were produced with this V6.

It's a two 225 V6. And this car as you see it is basically stock with the exception of the power steering pump. Two years after they bought it, Mrs. Doctor got tired of the strong arm steering and so they had the power steering installed. All right.

And it didn't look like this. You've done some work on it already. Now this isn't show-ready vehicle, but I really can appreciate the work you did on the body of it, cause he brought this thing a long way from the rust bucket it was when you started. Yeah. Well, it drove in Minnesota winters for eight years.

So as you can imagine, the quarter panels were gone. So we did replace the quarter panels, rebuilt the bottom of the doors, did quite a bit of body work to it and then gave it a paint job. And this is something Brett drives this thing all the time. This is his daily use vehicle in the summertime. So we really want to keep that engine running well.

He's done a good job. He's got a lot of tune-up stuff already taken care of on this, but we're going to be able to step you through a lot of things that's going to help make doing a tune-up on your vehicle a lot easier. So a couple of preparation things: you worked hard on the body. So the drape on the quarter panel is a great idea. You don't want a belt buckle or something messing that up.

Yep, even an old blanket works good. And I know lighting, I feel like when I'm under a hood I can never have enough light. The halogen lights back here are a great way to throw a bunch of light under the hood. I found this small light at a parts store. It's got a magnet on the back, LED lights on the front, so I can stick that on a fender.

Get it just where I want it, throws a good light on me. Very, very detailed light for me. The other thing we want to do is make sure that you've got a manual for the vehicle. We're going to refer to that a bunch of times as we go through the tune-up on this. And I think with that, we're ready to get started.

And a compression test is going to be first. Now just give us a little bit of you. Why do we want to do a compression test? Well, especially if you just purchased a vehicle, you want to set a baseline. You want to do a compression test on it just to see where you're starting from.

You could have a bad cylinder and not even know it. It could run well enough that you wouldn't realize that there was something wrong. All right, well let's get set up for that and we'll see what we've got for compression on this vehicle.