Marty brought home some “yellow soap”, a hard-core industrial grease-eating soap that works wonders for cleaning engine compartments. After a good soak in this stuff, Marty pressure-washed the entire engine compartment getting things pretty darn clean.

Engine compartment after being pressure-washed

After that I took off everything from the top half of the motor, since all the wear items will be replaced and the rest need to be repainted. Removing the valve covers reveals a pretty clean valve-train, no sludge to be found!  The grayish color found on the rocker arms is lead deposits from decades of good old fashioned leaded gasoline.

401 Buick Nailhead, partial tear-down for cleaning and detailing

During parts removal, a few cheezy farm-style repairs were found. A piece of steel wire was holding the back of the generator down since the rear mounting ear of the generator bracket was broken off. Since this bracket is made of aluminum, Marty said he can easily repair it. There is an ugly brazed repair done to the cooling/water manifold, so this unit will need replaced. There was regular vacuum hose used as a gas line from the fuel filter to the carb… yikes! The water pump has one bolt broken off in it, but were going to leave this one alone for now. If it aint leaking, don’t fix it!

On the upper left front area of the engine block is the serial number of the engine block, which in 1960, Buick matched to the cars VIN number. Since the number on this block matched the VIN, that makes this is a “numbers matching” car.

Engine serial number