This project just got a little more expensive

Updates from the last two days...this thing proves to get more interesting everyday and it's a blast. Yesterday I gutted the interior. The task I had before me was to dig the now deteriorated stuffing out from the rear bench seat, as mice had eaten away at it for 7 years. You can see what I was working with here in the pic, which includes my murder weapon for the inevitable mouse. The smell of urine and poo was overwhelming. All the seats came out and after a closer look, I will have to take them in to an upholstery shop as they will all need restuffed. It's the only way to get the mouse smell out. Turns out there was a whole family of mice living inside the back seat, five of which perished under the wrath of my screw driver, and two of which kamikazed out. I followed in pursuit but to no avail. The interior will be an easy and relatively fast project. It's in great shape already. After I rip the carpet out [which is new], I'll begin sanding down the floor and laying a nice black protective undercoating on it. This too should help cover up the mouse smell.

Jump to today. I took to the engine. The goal here was to remove the heads so I could take them into the machine shop to get hot tanked and magna fluxed to check for cracks. I will port and polish them, but a) the heads should be clean, and b) no sense in doing that until knowing first that the heads aren't cracked. Now remember this is a seized motor, so I knew things would get interesting, but little did I know what all I had in store.

First step. Drain the oil. Except instead of oil, I got bright green antifreeze, and lots of it. It nearly filled up my oil drain pan. Only after this ran out, did the oil itself start burping out. Next, I had noticed a valve on cylinder 7 that was stuck halfway up, as in it was not making contact with the rocker arm. Early on when I first noticed this, I figured this to be the source of the seize, but not only would I discover how right I was, but how bad the problem actually was.

The valve stem was snapped just inside the head at the end of the valve guide, and the valve itself was impaled/welded into the top of the badly deformed piston. The piston is sitting cock-eyed in the cylinder. Not only will this make it a beast to remove, but I'm not looking at bigger issues. There is no doubt my cylinder walls are screwed. The best option is to probably bore them out .040 over and reap the advantages of the performance upgrade. But now this means I'm also looking at a new set of pistons and valves (I was planning on replacing the valves anyways). Thus, this engine truly is a rebuild, as the only original parts left when finished will be the actual [bored out] block itself and heads. Cam, lifters, pushrods, rocker arms, valves, and springs will all be new and or performance upgrades. There's no telling what the crankshaft looks like at this point either. It could have some spun bearings for all we know and will probably need ground down on the journals. It looks like I'll probably have a $3,000 motor here, but it'll be worth its weight in gold when finished.