Hey everybody welcome back to legit street cars and welcome to another camaro video. If you missed the last one, i bought this a 1988 iraq z that been abandoned for about 25 years in a storage unit and then outside in some guy's driveway for an additional two years. So this car looked pretty good in pictures, but when i got there i found some rust on the body. Then i bought the car for 1500 bucks brought it back to legit three quarters and found even more rust underneath.

So it's definitely a project, a 10-footer for sure, but i want to see if i can get this tuned port 305 engine running, because it's one of gm's finest engines i'm just kidding. It's definitely not, and there's probably like a 50 chance that this engine was blown up and that's why they put it away 27 years ago. I don't know, but we're gon na find out in this video and eventually i would like to get this car to drive. The brakes are locked up and it's probably got a million other issues, but i want to cruise my iroc, i'm an italian living in chicago, it's sort of a rite of passage to at some point own in iraq.

At least you know if you're from my generation it is, must have tool. Shocks are gone. Oh, this hood is heavy all right, hello, toonport. How are you? Okay, that's not safe, got ta get the old louisville slugger out there.

We go all right. I feel comfortable. Now, all right, so we're gon na get this party started by attempting to turn this engine by hand, and i have a sneaky little suspicion that this engine's locked that wouldn't be abnormal after 27 years for the rings to be frozen to the cylinder walls. A little bit so we have a breaker bar on there, but we are going to be very gentle with this because you can damage the rings.

You definitely don't want to kick it over with the starter either or you can break the rings off. So i just want to get a little feel of it here we go and it's hard to tell, but i am putting a little force into it. It's not turning at all yeah. Okay, i'm gon na go ahead and say this engine is locked at the moment, but we can fix that i've done it before and we're gon na.

Hopefully, do it again - and you guys are gon na - see some really cool footage throughout this video, like the pov view that you're looking at right now and it's all being filmed on this, the insta 360 go to camera. This is a very lightweight and portable camera and it's clipped to my hat right now, so i have my hands free to work on the car. It makes life very easy, especially when filming car videos, if you guys, are curious on the engine oil. Let me show it to you, because i did check this when i bought the car if it was completely out of oil we'd be in bad shape, but it's not.

It is quite overfilled, though, and to be honest with you, that can be a big issue too. Maybe it lost all of its oil and someone who didn't know what they were doing just dumped a bunch in, but at least it's not dry, now believe it or not. You can resurrect an engine that is fully locked up. I did this on my 1985 firebird from a couple years ago.

The banshee concept replica that i had on the channel. That thing was locked up. We pulled the plugs uh. We sprayed a bunch of stuff, put some oil and transferred everything in the cylinders.

Let it soak overnight and that thing ran like a champ. So that's pretty much the game plan here, uh, but first we're gon na pull a plug and get a borescope in there and see what we're dealing with all right that was really loose. Actually, the spark plug barely torqued in there. I guess it's better than getting stuck in the head, but kind of weird all right.

Here's our first plug we got an ac delco, looks really nice a little too nice. I don't know about you guys, but it doesn't look like this spark plug has ever fired. I mean it is brand spanking new. I got to say: i've worked on mercedes benz that have easier spark plug access than this car, but we can get to this guy right here from the bottom, the one in front of it.

You can barely even see the tip right there and this side. The passenger side is even worse, so there's a plug. There's lots of spider webs and more rust. It's a wonderful place to be all right.

I got all eight spark plugs out. This actually only took me a half hour, wasn't too bad, especially getting most of them from the bottom, but they all look fairly new, at least on one side, so the driver side, and then one of them on the passenger side, look to be brand new. You can see the white porcelain there and then these don't have the white porcelain and they kind of just generally look a little bit older. I don't know, i don't know what's going on, but either way none of them are smashed.

None of them are in terrible condition like i said these look new so anyway, with that, let's borescope all right here we go first cylinder. We got some valves that are slightly open. Piston is all the way up here there we are okay, let's move on to another one where we can see a little bit more of the cylinder. It's a nice little chunk of carbon there on that valve.

Let's clean that up once it runs. What do we got laid it up in here light it up there we go: okay, not bad, not bad, at all, little cross hatchings on the cylinder you can see where the rings were resting for a while. So i don't know if someone else tried turning this engine over at some point, but this really isn't that bad, i'm sure the pistons are a little dirty, but that's normal and overall this is great. So far, so good, okay, there we go hello valves and hello.

Piston, nice, nice, nice, i like it, we don't have anything with a hole in it. So it's a good sign. Quaker state, quaker state oil filter come on now. That's not a good sign.

Okay, here's another one! I'm just i'm just kidding! I don't know if quaker state's good or bad never done any testing on that. I'm sure it's fine um. What do we got here? We got yellow stuff on my cylinders. What is this yellow stuff on my cylinders that looks like it was straight up painted? It is very yellow, very yellow.

Indeed i was going to say is that rust? Unless there's something going on with my camera here but wow i mean it's got to just be some light, some light rust it's coming up as school bus yellow on the camera. That's definitely something i don't want to see, but let's uh, let's check out one more before we start fogging these. Here we are on the passenger side, more yellow paint, which is actually probably just rust. These are iron blocks and they can definitely rust, and luckily we had the spark plugs installed.

So it doesn't look like water was sitting in here or anything like that, but um yeah. At this point, we are going to want to put a bunch of oil in here and see if we can break these rings loose. One thing you also want to check before you think your engine is locked is that you don't have a pulley, that's locked up. Now, normally we would use a half inch ratchet and put it right here and turn this tensioner to loosen up the belt, but it was broken and then i broke the rest of it.

So go figure so we'll take some tension off of the belt and then we'll go around just make sure everything spins, so power steering alternator water pump good there. You know what i'm here, i'm just gon na go ahead and slide this belt off completely there. We go. This belt is like stuck to everything, but anyway we have an air pump here.

Now, let's go ahead and just remove this belt. It is literally just stuck it's all the pulleys just completely get this out of the loop watch. This pieces of it are coming off right on the alternator. Pulley great definitely needs a new belt.

If we get this thing running, i could act like a locked up engine in itself. The fact that the belt is stuck on all the pulleys. That would be great. Okay, spinning alternator power steering water pump, idler ac.

This has an air pump, doesn't sound the best everything spins all right cool. I don't think this thing has any coolant: okay with the belt out of the way, and it's being real gentle here, nothing's. Turning yet that's. Okay kind of figured that yeah, if you see a belt like this, you know it's been stuck on the engine for quite some time, and this is also a sign that the engine probably hasn't run for a while all right.

So here's our plan of attack to try and free up these piston rings we're gon na use some penetrating oil. This is pretty good stuff, i'll leave a link down below and this little tube. So it's difficult to spray, penetrating oil or anything into the cylinders, especially on this engine, with just this little straw, it's just hard to reach all of the spark plug holes, so we are simply going to feed this tube right into the holes. Just like this all right, so what we're going to do here is spray the penetrating oil through this tube and use my glove kind of to block it up like that something's going to come out.

That's okay, but we're going to fill this tube and then we're just going to shoot a little bit of air in there. You know i'll, probably repeat this, probably three or four times on each cylinder and right now we're really fogging out the cylinder. Next up. We are going to use a little bit of transmission fluid and any trans fluid will work.

That's all i got the mercedes stuff right now and i'm putting that in my 100 year old little oil can found this bad boy in my backyard, when i dug it up to do sod like 12 years ago, pretty cool - i don't really know if it's 100 Years old, but the stickers they used back then, are amazing because this thing was under dirt for a long time. It's a pistol oiler do not use with water all right. Well, it sat out in the rain for years, so i don't know what they're talking about it still works fine anyway, let me show you what i'm doing with this guy. As you can imagine the exact same thing, i did with the penetrating oil so we're going to use our little pistol oiler to put a bunch of trans fluid in this line, and we could just let it kind of gravity feed in there.

But we'll help it out a little there. We go all right so now this cylinder has some penetrating oil and some transmission fluid and some engine oil. This was already filled about a quarter of the way with just engine oil, so we got a little concoction going on here. I've done this a few other times in other engines and so far knock on metal.

It's always worked. So let me show you how i'm going to get to the other cylinders, because that's like the easiest one to do all right. So i have one of these hoses in one of the more difficult to reach spark plug holes, and this is why the shop air is going to help, but this will actually get all the way up. There see that all the way up the tube we're going to lose a little then we block it off and get a little air in there and we're fogging it out.

This is by far the easiest way to do this. It's very difficult to get a little straw up there, so i did that a few more times now we have our piston oiler. There we go there. We go all right so that cylinder has plenty of penetrating oil transmission, fluid and engine oil, so we're gon na.

Do all eight and let this sit overnight here. Let me just show you guys how difficult it would be to get a straw in there. It's very tight quarters, but it's no problem for the go to so we're just going to use the charging case here and we're going to go right in here. So, with the go 2 going in, we can see there is one of the spark plug holes and it's probably one of the easier ones to get to, and then right in this area is the other one.

So very tight quarters. You really can't even see the rear spark plug holes and that's why we need the tube to feed right in there. So we can get our penetrating oil in all right. So we have some time while everything's soaking into the cylinders and hopefully freeing up the piston rings.

So let's get some f body motivation: let's go for a drive in the turbo ta for good luck, snap! It in we're ready to go all right. Let's go for a little blast. Oh i love this car. I love it so right now the insta360 go to is mounted to the windshield of the car and you can mount these little cameras everywhere.

They are phenomenal for shooting car videos where the insta is is getting that footage footage. I wouldn't be able to get normally uh with a larger camera, and i got ta say the audio on this thing is amazing. We even strapped it to the bumper of the trans am, and then we strapped it to my electric scooter for the burnout footage. Here's a little bit more of that and check this out.

I can just simply turn the camera, and now you guys can see exactly where i'm going all right. We got ta do a little bit of shenanigans down to third gear. We got traction control off foot on the brake line, lock activated. Oh, this car is just too much fun.

It's just too easy to play around. I love it and with the go to on my hat, this is so so nice for making these videos, so i can just have both of my hands on the wheel. Everything is nice and safe. We can see the cluster as well, and it's like you guys, are in the car with me.

That's awesome. The video quality is amazing. It films in 1440p and you can control this little guy right from your cell phone. You can edit right in the app or you can edit, with their insta 360 studio, which is totally free.

This powerful camera also has video stabilization. You can do time lapses, it does slow motion. You can take a normal picture and just look at how small lightweight and portable this camera is. It has a magnet on the back, so you can stick it anywhere and i love this charging case, so you can charge on the go.

It's kind of like an airpod case and it turns into a tripod as well. So you get a bunch of cool mounting options, including a pendant. So you can wear this around your neck and you have a chest mounted camera and they sell a bunch of other mounting accessories as well. To handle any kind of filming situation you could imagine best.

Part is, if you guys, click on my link down below you're gon na get five percent off. This is a limited quantity offer and everybody's gon na get a free, go-to lens guard. So with that, let's go try and get my camaro fired up and hope that the engine isn't totally grenaded all right. It's the next day we've had my little magical potion brewing inside of these cylinders overnight.

Let's see what happens here. Oh, oh still, not going all right, oh wait! A minute! Oh it's going! This must have been a weird spot in the stroke there. It's going all right, cool! Look at this! Oh man like butter, we broke free another one guys. I should patent that little potion.

It worked it worked. Let me see here, oh yeah. It feels pretty good all right check it out like butter, even with the little ratchet it turns so nice. This is beautiful.

All right, so we've unlocked the power of this tune. Port 305. It sounds pretty good. Just spinning around that doesn't mean we're out of the woods just yet, though, we need to throw some spark plugs in here uh and we need to check for fuel, although i have not heard a fuel pump at all every time.

I turn the ignition i'm listening and it's probably dead. These things failed all the time back in the day and when they sit with old fuel for like 27 years, they don't like that so uh anyway, we'll figure out a fuel system. Temporary, maybe we'll see, but first let me turn this over a few more times. We want to get all the oil and trans fluid everything out of there um and then we're going to throw the spark plugs in see what happens all right.

Let's drop this oil filter see what we can see. Oh gosh, all right, nice got a little chocolate. Milkshake there sweet, oh wow, it's just like condensation filled with water. Oh, this is horrible.

It's like a loogie nasty. What do we got? What do we got? Nastiness? Oh, this is bad yeah. This engine was put away with some definite issues here, so yeah, i'm glad i didn't really put any real money into this car, yet we had to get a key for it. That's about it.

This thing is just filled with slimy goo. Oh there's something that kind of looks like oil right at the tail end great. What i wanted to do was just fire the engine up for a few seconds and if it sounded okay, my next step was definitely changing the oil but yeah. This thing was put away with a bad motor for sure all right, we'll give this thing a fighting chance with some new oil just went and got the cheapest stuff.

I could find all right there, we go all right, spark, plugs and wires are in, and you can see all the oil and trans fluid that leaked out of the cylinders all over the place. We put quite a bit in there, but that's what it takes. And here it is on my floor all right. So here is the schrader valve and i've turned the key to position two a few times to prime, and let's see we got here, nothing, absolutely nothing yeah, not hearing anything from the fuel pump back there.

So it's pretty normal, there's a little fuel on the schrader valve yeah and it smells very old so on the third gen camaro, this is the fuel pump relay and these wires are not looking too hot. Look at that some of the insulation has just peeled back. Doesn't look like any of them are touching each other, but yeah that needs to be fixed and over here by the louisville slugger bat is the fuse for the fuel pump. Let's take a look at this guy.

That's a 20 ampere. What do we got? Yeah looks good. Okay before we start doing fuel pump diagnosis. We are going to cheat because i just want to hear this engine run before we really do anything you just want to hear it run, make sure it's not knocking or clanking all over the place like crazy.

So let's take off this cool ram air intake. So this is the factory intake for one of these third gen two and four cars. Some of them did go out to the side. I think not sure.

Third gen guys, let me know, but this one's pretty sweet. You got two little filters right here that are pretty nasty and uh yeah. Okay, this thing doesn't really look like it was maintained. Does it so it gets air there's baffles in here and stuff, but it gets air from uh in front of the radiator.

So that's pretty cold air, so pretty nice little factory system - and here we have a mass airflow sensor, so we're gon na spray, something flammable through the throttle body and see if this 305 will start all right. Guys actually did not need to take this entire air intake system off. I just snuck the straw in right there. So it's after the mass airflow sensor.

You don't want to spray any of this on the mass airflow sensor, so this will be perfect um. So at this point i got peter peter. What do you think of this thing? I love it. I mean it's the conditions, a little iffy, but i've always loved it.

It's sweet, isn't it yeah? I think the interior's, not that bad other than the steering wheel but like the seats, will clean up. I don't know you can at least like dream in here that it's in really good condition. The dream of the 80s is alive, all right, dude uh. Are you ready to fire this up all right? Let me get my uh starting fluid fuel system finger on the trigger here: um, okay, yeah, why don't you crank and then just open the throttle a little bit while i spray? That was not good, oh no! That did not sound good uh.

We have cranked this engine over a bunch of times to try and get the oil circulating, because obviously it had been dry after 27 years, but that sounds very clanky. It could be a rod, knock, i don't know, but yeah we got some. We got some smoke all right. Let's just do it again.

All right we got my tune. Port injection can ready to go. Go ahead. Let's just keep trying all right yeah.

Let's do it again all right, let's give it a break, we'll give it a break. Let's get a jumper on this battery too. Okay, now we're running into some pretty serious problems. Here we got a jumper pack on it and it seems to be locked uh peter.

Do it again, okay, all right, turning very, very slow, now great all right, give it another one peter, oh, okay, think on your feet. Peter diagnosis, uh, i'm gon na say it might be a spun bearing that is holding the motor up yeah. That's probably what we were dealing with before yeah cause, the cylinders looked fine yeah. The rings were probably good the whole time it was just the yeah.

The crankshaft was frozen and this thing was overfilled like two quarts with oil, so it's very possible that they ran it low on oil or on no oil, it locked up, and then they put oil in it um in an attempt to maybe save the engine or Something like that, it's it's pretty smoky in here all right, i'm gon na poke around a little bit, but we might have a locked, a real locked engine that we can't fix uh without rebuilding, so um yeah. Okay, i think we're having some battery connectivity issues uh. The jumper's off right now i just want to see how strong this battery is, go ahead and uh crank it over right now. Okay, all right, i think we're back in action.

Um all right! I'm gon na do a little bit more starting fluid and if you want to just crack that throttle all right whenever you're ready huh those are bad sounds. That's like flex plate like grinding bad, sounds okay. Let's do it again. Whenever you're ready man, i mean it runs, but every once in a while it kind of locks up like we're, hitting it right at a sweet spot.

This isn't good anyway, let's give it another one though man, when it does fire, though it sounds horrible, it sounds rad knocky you want to just go wide open throttle there. We go. Okay, all right, it ran. It definitely ran right there.

It didn't sound good, but it did technically run the 88 iraq z is alive, but in a very bad way. I think this thing's got a rodnock. It sounds absolutely horrible uh, so we got it to go peter's at wide, open, throttle kind of clearing it out and i'm i'm hitting it with the starting fluid um, but uh yeah and then every once in a while. It kind of just sort of locks up a little bit, it's like if we don't hit it at the right spot.

It's you know it takes a while for it to go whoa and then it starts to go. So i think, there's a possibility that they ran this thing like out of oil very low on oil and they spun a rod bearing or something, and then they tried putting a bunch of oil back in it to fix it and that's probably when they realized. They smoked the engine and it was a good idea to spend you know - probably 150 a month on a storage unit for 27 years, because that makes perfect sense totally could have bought like an ls1 car or something like that brand new with that money, but uh Anyway, i think this engine is bad, so there's really only one other thing we can do keep on going starting. We got a whole can of starting fluid people.

So let's do it. Oh yeah, i'm at full fuel throttle here all right, all right, all right. Poor little guy, this thing is definitely clanking away. Like none other, oh man, i really picked a winner with this one guys, at least with the 85 banshee concept.

Firebird it was locked, but when it came back to life it ran perfect. It was so quiet so smooth and then with the uh, the last basket case: f body, the lt1 uh that didn't have a rod knock. That was a really good engine. It just had like leaking fuel, injectors and and mice and stuff like that, but uh.

This guy is bad man rust bad engine. The whole fuel system doesn't work, probably needs a pump, which would be like the least of anyone's worries at this point, but yeah this. This isn't good and my shop is smoky very, very smoky, all right guys and there you have it my 1988 camaro, i rock z. It looks phenomenal on one side from about 10 feet away and if you don't ask any questions, but as we've seen here, it does run, it does run, but the engine uh it doesn't sound, very healthy.

So i think we can deduce from this video. That's in 1995, i don't think i've ever used. The word deduced before in my life um in 95, they grenaded the engine, put it away in storage and forgot about it and paid a lot of money for storage fees. I mean this must have cost them.

Like 20 000 or something like that, just to store it um, so i don't know. Hopefully dave got a bunch of other cool stuff out of that unit. If you guys want to see that video and see some of the cool stuff that he got out along with the camaro i'll link that video down below at this point, i kind of have to figure out what i'm going to do with this uh. I don't think it's worth like any kind of major restoration.

It's a 305 hard top with a lot of rust and a bad engine, but uh i don't know i got ta. Think about it. Let me know in the comments section: what would you guys do with this car uh? Maybe it's a good part out candidate. I don't know, but uh with that check out the link down below for the insta 360 go to this camera is amazing.

You guys are going to love it and uh. If you haven't already give this video a big thumbs up share the video with all your f body. Friends subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, but most importantly, don't buy cars like this and have an awesome day i'll catch. All of you in the next video you.