1968 Olds Cutlass 442

1968 Olds Cutlas

I bought this car about mid 1968 off of a used car lot here in Lynchburg, Va. It was a W-30 car with the optional UHV capacitive discharge ignition that also came on the L88 Corvettes. This was a 400 CID engine with a single Rochester Quadrajet carb. Along the way it found a set of Hooker headers and electric fuel pump. The rear was an Olds 10 bolt with factory 4:30 positraction setup. This car ran some 13.0s @ 106 in the quarter mile on a 7 inch tire.

It’s funny, a friend had a 327 350HP 65 Chevelle about that same time and it was notorious for fouling plugs. He had a coffee can that he put those plugs in and every so often I’d go pull a set out and put them in that Olds. That ignition didn’t care if they were fouled or not as I never had a problem running them. They say that one mans junk is another mans treasure! That was the case here as I never had to buy plugs!

That Olds engine had a pretty weak bottom end and a really weak oiling system. I blew that thing up a couple of times before I put a dropped sump pan on it and that seemed to fix the problem. I also blew one up via a dropped valve, which wasn’t pretty!

Anyway, tight money times dictated that the Olds had to go so I traded it in on a Toyota pickup truck in 1971. Don’t know where the car ended up after that.

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