My wife came home one day to find this 1970 Cadillac Deville parked in the driveway. “Whose car is that?” she asked in a highly-agitated tone. “Mine,” I responded. She didn’t believe me until I showed her the title.
Apparently the large fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror pushed her over the edge. There hadn’t been that much marital controversy since I installed the functional porcelain sculpture in the boiler room. I would like to point out that the wall-mounted Purell dispenser made it the only COVID-ready part of the house LOL.
So why did I subject myself to this wrath? In a word, regulations. There are a bunch of steps to register a non-OEM car in Massachusetts. One of the most challenging is obtaining an emissions exemption. There are three ways to accomplish this:
Prove that the car has a pre-emissions motor (i.e., pre 1974). You need a receipt with the VIN on it for the State Trooper salvage inspection. After several other steps you schedule a meeting at a MAC center where they put the car on a lift and inspect all of the casting numbers to certify the age of the engine. You then need to provide a table which illustrates that all of the final gear ratios are the same or higher than the car from which the engine was sourced. My cobra has a 1966 427 side oiler so this approach worked for that car, but it’s not applicable to the SL-C.
Use an approved drivetrain which includes engine, transmission and ECU. I think they also require the same differential and wheels. In any event, I couldn’t take this approach because there are no combinations which include a transaxle.
Purchase a pre-emissions car with a displacement larger than than the new engine and insure, register and inspect it for at least one year in MA. Then take it to a salvage yard so that “The chassis, frame, body tub, and engine will be completely destroyed in a manner that prevents their reuse as motor vehicle parts” and complete the paperwork which states that there are “significant penalties, including, but not limited to, possible fines and imprisonment, for submitting false, inaccurate, incomplete or misleading information.”
I had found a less-expense car, but when I met with the person selling it I learned that he was selling on behalf of his recently deceased grandfather who had bought it new, garaged it and personally serviced it for over fifty years. It seemed like bad karma to crush it so I kept looking.
Since my engine is custom built I didn’t want to get into an argument that the displacement might be slightly larger than 427 CID. The Cadillac has a 472 CID so there can be no debate that it’s larger. The three guys who crushed the car were upset. They kept asking “why” would someone crush a perfectly operating car. In a word, regulations.