VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION General Discussions Curious If Manual Posted

Someone posted a PDF copy of a 49 Chevy shop manual. I wonder if there's a library of such literature and if my 41 Special Deluxe might be available. Does someone know?

Yes there is...
and yes there is a manual for your car.

You will find it here:
https://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/index.htm

I like your nick. Just wondering about something and maybe you can help.

I bought a 41 Chevy Special Deluxe that is in excellent condition. The elderly man who owned it is quite a car collector but not a Chevy fan. He knows everything there is to know about flat head fords and model As. Anyway, in his collection of Chevy stuff, along with the car I could buy two 216s and one 235 CI engine from him. He told me the engines came from people who were upgrading their Chevys to V8 engines. This person is a multi, multi-millionaire and has no motive to tell whoppers plus he is a very good friend of my best friend and has been for many years. He's asking $100 each for the 216s and $200 for the 235. Is there much of a market for these engines and is this a good buy? I'm thinking it is, but it's not easy to move these things and finding a place to store them might be a problem. On the other hand, I would really be sorry if I found these are very valuable and I missed the good deal.

My 41 from him has a 235 engine in it and I wondered if it would bother the collector value with that engine or would it be wise to put one of the 216s in it. Of course, I will check these engines out as thoroughly as I can, but obviously not running there's never a guarantee that they are solid. What do you think?

Well...

I'm far from an expert on values, especially what they might be where you are.
That said, being a mechanic myself, I have no fear of the 216's.
And I for one put a value on a car having the engine it's supposed to have.

If it were me, and if the 216's are 1940 or later production (identifiable by the oil distributor valve), I'd jump on those for $100 each as possibilities for the future of your '41.
But that's just my opinion. 🙂
Hopefully others nearer to you will offer their opinions as well.

Gees, I went through the manuals available for the 41 and am amazed at how complicated some of the procedures are for adjusting as in the vacuum shift mechanism. It all makes sense only if you know the nomenclature of the parts and since I don't know that, I'm lost. Maybe with the parts in hand, it would make sense. Today, if something doesn't work they just replace it regardless of cost.

Thanks for pointing me to the manuals. They're invaluable.

That's what I thought. One of the forum members was interested when I told him but living in Washington state, the shipping costs are prohibitive. I may check with the Nashville club and see if they have an opinion. For $400 for all three, it seems they would be worth having. Thanks so much for your expertise.

As an afterthought, it might be well to have the better of the two 216s overhauled by an expert and prep it for install in my 41. Someone said the upgrade to the 235 was a good idea and especially considering the Babbit bearing issues.

Glad to help. 👍

I really have no fear of the babbited 216's if properly set up and high quality light oils are used.
In fact I think 216's actually had at least one advantage over the 235.

The only caveat to that is when the crankshaft has been ground undersize and the babbit in the rods is thicker as a consequence.
Even then, installing bearing shells in the rods will get around the issue.

I would never even consider swapping the 216 out of my '46. 🙂
It came in the truck, and it's going to stay that way.

PS
The truck gets driven regularly at 50 mph and still has the original 4.57 rear end in it.

Amazon and eBay both have paper reprints of the shop manual for under $30. I took allot of notes in mine as I have done various repairs. When we re-wired the car all of the colors for the wires were added to the back page. At this point we are considering it part of our 41 since it has so many details unite to the car noted in it. If you use a PDF manual I would reconned printing the pages you are working on and taking notes and placing them in a binder.

Also I would recommend getting a book that cross references the parts for the GM cars of that year. We had to do body work on ours and the Fisher Body manual gave some good information on that.

I would never have changed it for anything else unless it was destroyed somehow. Some have said the 235 holds some fairly significant advantages over earlier years. I had a 54 Chevy Belair in high school and can say with all certainty that it was thrashed beyond whatever you can imagine. I don't know how many transmissions I went through. I traded it on my 55 with the 265 V8 and thought I was invincible...lol. I did a lot of research after my original post and found that what you say is true to many others. The babbited bearing engines were very dependable and some were driven to over 100,000 miles with reasonable maintenance. Thanks for your input.




Thanks for the information and advice. The maintenance and repair manuals were always a constant source of info when I was working on my older cars. Kinda got out of that habit when they started computerizing everything in the newer cars. I was told that my 2002 Corvette had as many as 50 different computers doing all sorts of things. I haven't HAD to work on my newer cars for a long long time...so no books.

I can certainly see where notes would be helpful since some things are very hard to find in printed form. These days if you Youtube your repair project you can usually find something on everything regardless of year of manufacture.

Thanks for your input.

If you are working on the 41 and use YouTube search for a series on the rebuild of a 1948 Chevrolet done by 'The Jayhawker'. It is vary well detailed and most of the items for the 48 apply to the 41. Sometimes watching it doe and reading about it helped me greatly.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheJayhawker/playlists

. The best way to identify an engine is by casting number. (Not Stamped serial number). .
Look at web page <http://home.znet.com/c1937/Cast.htm> . for information. . .
. Lou .