Andrew, known to his friends as Bucky, is a junior studying mechanical engineering at the University of Idaho. He spends summers driving tractors on the family farm and is in the process of restoring a 1975 Chevrolet K20 pickup truck he rescued from his grandfather’s barn.

Last fall, when Bucky had to return to school, he was sad to leave his project behind. So he hatched a plan. He found a relatively modern “iron block” Chevy V8 on Facebook marketplace, bought it for $600, and dragged it into his dorm room. His plan was to fully rebuild the engine, then take it home to drop into his truck as a major upgrade.

Wait! How did Bucky get an engine into his dorm room? He picked it up in the bed of his old pickup truck. Then he used his floor jack to lift the rear of the truck off the ground. He chained the engine block to an overhead tree, lowered the truck, and drove away. With the engine hanging from a tree, Bucky attached it to an engine stand so he roll it into his dorm room.

Though he had the engine block clean, with 310,000 miles it would need a full top-to-bottom rebuild. Bucky targeted about 400 horsepower. He said, “The goal is to make a reliable but fast engine to put in my pickup and daily drive while having fun.”

Of working in a dorm room, Bucky said,  “Overall there really isn’t much you can’t do in the dorm as opposed to a shop.” But his methods have been unorthodox. He set up his piston rings using a file clamped to a draw on his desk. And he pressed out his bearings using a screw jack and the bottom of his room’s shelves.

Bucky hit his first real hurdle when he tried to remove the harmonic balancer. He found it attached with such a heavy bolt, none of his hand tools would undo it. So he cheerfully rolled the engine out and across campus in search of heavier tools.

Not only was the job going well, but Bucky was posting videos of the work online. His project went absolutely viral, and he soon had 554,000 Instagram followers watching his progress. Then the University’s administration came knocking. It turns out, you aren’t allowed to rebuild an engine in your dorm room. No word on whether the University of Idaho invented this rule for Bucky, or whether they had run into the same issue before. But they told him to pack up the project.

Resourceful Bucky took his ultimatum in stride. He rolled the engine back outside, pulled the back seat and passenger seat out of his hatchback Toyota Corolla, and slid the engine inside. He boasted that his new “shop” even had heat. Then, he spent the winter finishing his V8 engine project in the back of his car.

The story has a happy ending too. The engine is running, Bucky is now home for the summer, and the engine is in his grandfather’s garage so he can put it into his truck. Something tells me that Bucky will make an excellent–and very resourceful–mechanical engineer.

Next, see Bucky’s engine run and find out everything that went into the rebuild in the video below: