Ranger's Dec09 motor rebuild thread (lol)

#221

I only got a couple hrs each night lately to get things back together. That was only enough to torque down the head, put the manifolds on and adjust the valves.

Metric Mechanic says that the 22ftlbs 90deg 90deg protocol results in about 50ftlbs. I use reusable bolts and used a 3 stage protocol to 55ftlbs. I’m using a Goetz HG, which seems to have a better reputation then V-R HG’s.

I didn’t have enough intake gaskets available so I looked around a bit and found some OEM intake gasket pieces in good shape on the spare motor. I noticed that the OEM intake gaskets are far thicker and more sturdy then the V-R intake gaskets. I carefully cleaned the gaskets and their mating surfaces. I also took a rotary wire brush to the mating surfaces of downtube and exhaust manifold, and the metal gasket that goes in there.

There’s lots of ways to get the steel oil return pipe in between the intake manifold and the block, but I’m convinced now that the easiest way is to use a small zip tie to tightly compress the spring.

I figured out that I’ve been using the wrong intake this year. I came away from the Molitor fiasco with a nice clean intake. I checked my 3 intakes the other night and found that the clean one was in my attic, not on my car. But the clean intake’s injectors are suspiciously dirty. They should have only a year on them, but they look like crap.

Either during the CMP motor swap or sometime after, I ended up installing a junkyard manifold that has a layer of carbon inside. The Molitor manifold then went into “spares” I guess. If I have time I’ll remove the mystery injectors from the clean manifold and put in the injectors that I had blueprinted last year. Then the clean manifold will go on.

There’s rain in the forecast tomorrow. That motivated me to do some more thinking about how I might try a little harder get the race car into the small front garage. The race car’s normal home is the small back garage, but the Lemons car is in there right now. My nightly 10PM to midnight efforts in the cold and rain, somewhat wary of the possibility of thugs walking into the neighborhood, have been kinda a pita.

Not to mention, that at any moment Brendan or Gasman might walk up to me and tell me I’m an idiot.

I came up with the idea this afternoon of putting my spare motor on a furniture dolly to roll it into a garage closet, and get wheel dollies for the SpecE30. I’m pleased to report that spare motor, shortblock, and tranny, and tons of parts are now stashed away. The engine hoist is dismantled and the SpecE30 is in the garage. And that means I get to finish the motor tomorrow despite the forecasted rain, and I can work all night long without having to stay aware of possible visitors. I should have come up with the idea of the dollies months ago.

#222

thugs roaming the neighbourhood? do you mean your neighbour again? :slight_smile: you make it sound like you live in the project… somehow I doubt that :slight_smile:

#223

kishg wrote:

Savannah has some pockets of war zones in the older parts of town. There are many million dollar homes 300yds from projects. Sometimes the residents of the war zones get tired of stealing from each other and walk a couple blocks to our neighborhood. A neighborhood email list is starting to make it clear that it’s happening a lot more then I’d thought it was. I have a solution but some might perceive it as severe. It’d cut way down on recidivism tho.

#224

The motor is done. Tomorrow I’ll push the car out of the garage, stage a fire extinguisher close by, run the starter a bit to charge the oiling system, put in the fuel pump relay and start her up.

And we’ll just have to see if I screwed up anything major.

I spent some hours today screwing with intakes and injectors. I decided to swap over to my clean intake and cleaned/flowed injectors.

To my surprise I found that the clean intake had a goofy gasket between throttle body and intake. It has a dia of 55mm instead of the 65mm that it should have. Maybe it’s for an “e” model or something? That intake came from Molitor, so there may never be an understanding as to what’s up with that. That smaller dia gasket would definately have restricted air flow from the throttle body to the intake. Not a big deal because that intake was only on the car while it was gathering dust in Molitor’s shop.

The next problem was that my 6 cleaned/flowed injectors turned out to be 5. I knew that one of them had turned out to be dead but I thought that that I had a new (spare) injector. Nope. I’ll send some more injectors out to be cleaned and flowed on Mon. Until then I’m using 5 clean injectors and one installed by the PO 3yrs ago.

#225

IT LIVES!!!

Put a solid 7hrs into the car today. Didn’t even take a break to make a headcall.

First problem was that it wouldn’t start. I had spark and fuel but it wouldn’t even “catch”. I racked my brains, checked everything that made sense, went over the Bentley with a fine tooth comb and called Jim Levie for ideas.

The problem turned out to be a failure to torque my spark plugs in enough. I’d torqued them in pretty lightly. I’m always worried about aluminum threads and I might have also subconciously recalled that when I was doing the leakdown and compression tests early in the week the hose only goes in handtight.

Once I torqued the spark plugs to 20ftlbs (after 2 hrs of trying to figure out the problem), it started right up. If I had to guess I’d say that the plugs had only been torqued to 8ftlbs.

Which is when my oil pressure read 0. My bright red 20psi idiot light was remaining on and the oil pressure gauge read 0. I turned off the motor immed and did some thinking. After scratching my head for a while I started the motor again. I’m an optimist. I was hoping for magic. No magic. 0psi oil pressure. I turned off the engine again. Total time on motor prob 8-10secs.

I needed to take a look at the oil pump and see if something funny was going on. I didn’t want to have to use the engine hoist again because there’s limited space in the garage. The hoist also creates problems trying to maneuver a creaper under the car. So I figured I’d take a look at dropping the subframe in order to get the oil pan off. I’ve not done that before, but apparently it’s the preferred solution for some.

But in looking at the subframe and motor mounts, it looked to me like if I dropped the subframe the motor would drop on to my head. Maybe the motor has to be supported from above if you drop the subframe? So I called Jim again. Yep, has to be supported. That’s ok, I have one of those engine lifts that sit on the fenders. But Jim and I talked about the oil pump shaft access port so I thought that I’d give that a try first. I’d tried and failed to get the oil pump shaft access port cover off last Winter, but this would be a good time to try again.

God what a bitch that was. It took me 2hrs to get it off.

Then I turned the oil pump with a drill at about 1/4speed for about 30sec. A little oil came out of my remote oil filter adapter. Heartened by this I put the oil filter back on and worked the drill some more. I did the drill for the better part of 60secs, still at 1/4 speed, but got nothing. I was starting to sweat.

I had expected oil to come out of something long before. I was watching my oil pressure idiot light and I was peering thru the “add oil” port in the rocker arm cover. What I feared is that I’d have to drop my oil pan and look at the pump. And I’d finding nothing wrong. I’d have no oil pressure but I’d not find anything wrong. Lacking any good alternatives to running the drill more, and really hoping the issue would get resolved without me pulling the oil pan off, I kept at it and ran the drill a bit more at 1/4 spd. I kept thinking that maybe I was running the drill the wrong direction, but everything I looked at the gears I came up with the same answer.

It occured to me that when I removed an oil pressure and temp sender last month, that I’d emptied out my rather large oil cooler. “Is it possible that the oil pump flow so little oil that it’s take this long to fill the oil filter?”, I thought.

After running the drill for ~2min the drill started meeting resistance. “Holy Shit”, I thought, “the oil pump is binding on something”. And then I could see oil spurting in the oil pump shaft access port. And I could see that my dash idiot light had gone out. “Hey, this may working”, I thought.

I’d done a fair amount of disassembly attacking the oil pressure issue so it took me while to put everything back together. The timing belt, for the first time ever, seem to be giving me a lot of troubles where it would seem to be right, but after turning a couple revs would be wrong.

But eventually it was all back together. And the moment of truth had arrived.

The motor started right up and I had oil pressure. Thank god.

I’d never be able to do this sort of thing for a living. I can easily see myself fighting thru frustration after frustration fighting someone’s POS car into submission. And then the owner coming and with a complete lack of gratitide, acts cranky. That would send me 'round the bend.

#226

There was a reason I sent my OP drive shaft home with LevieB) Chuck

#227

I really need to send that back to you. I prefer a 6mm 1/4" drive socket welded to a piece of rod.

#228

Congrats Ranger.

Can someone give a few more details on the procedure to prime the oiling system with the drill. Seems like a good thing to know.

Thanks,
Jason

#229

You pull the plug where the distributor would mount on a carburetted engine, remove the helical drive gear and spin the oil pump drive shaft with a drill. I use a 3/8" Milwauke and run the pump (clockwise) until I see pressure on the gage. You know when the system fills with oil because you’ll hear the drill load up.

As Scott found out, removing the plug can be a bit of a bear. That pales in comparison to what he was thinking of, which would have been to remove the pan and check the pump. Fortunately he called me before doing that.

#230

The next problem found and fixed was a fuel injector that was leaking like a seive at the fuel rail.

The current problem is water in the oil. I’ve gone thru 2 batches of oil now and both came out pretty bad. I changed the filter too so there wasn’t a bunch of contaminated oil in the filter. Oil cooler, yes, but oil filter no.

The block can’t be cracked because when I removed the oil after overheating at RA, the oil was fine. It’s hard for me to imagine it’s the new HG. Water goes everywhere when you remove the head, but I had the oil pan off too. I can’t imagine enough water could have hidden away such that it would contaminate two batches of oil.

I’ve removed and installed a head a heck of a lot of times, but this much contaminated oil is outside the norm.

Given the design of the water and oil channels in the head, what’s the liklihood that there might be an undiscovered crack inside one the head’s water passages such that water and oil are mixing inside the head?

I can’t tell yet if I’m losing water. I’ve just filled it up and it usually takes some iterations of running and bleeding before I get the water volume stable.

#231

Ranger wrote:

I cracked up laughing when I read this. You do know the definition of instanity right.

#232

I talked to Chuck Baader a bit today. I’m going to get a coolant pressure tester and see what it tells me tonight. If it says tells me I’ve a leak in the water jacket because something is cracked, I think I’ll ship the motor off to Chuck.

This is a hobby. A requirement for hobbies is that they remain fun. When it becomes unfun one will say “f**k it” and walk away. My normally unlimited optimism is getting taxed.

My mother is staying with us for a couple weeks. I got to bed before midnight last night, which is a little earlier then normal. My mother looked at me this morning and asked if I’d stayed up half the night again.

When you are get a decent amount of sleep but you still look like shit, it’s a sign. A Stop sign.

I’ve proved to myself that I could figure out how to do this stuff, and that was important. But the intent was learning, and saving some money, not torture .

#233

If you can get to ATL , I’ll lend you one of my Pressure testers, But if it’s leaking internaly , Im not sure how putting pressure on it will help you find the leak??
BD

#234

bdigel wrote:

[quote]If you can get to ATL , I’ll lend you one of my Pressure testers, But if it’s leaking internaly , Im not sure how putting pressure on it will help you find the leak??
BD[/quote]

Thanks Brendan, but I just went out and bought a pressure tester.

I want to use the leak tester to confirm that there really is a leak in the coolant system. It strikes me as still possible that there is no leak and I just need to do some more flushing to get rid of all of the contaminated oil.

My remote oil filter, large oil cooler and the plumbing all add volume to the system, and also give old oil a place to hide from oil changes. That may sum up to a need to do a bit more flushing to reduce the level of water contamination.

#235

Ranger -

How many quarts does your system hold total? I drained and refilled my M20-powered E34 yesterday and forgot to change the filter. So I am just trying to make myself feel better about the 4 quarts of Mobil1 I p!ssed away. :laugh:

I was proud that I only got a couple tablespoons of oil on the floor this time, though.

#236

Steve D wrote:

[quote]Ranger -

How many quarts does your system hold total? I drained and refilled my M20-powered E34 yesterday and forgot to change the filter. So I am just trying to make myself feel better about the 4 quarts of Mobil1 I p!ssed away. :laugh:

I was proud that I only got a couple tablespoons of oil on the floor this time, though.[/quote]

What’s the M20 hold stock, 4.5qts? I figure 5.5qts or just shy, to get to the full mark with the plumbing, remote oil filter and oil cooler “charged”. I’m not using that much oil for flushing tho. I’m using more like 4.5qts of cheapo oil.

Race fill is 7qts because that puts 1.5qts in the Accusump. I don’t do “a quart over” any more because that’s what the sump is for.

I added ZDDP to the first batch of oil to make sure that the cam’s refinished lobes got protected.

#237

Boys and girls, I’m out for CMP. The coolant system isn’t holding pressure. Something is cracked. Sometimes luck shines on you and sometimes it kicks your ass. I have to shift focus to the Lemons car for the next couple of days. I’ll pull the SpecE30’s motor on CMP weekend and ship it to Chuck.

#238

don’t you have a spare motor? just swap it at the track… :stuck_out_tongue:

#239

Bummer. Sorry to hear that. If I could I would have come down and help with a quick engine swap.:frowning: Coulda woulda, but the thought is there.

#240

Thanks Dex.

Got a burst of energy tonight and pulled the manifolds and head off of the race car, and pulled the head off of the spare motor. I wanted to put the spare head on the race car, fill the coolant system and see if it held pressure. But the remains of the old HG on that spare head are stuck on there so fiercely tight that I didn’t make much progress cleaning it off. I’ll think I’ll run it by the local machine shop in the morning and have them hot tank it.

I gave a really close inspection to the motor’s cylinders and I don’t see any crack, but apparently a visual inspection doesn’t always spot this sort of thing.