OK. This teardown/rebuild took 48 hours of actual mechanicking/painting time spread out over 96 hours of 90* + humidity + two small floods from heavy rain.
12:15PM on Saturday. Sort of like an athletic event, you have to psyche yourself up. The box has the gasket kit and cam bearings and the envelope above my head has the new cam gear expressed down from Toronto by German Supply Scott.
2:20PM, the engine has been stripped down to the longblock.
Occasionally you get visitors that you just can't ignore.
It is 7:10PM and the heads/oil cooler/manifolds have been inspected on the bench, this is the shortblock remaining in the car.
At 8:40PM the case is ready to get split, anticipation is rising, what has been going on in there with all of that clattering racket?
At 9:40PM, I am glad to see a clean inside-the-crankcase, but still, the cam gear is patterned like Sahara dunes, whoa lots of endplay, like .013" worth, well over double the wear limit. The crankshaft is enjoying a sloshy .008" endplay, .002" of that was from the thrust bearing moving in its saddle. Ouch, the backing is shiny from movement against the case.
It is 1:40AM on 7/15 here, time to turn in.
Sunday morning, we have an issue with the new cam gear. The rivets were drilled out to separate it from its shaft in Canada, and the shoulders have been chewed out past any hope of indexing our step-drillbit. So the trite little goal of a 48 hour start-to-end bites the dust. . . we're looking for a machine shop Monday morning to save this thing. Fair enough, more time to clean and paint! Here's the pistons and cylinders at just past noon after a light cleaning.
Ryan got to see some more of that hack-razorblade treatment of the left cylinder head spigots. They did fine with the Air-Cooled.Net copper shims from last summer, but I could see some room for improvement, so out came the razorblade, Itinerant Scissorhands. . . .
By 3:30PM, the valves are being removed, decarbonised, measured for stretch, and treated to an aggressive valve lapping to the seats. You have to clean this lapping compound out soooo carefully. . . the guides have opened up a bit from all of my high speed driving, but the swivel-foot adjusters have been helpful.
At 4:00, I am posing for a Valve Job Hack Style portrait. There are a thousand and one little notes being stored in my flagging brain.
Last "Sunday" picture is actually early Monday, 12:22AM actually, with the clutch components all sanded and cleaned and ready for assembly. The pilot bearing was extrememly happy to see some attention, it had dried out since my last visit in August 2003.
OK, for any poor dial-up users, I will post the Monday/Tuesday pictures in another post.
Colin
