Building a hot vintage engine with Jonny69

[Jonny69]

After a quick cleanup I can see that the surface of the block is good, the valve seats are all in good condition despite being used with unleaded fuel and the pistons are in good condition. There was hardly any carbon in there at all and the bores are in very good condition. All good news.



Final job was to flip it upside down and strip the block bare. Took the sump off, removed the flywheel and timing cover and started scraping all the old gaskets off. I'll be taking the cam, crank and pistons out next so they don't get contaminated with grinding paste or any of the muck when I start relieving the bore edges, then it's out with the power tools to do the fun bit. Mwahahahahah!!!!!

[Nutcase]

Hooray for sidevalve engines

I think the last one I worked on was a Suffolk COlt - lawnmower We do have two in the family though - a Talbot 10 and a Morris 8.

Must admit I'm sold on mechanical fuel injection and early electronic ignition. Ultra reliable and dead easy to diagnose and setup if there is a problem

I *hate* points ignition

[Jonny69]

I love points

[Jonny69]

Finished stripping the engine. Took the cam, crank, oil pump and pistons out now so it's a bare block. Tomorrows job is to get some Gunk and give it a damn good clean all over then I can do that grinding. I think I might give it a paint after all, for the sake of a fiver in paint while it's out in bits...

So when you take a cam out and you haven't got a manual it's a good idea to take a note what way round it goes in. The easiest way to do this is to turn it so the no.1 piston is at top dead centre (TDC) on its firing stroke and make a mark with some white paint, or in my case some Tippex which I stole back when I was working at Marconi. That was a long time ago but I still steal things:



It's also a good idea to mark your pistons so they go back in the right bores, this saves you having to re-balance the engine but more importantly the bottom ends go back on the right crank journals. So make sure you also keep the big end shells round the right way and with the correct conrod:



With a bit of luck over the weekend I'll also get to take a grinder to the block and relieve it where I deem fit, then next week I just have to order some bits and get it assembled

Edit: by the way I don't read The Mail, it was in the recycling bin downstairs and I needed a paper to soak up any excess oil...

[Jonny69]

Jumped straight in at the deep end this afternoon and got on with the relieving around the bores. Popped the headgasket in place and secured with a couple of head studs:



This is so I can mark around the edges so I know where to grind and where not to as the chamber in the head is reasonably tight around the area:



Scratched my marks in with the tip of a chisel and removed the gasket and I was left with this on each of the bores:



Took the bulk of the meat off with a grinding disc on the angle grinder which made pretty light work of it and was left with this lovely rough edge to clean up with a half-round hand file:



Which left me with this lovely smoothed run into the bore rather than a sharp step. I gave it a quick lick over with some 400-grit wet and dry just to take the file marks out and all was done:





It's a bit difficult to see in the photos but it's about 5mm down from its original position and will let the piston suck in quite bit more as the sidevalve design is quite flawed. Then I gave it a good old wire brush, a clean down with Gunk followed by water, washing up liquid and a rinse, same with the sump which was lined with slime.

Went against my normal rules and fired on a coat or two of fire engine red, won't get much time tomorrow but I will be able to sneak in a few extra coats of paint

[Darrin]

Looking good, mate. Wish I'd had time to do that to my truck engine before I put it in.......

[Jonny69]

Sooooooo my bandwidth got caned so all the old images are dead until the 28th

No worries because I can make like a gypsy and move in on someone else's land as such. Yeah I'm stealing some webspace temporarily...

So here's what I've been up to. Got on the lathe on Tuesday night courtesy of a particularly generous bloke I know and turned down all the valve guides. Had to swap on the 4-jaw chuck to get a hold on them because they are in two halves but after a bit of setting up progress was good and I'm happy with the results.



Before, after and, er whoops:



Broke one of them so I'll have to pilfer one out the spare engine. Cast iron I think and it's like machining something between glass and china. I'll cut the remaining one by hand since it's not critical how square they are, I just want them recessed out the way.

I also got my head back. Nice bit of work, bit expensive but NOOOOOOOO! he's taken too much out the chambers! Ah well I guess I didn't explain it to him properly. I asked him to cut the base of the chamber down flush and I think he took it a bit too literally and cut right into the slope in the end of the chamber:



The bit between the two dark areas is supposed to be a nice smooth curve but now it's a deep step. Well I ummed and arrrrred about it quite a lot today but I think the only real solution is to add some metal back on. This is what the head looks like though, nice skim:



So this metal-on mod. This is going to involve welding to cast iron which is brittle. I decided the best way to do this is to get the head hot and weld it hot so the concentrated heat buildup isn't as high as if the head were cold. This will reduce warpage and reduce the likely hood of it craking. So the SWMBO is out tonight which is a piece of luck because I'm banned from bringing car parts in the flat let so please no-one let her know I've been sticking them in the oven.



225 degrees for 30 minutes until smoking nicely, which it did and the flat smells like it's been on fire. Severely. In the meantime I stuck the thick wire in the MIG and ran a couple of test beads on a spare head. When I was happy with the results I ran up and grabbed the one out the oven, ran down with it in my welding gloves (choking on the smoke and yeah it was bloody hot!) and zapped in a couple of runs of weld to fill the gap:



This is what I was left with after a quick wire brush. Once the head cooled down I thought I might un-shroud the sparkplug a bit. It sits right in the thread and is practically covered so I reckoned a good healthy chamfer would come in handy, get that flame front moving a bit quicker like:



Then while I was working on the ports in the block I gave the head a few licks of paint, red again:



Followed this with a rather nice shish kebab, chips and a few glasses of wine while I watched California Kid

[Flibster]

Can supply a ftp and some hosting if you want.
I'm only using about 100mb of my 20oddgb of transfer.

If I can remember the password to the admin panel....

Simon/~Flibster

[Jonny69]

Thanks for the offer, I might have to take you up on that.

I reduced all the pictures from 640x480 to 450x300. Hardly any difference onscreen but the images drop from some 5Mb to 1.5Mb in total. Should help quite a lot but once it's on my website rather than on the forums it should be sorted because I think it's been linked to on other forums hence spanked 3Gb in under 2 weeks! I might start using some kind of photohosting for the forums then transfer it to a tech article hosted on my website when it cools down.

[Garp]

When I'm at work I'll set you up an account / space on my server in the data centre if you want? I have no bandwidth restrictions at all on it