Star Power

Old star fragment, with a new high-volume Melling oil pump

We're all hurtling through the cosmos in this infinitesimal slice of time. Pretty mind blowing, right? No rhyme or reason to it, but for whatever reason, we're here, doing this now. To boot, events preceding precipitated and enabled everything. I was thinking about this as I was installing the oil pump on the bottom end of the engine. Engine block is iron. When I thought about how we get iron, or how iron occurs, I perked up as I acknowledged I was attaching an oil pump to a core fragment of a dead, massive star that must have gone supernova millions of years ago. It is highly processed and machined, sure, but a dead star fragment nonetheless. Cool.

Oh, and I finished installing the oil pump, so yeah.

Here's some extra photos I took when I was checking to make sure the oil pickup cleared the bottom of the oil pan- a little modeling clay on the pickup smashed by the temporarily-fitted oil pan gives us a 3/8" clearance reading.

add a blob of clay...

...fit the oil pan...

...and the flattened piece...

...can be removed, sectioned, and measured.

4/17/2016 Update: Pressed the front main seal into the timing cover, then got the timing cover and harmonic balancer installed. Ran into a small weird issue with a part on the crankshaft known as the "oil slinger" interfering with the new seal because of the big new aftermarket double roller timing chain. Scanned the Intarwebz, survey says: toss it and move on. Even Ford stopped putting them on in '74. Also, while deburring the timing cover to Depeche Mode, I started filing to the beat and counting, and realized one of the reasons Personal Jesus is awesome is because it's in 6/8 time.

Timing cover looking good after a bath in the hot tank

Installing the new front oil seal *whack!*

Hard to see, but if you look closely, you'll see the oil slinger pressed right up on the seal (no bueno)

Latest snapshot: timing cover and balancer done

Surging Ahead - Heads

Finally...

I know the plan all the long was to "just do it", fail, learn, recover, and press on- I mean, I know I have learned some valuable stuff. But damn, for the last month it really felt just like a whole bunch of stagnation. I know it probably looked like that from your perspective too (at least I had a hard time posting updates, since I felt like I was posting over and over again about the same things). Recovering from the errors I made took time, and I suppose that goes to patience, another thing I probably need to work on. All good! This week our machinists at G&G returned the #8 rod on which I broke the bolt, new rod bolt installed, and re-honed. I don't know about you, but I was rarin' to go. This weekend we surged ahead and got the heads and valvetrain installed. It felt so good. Extra bonus- I forgot how awesome the parts we ordered for the valvetrain were- not only will they work well from an engineering perspective, but hot damn, do they look great. And that's what it's all about, part engineering, part art project.

2nd verse, same as the first!

Finished the bottom end

Installed the number eight piston and celebrated a little! After I got the hang of it last time, it went really smoothly. Once that was done, I knew we could get to the thing we've been itching like crazy to get at:

Installing the heads

To revisit, I had purchased some nice Edelbrock aluminum street heads to replace the stock ones. For one, the old heads were so original, they would not work well with unleaded pump gas (old heads/non-hardened valve seats require a time machine and a pump dispensing leaded gas). Additionally, I found some evidence of valvetrain problems that I suspected that I may not have been able to sort out. Considering the heads also came with flow-matched cam and intake, this was the "easy button" approach that would allow us to redo the engine, but not really need to go to too far down the "flow bench expert" rabbit hole (maybe on the next project?).

Xavier and I threw em on and, since he had a busted finger (gym class be damned), I did all the torquing. Yes, I checked and rechecked the torque specs like 5 times. It looks more like an engine now.

The cherry on top

Looking sweet

I installed the roller rocker arms since all was going well. Xavier was a little sad that these will eventually be hidden away under valve covers. I explained that these were like wearing a pair of awesome socks. Nobody may notice that you wear awesome socks. But you know you're wearing them; and that makes a difference in how you carry yourself.

All installed: lifters, stud-mount roller-tip rockers, and new pushrods.

On the horizon: headers, intake, timing chain, oil pump, oil pan, distributor, flywheel, bellhousing, trans, fuel injection

More pics

test fitted the intake -oooh nice