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