Long story is, the day started off slow, since we had to figure out how to actually properly use a piston ring compressor. And in order to put the piston back into the cylinder we actually needed to first remove the piston from the connecting rod. A classic case of remove to install. Luckily we had plenty of hands to hold the piston in the cylinder while aligning the wrist pin with the connecting rod making sure to not drop anything.
Next up there was some re-assembly to do, which meant torquing everything down, installing the heads, some wiring, building a test stand to fire up the engine and waiting for Greg to show up with the carbs. Somebody wise then suggested that we should call Greg to make sure he didn't forget the carbs some 50kms away...
A brief period of time later (NOT!) the carbs magically appeared. We promptly broke some bolts while installing the whole intake assembly into the block, BUMMER! Yes, these are the same bolts that have been giving us grief since the beginning. Executive decision is: BUY NEW BOLTS!
At this point we decided to try and test the compression on all cylinders. First attempt was 130-100-125-120 psi. So there was one cylinder with a slightly unacceptable leak! This was of course the same cylinder causing us previous major headaches.
There was talk of honing the cylinders, getting new piston rings and generally having a more thorough (read expensive) rebuild. This being a Lemons build really would suck. Then Eric suggested we clean the heads and the pistons, so the day would not be a total loss.
Luckily for us, we decided to re-check the compression after cleaning the heads and noticing that we may not have seated the head gasket correctly the first time...Results:
130-120-130-125 psi. It would seem our luck has changed for the better this time!
No comments:
Post a Comment