Gramma's Car: the new project!

[olredalert]

-----Craig,,,Why should Steve finish it??? Train the kid right and then let him loose (with a bit of supervision). From everything I have seen, Steves son could probably make us all proud without much prodding.......Bill S

[njsteve]

Yesterday, both the daughter and the son got involved in installing the rest of the pistons. They argued over who got to do more, [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/rolleyes.gif[/img] so I let each one of them install two pistons, and torque the rod bolts.

[njsteve]

We then spent the rest of the weekend buttoning up the engine. Installed the pan and timing cover to catch all the oil and assembly lube that was soon to be dripping down. I manhandled the cylinder heads onto the block and the boy did all the torqueing. He was definitely tired by the time he was done!



I think the part he enjoyed the most was gooping all the black moly and red assembly lube onto the lifters, rocker arms and pushrods. He then torqued all the rocker nuts into place and we added the oil. I had him rotate the engine while we ran the oil pump primer and pressured up the engine.

I also showed him how the cam/lifters and rocker arms activate the intake and exhaust valves in relation to the piston movement, building on what I showed him yesterday with the timing chain connecting the cam to the movement of the crankshaft. You could actually see the lightbulb go off over his head when he realized how everything was interconnected. [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/shocked.gif[/img]

Of course we ran into an interesting problem while priming the engine. All the lifters/pushrods/rockers oiled up fine except for one. Nothing was coming out. They were new Sealed Power rockers, too. I thought maybe something was wrong with that lifter so I swapped it with one from another lifter position. The previously non-oiling lifter worked fine in the new lifter bore and the previously functioning lifter didn't oil in the suspect bore. So that ruled out the lifters. Checked the pushrod and it was clean with no blockage. I finally swapped the rocker with an original one and it oiled up fine. Here's what I found:



New rocker on the left, original on the right. The new rockers have the oil holes in a different position than the original ones, which, depending upon the pushrod, can restrict the oil supply to the oiling hole. The original rockers have the oil holes directly over the pushrod oil hole opening, the new ones have them in a spot that barely connects with the pushrod oil hole.

Glad we caught that now.

[njsteve]

Here's how the engine looked by this afternoon:

[njsteve]

Since it has been raining since saturday morning and it's supposed to rain all week, I figured I wouldn't be able to paint the engine until at least next week. Around 5:00 PM the sun came out for about an hour and I quickly rolled the engine out in the driveway to get her painted up.





I used the Bill Hirsch Engine Enamel. The stuff is amazing. The color match was exact. 1975-77 Pontiac engines have this weird, heavy metallic, royal blue color that is similar to the Oldsmobile blue and not available anywhere in spray can form. I used one of those Preval, do-it-yourself aerosol spray bottles, diluted the canned paint by 1/2 with lacquer thinner and sprayed away. I used about 1/3 of the quart can.