4/16/09

Longtime readers of this rant may remember that I used to have a 1200 called Gil. For Gil I built a pretty stout A-14 with a Nissan Race Cam #1 (or #2, depending on which one is milder, I don’t remember). We’re putting that bottom end into Shichi under the $1,000.00 cylinder head I had build last summer. Now the bad news is, that engine had a nasty habit of bending pushrods on occasion. We never did finger out why it was doing that… until last night. But I'll get to that in a moment. First off, I picked John up at around 1700 h and we headed to Lowe’s to buy a pipe cutter. I didn’t want to use a hacksaw on the water inlet or crankcase breather pipes which needed trimming. By the way, there are those out there who would have said, “needed trimmed” in that last sentence. Those people are dumbasses and need to be removed from the planet. But I digress. We found and bought the cutter and headed to the shop. I think it was around 1745 h when we finally arrived. I changed from my work clothes into work clothes, you know what I mean, while John cut off the water pipe. I installed the starter and we hooked the hoist to the engine. The only way the installation could have gone smoother would have been for there to have been an earthquake which shook and bounced the unit into place while we were away! It slipped right into position, we did stop and hook up the speedometer cable and steering shaft by the way, and once the motor mounts were bolted on the block, it fell right in place and the holes all lined right up. John crawled under and bolted up the transmission cross member while I tightened the motor mount bolts. At some point, while installing and/or reconnecting stuff, it was decided to pull the head off. I loosened the bolts and John grabbed the rocker shaft. Schplork! This one popped right off with little effort as well. Once the head was out of the way, we could see why the pushrods would bend on occasion, there was a nice little crescent moon indentation in all four pistons where each intake valve had made high-speed contact. The engine never quit running so Juan has to assume the valves never bent. We took that head and the $1,000.00 (henceforth to be known as the 1k) head outside to compare and contrast. First the good news, the combustion chambers on the bender head is much shallower than the 1k head. Now the combination good/bad news, the intake valves are considerably smaller on the 1k head. These two facts make us think that we won’t have a recurrence of the interference so we’re going ahead with the installation. Finally the bad news, with the combination of the flat top pistons in Gil’s bottom end, and the exposed spark plugs in the 1k head, we’re going to have to index the plugs to keep them from hitting! John has a bunch of non-resistor, non-protruding spark plugs we’re going to try on Saturday. I think indexing won’t be an issue. John insisted that I clean the carbon off of the piston tops so I hooked up the die grinder with a Scotch Brite disc and went to town on them. I think I might have even polished the crescents to the point where they won’t create hot spots. I cleaned up the gasket mating surface as well while I was there. John used the tire inflation nozzle and blew away the residue and then I hosed the hell out of everything with WD-40. Just before we left, John crawled once again and installed the clutch slave cylinder. I think we’re to a good point and shouldn’t have much trouble making the thing run Saturday. I'm pretty excited.