1/21/13

Oops, it is 1510 h and I'm just now sitting down to tell y'all about the weekend.  I'll get Sunday out of the way right now… I did nothing Sunday.  Saturday on the other hand, was productive.  First off, I picked John up at the Fjord dealer where he was having his oil changed.  From there we went to the shop, duh.  Rather than wait for the 10mm flare wrench, which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway since the lines were already pretty rounded off, John attacked the front brake lines of Lil' Wiggly with a pair of vice grips.  Long story short, the front brakes are hooked up now.  We decided it wouldn’t behoove us to bleed them now since we still need pads at both ends of the car and moved on to installing the wheels.  We used two ¼” spacers per wheel, and think the fitment is just about spot on.  We may try another 5mm spacer but I'm not 100% comfortable with that since the studs are flush with the ends of the lug nuts right now.  John wants to put the flares on the front, and another 5mm spacer would require them, but the tire is pretty flush right now.  Of course if we step up to some 225mm rubber we’ll need the flares… and then maybe the spacers to fill them completely.  I did make a suggestion about how I'd feel better about the lug nuts not being full of stud.  By the way, there would only be 5mm of nut without stud engagement, they wouldn’t be hanging on by a thread or two.  Anyhoo, my suggestion was to put some faux studs poking out of the nuts… because racecar.  They would look like the long studs we have in the rear, but would essentially be just “acorn nuts” with long titties… sort of thing.  I don’t know, we’ll see.  We dropped a fender on and John took a couple pictures.  We both stood in the engine bay to attempt to replicate the weight of the engine and see where we would be at this spring rate and perch setting.  We think we’re going to be fine as far as rate goes but might have to come down a little on the perch.  Down is good, up would be difficult.  After that bit of grokking, we went in to get cracking on our engines.  We got the 302 on the stand and removed the intake and front pulleys and stuff, only breaking two intake bolts in the process.  We did manage to remove the broken bolts once the manifold was off.  I couldn’t resist test fitting the Edelbrock intake manifold so John made me go wash my hands before touching it.  Ooh, it looks so good.  John got a picture of it for the build thread while I was unpacking the HEI distributor.  He got a shot of the dizzy in place as well, I believe.  We then flipped the engine over and I got to work replacing the oil pan… well, I got to work removing the oil pan.  We didn’t have a gasket so we couldn’t put the 289 pan on just yet.  While I was doing that, John replaced the front cover and oil pan gaskets on the Z-20 out of the Chickenhawk for his 1200.  Yeah, turns out the guy who built the Chickenhawk's engine allowed the front cover gasket to slip and that was why it leaked so badly.  We’re blaming it on Daniel.  But back to my engine, I cleaned up the oil pan gasket surface and discovered that someone has had the front cover of that engine off.  I'm not too chuffed about that, but I'm moving on without thinking too much about it.  Oh!  Remember how I was hoping the oil pump pick up tube from the 289 would bolt to the 302 and you said it wouldn’t?  Well, nanny nanny boo boo, stick your head in doo doo!  It bolted right up… after I cleaned all the accumulated schmuts and schmort out of it with Berryman’s Chem Dip.  And yes, everything DOES smell like Berryman’s to me now… still.  Once we were both to a quitting point, we “cleaned up” the area where we’d been working and rolled Lil' Wiggly back inside.  We locked up, cleaned up, and went to have sushi.  After I dropped John off to pick up his car, I headed home.  As I was about to turn onto my street, I went straight instead and wound up at the Boys of Pep.  I bought oil pan and carburetor gaskets and headed back to the shop.  I fingered since everything already smelled like Berryman’s to me, I might as well go clean up the 289’s oil pan and put it on the engine.  This I did.  The pan came with these really cool plastic alignment thingies which screw into the four corner holes and hold the pan in place if Jaun were doing the job under the car.  I was really impressed with those bits.  I used them, even though I had the engine on a stand upside down.  I put a hunker on all the bolts, just a nudge past when they stopped, and flipped the engine back right-side up.  I had a look at the dipstick situation.  We’d decided that we’d use the dipstick from an old Z-20 engine but I couldn’t get it to budge from the Nissan block.  I wound up cutting the top from the Nissan tube and welding it to the bottom of the Fjord tube.  Yes, I did finger out where the end of the dipstick needed to be in the pan before just welding it on all willie-nillie.  Of course the tube doesn’t fit tight in the block and I'm not sure how we’re going to rectify that.  But we’ll burn that bridge later.  By this time it was getting dark so I went home for real this time.  I'm pretty chuffed at the progress we made but wish we had more time to do more stuff every week.  Oh well, what are you going to do?