I just got everything back from the machine shop.

http://www31.addr.com/~stealthe/irocz/rebuild/fresh/

Everything was inspected and hot tanked.

The block was honed and the mains were align bored (mains were out of round). Crank was cut and hot tanked.

Do I need to plastigauge before I begin to assemble the bottom end?

Other then plastigauge, I think I have everything I'm going to need to build the engine.

 

Well, I use mic's but if thats all you got I would. Always check someone else's work!!

Auggie

 

plastigage is a joke. if it's all you have it'll give you ball park idea but not really tell you anything. you'd be way ahead to buy the proper tools to complete the project you started.

 

How am I supposed to check oil clearances?


What do I do, put the bearings into the main cap, torque the main cap down and measure the inner diamter, then measure the crank journal and subtract to get the oil clearance?

 

Measure the inner diameter of the main and rod bores; measure the thicknes of the bearing shells; measure the diameter of the crank journals. Don't torque your bearings to measure them and then take them back apart.

Plastigage is about worthless except for making sure that your crank and bearings agree roughly; like they're both .010" under, or .020" under, or whatever. It's useless for measuring oil clearance.

As you assemble the mains, the crank should become easier to spin as you torque the bolts. If it does, it's probably OK.

 

I wasn't serious

When you say measure the ID of the main and rod bores, that means I put the main and rod caps on and torque them to spec w/o bearings. If so, what should the ID be? Am I looking for a specific ID or just consisency?

What should the thickness of the bearing shells be? Again, am I look for consistency?

The guy from the machine shop told me I should be able to spin the crank once installed with two fingers.

 

Well you had all the machine work done at the shop, did they order you a set of bearing too? Usually they do and you dont have to measure anything but then again most people do not have a machinest they trust.

 

Don't worry about the absolute diameters.

You're looking for the main journal diameter plus the thickness of the main shell plus .002" or so of oil clearance to equal the main bore, and likewise for the rods.

The machine shop guy is right; the crank should be very very easy to spin. After you finish installing it, you should be able to grab the crank snout with one hand and give it a good flick of the wrist, and it should spin for at least 2 full revolutions. As I said earlier, it should get looser as you torque the bolts.

Cleanliness is the first order of business. By the time you are assembling the motor, the crank should have been to the car wash, and washed with brushes in the holes and stuff, to get out any particles that might be hiding in there. Wipe the main journals with a lint-free towel, and use spray can carb cleaner last of all, to wash the oil holes and the main journals. DO NOT touch the main journals after this last flush.

First thing to do is put the rear main seal in both the block and the cap. DO NOT use sealer on the back of it; instead, use a small amount of white lithium grease, just a light smear, on the metal parts. Use the little plastic guide tool they give you, and put the seal in end-wise, pushing it around the seal bore from the end; DO NOT just jam it straight on. How you put that seal in is very important, if you want a leak-free motor. Leave it with about ¼" sticking up at one end of each, such that when you assemble it, the split in the bearing doesn't line up with the split in the block. Smear a very light smear of white lithium grease on the seal surface (both halves of the seal) where it meets the crank.

Wear vinyl (not latex) gloves such as you can get at hardware and paint stores. Take the main bearings out of their boxes, lay them in clean lacquer thinner in a shallow pan or something WITHOUT TOUCHING THEM; clean the block and the cap saddles one last time with a lint-free towel and lacquer thinner; lift them by their outside surface at the very edges where they meet, and place them carefully in the block saddles WITHOUT TOUCHING THE BEARINGS; do the same with the other half and the caps WITHOUT TOUCHING THE BEARINGS; put a couple of drops of ATF or 10W-30 synthetic motor oil on each block shell; lay the crank in. I like to use a small squirt type oil can for the lube so I can control how much I use, and avoid getting oil on things that seal, and committing other such unclean acts while building a motor.

Put a drop of gorilla snot on the very ends of the seal, and a light smear of silicone on the rear cap surfaces of the block, especially the one toward the oil filter side, making sure to get a little bit into the very corner of the register step, all the way from the crankcase to the outside world. One at a time, put a couple of drops of lube on the exposed main journals; place the caps in place; put some assembly lube or white lithium grease on the bolt threads and thread them in; and tighten all of them to 10 - 15 ft-lbs or so. Make sure all the caps have gone down into their register shells. At that point you can spin the crank, and tap it gently on both the front and the rear, to seat the thrust surfaces evenly. Tighten the bolts to 30 ft-lbs, the crank should get easier to spin; tighten them to 50, as you tighten each one, it should get a little easier to spin. When you get there, take your BFH, and give each cap a good solid whack, and tighten them again. You'll probably find that at least a couple loosened. Tighten them back to 50, then all the way, to 65 ft lbs.

Note the emphasis on cleanliness, NOT TOUCHING THE BEARINGS, slow and gradual tightening to spec WITHOUT OVER-TORQUING, and relieving the stress from the assembly so that the bolts don't loosen the first time the engine runs hard.

That's enough for now, my fingers are tired.

 

Thanks for the in put, just a couple things.

My machine shop also stressed cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness as the most important thing.

They gave me some assembly lube they prefer for bearings and such (as opposed to oil).

ARP included a moly lube to put on the main cap bolt threads (not studs, I bought new bolts). The instructions say that the lube they gave me makes sure the bolts truely get torque to spec.

I asked them about what you said, cleaning the block with rifle brushes and such. They told me the crank is fine. Checking the crank/block with a mic is more about not cutting corners and rechecking everything, basically dispelling ANY chance in my mind that something could be wrong (maybe I get 1 bad bearing that is out of spec), not a lack of trust in my machine shop. The place I went is a husband and wife, they've been there 35 years, and everybody's dad's I talk to who build engines tells me they are the best and from what I've seen they do very good work (they did all my buddys machine work as well) They cost a little more then the other places around me (for things like machine work, sometimes paying the LEAST isnt' a good thing), but they know what's up and they aren't just trying to take your money and get done.

As for the block, the old man told me the coolant/oil passages are all completely clear, that he took care of it when he tanked it. And that all I have to do is take some cleaner to the underside of the block mating surfaces (oil filter area and oil pan mating surface) and powerwash it. He told me to take lint free towels and wipe the bores down over and over again with transmission fluid until the towel comes out 100% clean. The crosshatch they did looks MUCH better than what I did, a nice 45* hatch on it (pictures linked in my first post). (I went up and down, I didn't hold it, but whatever, I obviously didnt' know the speed, and the guy who helped me build the 1st time never said anything was wrong with it -though when he looked at the bores AFTER it was taken apart, he was nice enough to comment how the hatch didn't look right-

What do you mean block shell? You mean put assembly lube on the main bearings in the block? Just a couple engine terms I'm not familiar with. Gorilla snot = silicone?

Oh yea, anyone know what those two pieces are?

http://www31.addr.com/~stealthe/iroc...h/DSCN0167.JPG

I left the timing chain gear on the crank, that was given back to me, do I need the two half moons?

 

I would have to say they are key way locks for the end of the crank. old ones are worn and wont stay in or they get lost.
Why ther is two I do not know maybe and extra?

 

yep, 84 is correct. Those look like the crankshaft woodruff keys. They are needed. They position both the timing set and the balancer in relation to piston location and timing. You mey need both, you may need only 1. You may even not need either. Depends on the condition of the current keys and if you have both.

Why there are 2? One for the timing gear keyway and one for the balancer keyway.

 

So what's the reasoning behind this? Seems to me that would be the correct way to do it, will the bearings be distorted because the crank and rods are not present to hold them in place? I've also seen in some magazines where they used mics and bore gages to measure clearance AFTER the caps were torqued.

 

The things in the pic are called Woodruff keys; they go in the slots in the front of the crank. Discard any old ones you may have, and get new ones. You can get them anywhere, at any parts store; probably less than a dollar. You want the timing gear especially to be absolutely positively located correctly on the crank, and a used key may have wear or be distorted enough to allow misalignment.

The reason there are 2 keys, I suspect, has to do with factory assembly.... that way they can put one on when they put on the timing set; then as the engine continue to move through the process, when the time to put on the balancer comes later on, they put on that one. That way there's no possibility of an engine "losing" one somewhere along the line and sneaking out the door without one, and they don't even have to check anything (i.e. depend on something with a chance of human error or oversight). And better than using just one big one, because it's possible for that to get tilted or whatever, and interfere with putting the 2nd part on. Kind of like my favorite way to get work done: I don't like to "work hard", or even "work smart", if I can help it; I'd rather find ways to "make the work do itself". It's a common philosophy in industrial engineering. Design the process so that it can't screw up.

The reason not to torque and disassemble and re-torque the bearings is because they will be crushed into the bore and distorted the way that they are designed to do during assembly the first time, and when re-assembled, won't do it again. THey won't have their "tension" holding themselves in place as much as they should. Kind of like the crush sleeve in a rear end.

I can't answer for what magazines do. I mostly know about how to build engines that run good and last longer and that both cause and experience fewer problems than most other people's, but not so much about what magazine writers write.

If you feel that you simply MUST measure the bearing bore with the bearings installed, discard your test bearings, and replace them with an identical set. I would suspect that's what the magazine people are doing anyway, especially since they have a virtually unlimited supply of somebody else's money to do it with. Doing pointless wasteful things like that isn't as likely to bother them as much as it would somebody using their own money. Personally, I don't find it useful, since there are other ways to guarantee that the clearance is right; if the crank journal diameter meets its spec (minus whatever undersize), and the block bore meets its spec, and the bearings meet their spec, then the whole thing has no choice but to be right. I guess it's a matter of having confidence in your own ability to measure things and interpret what you're seeing.

You can never get everything too clean. All that has to happen to trash your next set of bearings, is for something to fall into the right place in the block somehow while it's sitting around somewhere, after it's been through all of the cleaning processes; or for whatever cleaning process was used, to be less than 100% effective. An auto machine shop is always full of metal particles, grit of various sorts, just plain dirt, etc etc etc. There's just no way to guarantee, in that environement, that (1) the cleaning process consisting of immersion in solvent will loosen and dissolve and remove any metal chips or casting sand or whatever from your parts, and (2) no new contaminants got accidentally introduced during subsequent handling.

Direct your effort and energy to where it will do the most good. IMO that's cleanliness, and not in trying to measure your bearing clearances directly.

Assembly lube on the bearings is fine, as long as it doesn't have moly or something like that in it; moly is like sand. Think of it as "millions of tiny ball bearings". Great for rolling parts or hard surfaces that slide, very very bad for a situation where a hard surface meets a soft one. It will embed into the soft bearings, and act like abrasive grit in there forever. That's why I use oil or ATF; something thin so everything is easy to work on, and guaranteed freedom from such additives.

 

One thing that was explained to me was to use frams HP4 oil filter. High volume pumps push more oil than the regular PH30 can handle, so all the oil isn't filtered, the extra pressure is bypassed and never gets cleaned. Could explain why my bearings were so beat. The oil plugs in the block were in place, so it makes sense, I was running a summit high volume pump. I bought a new melling high volume pump.

Any clarification on that?

I'll have my buddy (not the same guy who built the 1st time) come over with some mics and just check the stuff over once.

Assuming the weather holds up I'm going to bring the block out and powerwash it, damn NJ, its rained like 15 times the past 30 days.

As for the oil passages, could I blow compressed air through it? I could get about 800PSI. Should I powerwash and THEN blow compressed air. I just don't want any water sitting in my oil passages. Would K-mart sell rifle brushes? They sell firearms I believe.

 

i wouldn't use a HV pump for anything but if i had to use one it'd onoly be for a race only engine with a bigger than stock pan. M55 w/#26 spring is good for anything you'll ever need or do.

gorilla snot is brand name of a sealer

wash it and then use air, not air alone. k mart, wal mart will have a rifle cleaning kit.

 

I have the M55HV. 70 PSI oil pump. I'm using a stock capacity pan, am I going to suck the pan dry? How can I tell what # my spring is? Right now a pink one is in there.

 

Gorilla snot = 3M 08001; also comes in black "bear snot" = 08008

I wouldn't use the M55HV. You don't need it if you're running stock bearing clearances; mostly all it will do, is increase the load on teh dist gear, without providing any real benefit whatsoever. Use a regular M55 with the Mr G 26 spring, and weld or roll-pin or braze or something the pickup on. Use the screen with the right depth for the pan you have (stock pan for these vars uses a 55-S, there's also a 55-S1 and 55-S2 for other depths), and a IS-55E pump drive shaft, with a metal collar instead of the plastic collar.

I wouldn't use a Fram oil filter, any part number, in anything I own. Period. Use a AC/Delco one, I can't remember the new # for a PF-35.

Yes K-mart and Wal-mart and those types of places have rifle brushes. Most anyplace that has sporting goods will, even if they don't sell weapons themselves.

 

Well the stock pick up just got tack welded onto the M55HW today, so I'm guessing it's too late to return it. Can I just replace the spring? If the high volume isn't going to suck my oil pan dry then i'll just deal with all that power robbing oil pressure.

I reused the same pickup from last time. The new oil pan I got from summit is the exact same as the one I'm replacing. Capacity is the same, size, shape, etc etc. So as far as the pickup I'm fine. Again, the HV pump is what the machine shop recommended, they never asked about what oil pan I was running. It may be overkill, but if it isn't going to suck my pan dry I'm fine with it.

I ended up using brushes my dad had. Cleaned up real nice. I feel real good about the oil/coolant passages now. I blew out every oil/coolant passage/hole I could find. Then I blew compressed air through every passage/hole. Hehe, with the power washer blowing into the 3 small holes at the back of the block it blew out all those oil passage nicely. 1 was for cam lubrication, another for main journals. Had some nice fountain action going on. I got brass freezeplugs, when I install them, I don't need to use any sealer or silcone right? The brass is sticky enough a metal that it should seal?

Is there any substitute I can use for lacquer thinner? I have acetone, mineral spirits, and a bunch of other stuff. I didn't notice any cans labeled "lacquer thinner".

I'm going to install the crank/pistons/rods tomorrow with my buddy. Hopefully everything goes smoothly.

 

Use some kind of sealer on the plugs. I use either Permatex 300 or whatever it's called these days, the brown gooey gunk; or Permatex "brush tack", which is the purple stuff. NOT SILICONE.

Acetone is OK as a substitute for lacquer thinner. But you'll need alot of it; I'd suggest going to the store and just getting a gallon, you'll probably need it. Mineral spirits is useful for heavy de-greasing but is not acceptable for final cleaner, as it leaves a film and takes too long to dry.

 

If I have read everything correctly. I use White lithium grease on the rear main cap and block where the rear main seal slides onto it and on the rear main seal where it meets the crank. The ends of the rear main seal get a touch of gorillia snot (in my case I'll be using permatex 300). Then a small amount of silicone between the rear main cap and the block especially around where the oil comes from the pump.

I picked up a gallon of laquer thinner from pep boys along with all the other things you suggested.

As for the oil pump, will it work or am I going to have 0 oil pressure as I go through the traps because I sucked my pan dry? You seem to think the high volume is uneeded (which I agree it true) but since it's a little late considering the pick up has been tacked on will it be alright? Or am I dishing out another 35$ for another pump.

Am I forgetting anything else? Tomorrow is the big night, the bottom end is going in. I appreciate all the tips and info, wish me luck.

Oh yea, where can I get gorilla snot? Does permatex make an equivalent to it? Thats the only thing I dont' have.

 

if it's just a tack you can grind/break it. i weld a brace to the pick up and bolt it to the pump body. jegs sells one that clamps to the pick up and bolts to the pump. i'd trash the HV pump even if it means pissing aways 35 dollars. you can buy a new pump and pick up for a lot less than any damage you may cause with the HV pump, or you could get a 7qt pan.

 

What damage with the HV pump? This is what I'm trying to acertain. Is it going to suck the pan dry? Either way it's a loss, since I already have the new oil pan.

Can't I just get a different spring to put in the pump?

 

Yes it can suck your pan dry. It happened to a friend of mine. Stock pan with I believe the same M55HV pump you have. His 4340 Forged Lunati crankshaft almost broke in half. All the rod/main bearings welded themselves to the crank. Several thousand dollars lost to the wrong $35.00 pump for his stock oil pan.

 

A Melling M-55 is about $12; a 55-S is about $7. Both avail at Auto Zone. The Mr G 26 is about $5 at your local speed shop or Summit or wherever. Not much to get excited about.

 

I would replace the pump with a good name brand stock type pump unless you willing to put a Hi volume oil pan on to go with the hi volume pump, I even know someone that took a stock pump and cut the housing and gears thinner so it would pump LESS volume and consume less HP, he runs it every weekend at the local 1/8 mile track and he's had no problems with it so far.

 

Yea, 20$ for the 55HV. I'm going back to my machine shop tomorrow to talk to them about the getting the standard M55 pump and pick up some final items.

I wonder if they'll take the pump back even though it was tacked. I can break the weld and take the pickup off.

 

had that problem back in the 80's,on acceleration in corners pressure would drop to near zero!engine lived but after 5 or 6 hard corners i caught the cause and remedied it!maybe a high pressure but unless you have an 8 qt pan and side kickouts i wouldn't touch the high volume pump!
Eric

 

Well, you can modify a H/V oil pump by drilling out the bypass pressure-relief channel to 3/8 of an inch. This will provide adequate bypass volume during cold start conditions and at high engine rpm. This mod will not empty out the oil pan. Remove the oil pump housing cover and the pressure-relief valve and spring. Remove the small soft plug and drill out that hole to 7/16". Using a 1/4"-18 NP tap, run it in as far as it will go being carefull not to touch the other side of the bypass pressure-relief channel. You now can acess the bypass hole through the larger 7/16" hole. Drill out that hole to 3/8". There will be burr's on the pressure-relief valve bore that will have to be removed or the valve will not go all the way into the bore. Plug the 7/16" hole with a pipe plug but do not screw it in to far or this will impead oil flow. Braze on the oil pump pickup and install the pressure relief valve and spring. Screw the modifyed cover back onto the pump housing and your done.

Auggie