the main reason to get this up in the air was to remove the oil pan, and bolts for the oil pump/pickup. this motor had been sitting for years without an intake manifold on it, so when we drained the pan, it just bled water for what seemed like 2-3 minutes. thankfully oil followed the water, and rested some of my worries about the pan being rusted and junk.
once we had the donor engine robbed, we got the 289 going into the comet into the air:
first thing we did was replace the back freeze plug before we put it onto an engine stand. having the transmission off, and such easy access, it only made sense.
once we got the engine on the stand, we rolled it into my dad's shop, and removed the intake manifold. my dad did this while i was eating pizza, stinker!
next began the process of getting the surfaces clean so that the new gaskets/manifold would have a good seal. this translates to spending a good 15-20 minutes scraping cylinder heads with a razor blade.
on the upside my latest hair dye job looks excellent! thanks revlon!
clean(er) surfaces! yay!
next thing we did was pull the water pump off to see how it was doing. it seemed to not be turning great upon inspection by pops, so we got it off and this is what we see:
CHECK YOUR LEASE, CUZ YOU'RE LIVING IN CORROSION CITY.
also upon checking the timing chain/gears, there seemed to be a lot of play in the chain. with all of this discovered, a quick phone call to autozone, and a short trip down the road, we came back with the following:
timing cover - 110 dollars
water pump - 30 dollars
timing chain and gears - 20 dollars?
my freshly paid off credit card is now 200 dollars deep again. oops!
also, in the mail/trips to napa the following came:
mallory unilite mechanical distributor - 110 dollars
clevite high performance (high pressure, high volume) oil pump - 42 dollars (thanks napa guy!)
to get the top end sealed up and reduce the amount of gunk that could fall into heads/oil galley, here is a great picture of my dad polishing up some chrome edelbrock valve covers we liberated from the donor motor. not bad for free! i have to say though, it was a contest on who did a better job on the valve covers, and mike's left hand cover was looking pretty nice!
after that nonsense, we got the new timing cover up in place to check out some issues we had sensed in the force. this timing cover was missing a timing tab, which we are obviously going to need to time the motor. we ended up robbing the timing tab off the other 289, but our major issue is that this one is a left hand mount, and does not match the marks on our harmonic balancer. the harmonic balancer that is on is not in great shape at current time, but replacements vary from 100-400, so we are doing what we can.
we installed the new gears and chain, and it is a lot tigheter, less play to the chain now. looks snazzy too!
after getting this on, we went back outside and went to work on the oil pan, which had been sitting in degreaser for oh, around 3 hours.
to say this thing was a sludge beast is an understatement. we spent a good while cleaning everything out. my dad did some tig welding on it to fix where the drain plug was (he created a flatter surface for a better seal) and we flattened out a few dents in the pan, as well.
after all of this, we called it a night, and i took some photos of stuff sitting in place. manifold/valve covers have not been sealed up yet, just sitting to keep gunk from falling into the motor.
sure looks nice with all of that on it. my dad called me this morning, and it looks like he is going to try and replace the rest of the freeze plugs, and clean the sides of the motor. he's also out getting some nice stainless steel allen head bolts for the top end, and steel for the bottom end. things seem to be progressing quite well. thanks go out to mikey for getting me out to fontucky to work on this last night, and standing in the cold helping out as much as he could.
No comments:
Post a Comment