Engine Progress

Haven't posted an update in a while because I've been spending every spare moment working on the car. Quite a bit of progress has been made, so here goes.

First of all, here is a bunch of parts I bought! New rad, hoses, carb rebuild kit, diff parts, seals, gaskets. Also bought but not in this pic is a RC40 exhaust. :)

While the engine was away at Stanwood Engineering, I worked on the gearbox myself. Everything stripped down, cleaned and inspected.

Thankfully, no major badness was found, so all of this lot went back in again.

Here is the cleaned out casing after much scrubbing!

New baulk rings went in, and the old oil pick up replaced with a centre oil pick up pipe.

Also took the diff to bits to replace the pin, washers, and planet gears.

Old diff pin vs new 'performance' diff pin which was cheaper than the standard one.

The finished article with new bits installed.

I also fully stripped the HS4 carb and cleaned everything out. Bought the full rebuild kit to renew all the worn parts.

Here it is all back together. No idea yet how to go about tuning this thing but I guess I will have to learn!

In other news, I needed to do something about the heater unit situation. I had somehow come to own 2 of these things, but neither of them were in decent condition. The idea was to recon the best one.

All this panels ready for rust repair.

Everything painted and going back together. One of the units was a later version with 2 holes in one side, so I used that one because a new later matrix is cheaper :)

Then the short motor build came back from Stanwood. Hooray! Very pleased with the work they have done - rebore block, new pistons, unleaded head recon.

Then it was up to me to do the rest of the build. First job was to install cam followers and confirm the cam timing was accurately set up. All good. 

Head studs and gasket on.

Then on with the head and 1.3:1 roller rockers.

The gearbox went on and off a few times because I encountered a problem which stopped the engine turning over. (Didn't take any pics because I was too stressed!). It turned out to be a slightly raised locktab on a con rod fouling the oil pick up pipe. Solved it by hammering the offending article flat.

On with attaching new things - here is a new oil pump from Swiftune.


 

The man at Stanwood Engineering said I needed to replace the old worn idler gear, so I had planned to buy a new one from minispares. Then I noticed a cool dude called Darren was selling a NOS one on this forum so I snapped it up. :)

Works very nicely!

Then on with the transfer casing, new pressure plate and clutch disc.

I decided it would be worth getting a few new fasteners to replace some of the nasty old rusty ones...

This is how I left it today. Flywheel is on, which has its new ring gear installed, oil filter housing is on, timing cover and front pully are both on. Cleaned up distributor is also on, which was a scary experience because its very easy when trying to install the spindle to drop it down into the gearbox. Thankfully that didn't happen.

Need to do another quick order from minispares to pick up a few more bits that I need, but I feel like I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel with the engine build now. I just hope it works!