All right, I'm ready to talk about it. At first I thought I had gotten off easy. You know the back story, one week before I was to move to California, I took my cousin for a ride in the Falcon. As I blipped the throttle to rev-match a 3-2 downshift, I heard some clatter and the engine died. I found out that while the crank would turn, the valves were not being actuated. I got the car to California, and it sat for a couple months. Eventually I would get around to looking at it and at first glance, it seemed like I just had a cam bolt that backed out, and this had lead to the cam locating pin shearing.
I should have known that this would go down as smoothly as a kitty litter and bile milk shake.
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Accessories off
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Timing chain intact, so far so good...
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Cam pin as I found it
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Formerly a one-piece pin
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All ready to line up the timing marks and put it back together, right? Right??
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I ordered a new timing cover gasket, locating pin, and cam bolt. The original cam bolt had some messed up threads. So all I had to do was line up the cam timing and re-assemble. It soon became apparent that the cam didn't want to rotate. Normally a cam will rotate quite easily by hand. You could have Chuck Norris hands and this cam wasn't going to move for you. It was time to dig deeper.
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Well then...
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The rockers and pushrods came off first. The rockers didn't look damaged, but several of the pushrods were looking a bit, shall we say... noodley. Not a good sign, but I still had some hope. When ran a straight edge across the tips of the valves, I could see that a few of the valve tips were lower than the rest, indicating that the valve heads were not fully returning to the valve seat. In short, I now knew there were a number of bent valves. Welp, time to take off the heads and take a look at that. No, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's check in on the roller lifters to make sure they are ok.
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Intake off
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Broken dogbones
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More broken dogbones
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Shouldn't those be attached or something?
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The rollers were not OK. Quite the opposite, in fact. The lifter valley looked like a post-Beastie Boys visit hotel room in 1988. It seems when the pistons hit the valves, the lifters took a redhead step-child grade beating. On the driver's side bank, every single lifter was thrashed. These were not going to be re-used, at least not without a trip to the recycler's blast furnace. As you could see, every single dog bone (used to keep lifters from rotating in the bore) was broken. For some reason, the passenger side bank was relatively unaffected. Now with the entire valvetrain removed, I figured the cam would rotate.
And rotate it did. Of course I did have to use a bit of persuasion in the for of mechanical advantage. But if I'm honest, it didn't feel so nice to use that much... err, persuasion. I wanted to remove the cam at this point and things weren't going so well. I ended up trying to pull the cam using a homemade screw puller and a big slide hammer. Neither could make it budge.
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Homebrew screw puller
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Slide hammer
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At this point I resigned myself to the reality that not only was it the end of the road for this cam, but for the block as well. Even if I were able to force the camshaft out, there is a very real possibility that a new cam would be damaged by misaligned cam bores. Also all the partying in the cam bores likely left them damaged.
But all is not lost. One of the reasons I chose this engine was because they are ubiquitous in wrecking yards, and ubiquity is adjacent with cheap. I can get a new old short block for a few hundred dollars, so I'll need to do a pick and pull run soon. If I can just get my wife to increase my allowance...
Anyway, just for fun, I popped the heads off to see what that looked like. It was instantly apparent where the pistons and valves had gotten their groove on. So yeah, I'm going to need a new set of valves.
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Shiny spots bad
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As much as I'd like to get right to it, it will be a little while. But hey, I live in California now so even if it's the middle of the winter when I finally fix it, I can still go drive!
