Engine McEngineFace

Oh hey. It's me again. And while all y'all forgot all about me and my crusty car, I have been hard at work doing things as slow as possible. Let's see, where did we leave off... ah yes, we talked about the shiny intake and totally jumped over the engine. Well today we'll talk about the crusty engine for my crusty car. Of course this engine is not crusty at all compared to the first V8 that I put in this thing. This time I was able to get a powerplant with less than 100k miles on it, which appeared to have lived it's life in California. Upon teardown, things looked pretty good. This engine came with GT40P iron heads, which are similar to the GT40 iron heads I had been using. Because there the heads that came with this engine had had some intake and exhaust valve leakage and my old heads had been rebuilt recently, I decided to just repair and re-use my old heads. Because GT40P heads are somewhat desirable, I was able sell the new heads.

 

Minor wear marks on the cylinder bore

Carbon buildup prior to scraping

While repairing my cylinder heads, I needed to remove the valve spring keepers. I have a tool that I have used in the past, and it has worked fairly well. In this case it worked like an aspiring actress/waiter in L.A. county during 2020. So I went to everybody's favorite smelly tool store, Harbor Freight, and got an 8 dollar c-clamp. After an hour of grinder/welder artistry, I had a usable valve spring compressor.

Custom tools, not to be confused with premium tools

Doing the work

 

Out came the valves and I took another look at the ports. As you can see in these photos, the exhaust port has some horrendous ridges. What you can't see as well, is the throat area of the exhaust seat. It is quite constricted, so while I had it all apart I decided to do a bit of porting work. I concentrated on the exhaust port, but also did a bit of intake work as well. Somehow I failed to take any pictures after the porting.

 

Ridgey McRidgeface

 

As you may remember, this engine met its demise when pistons and valves became intimately acquainted and as such, many of the valves were bent. I decided to replace all the valves with a stock replacement part, but when they arrived, I noticed a ridge on the valve that was sure to kill low lift flow, particularly on the intake side. Of course this is nothing that can't be fixed with a little redneck engineering.

Left: after    Right: before

Valves were chucked up in the drill press and lightly touched with a die grinder

Then came head re-assembly, which always involves a lot of measuring and re-measuring. In this case, it also involved a lot of shims. Previously when I had set this head up, I think it only took two 0.015" shims to get all valve spring heights within spec. With the new valves and the valve lapping I had done, many combinations of shims were required to meet spring height specs.

Valve spring height measurement

I was able to use my old valve spring compressor for reassembly

Then there's the cam. Of course you never want an engine to blow up on you, but the fact that it took the shiny new cam with it was a real gut punch for me. So I decided to go with the same cam again as I had last time, a Lunati VooDoo 272/280 advertised duration cam with 0.550/0.565 lift. This time I retarded the cam timing slightly to shift the power band to a higher RPM range. I even got all fancy-like and "degreed" the cam like an old fart. Will it help me make any more power? Probably not, but I'll be able to brag to boomers about how I degreed the cam. Most importantly, this time, I put loctite on the cam sprocket bolt. Having valves that are not bent does help make more power.

 

 

The glue to keep the engine from self-destructing again

 

 

Once the heads were re-assembled and the new cam installed, I could stick them together. I was able to re-use my ARP head bolts. Because half of the head bolts on a smallblock Ford go into water, those bolts were coated with a sealant, while the other bolts were coated with ARP specified lubricant. Using my trusty Harbor Freight torque wrench, I torqued the head bolts to 70 ft/lbs +/- 2 ugga duggas. I should probably get a legit torque wrench, but that's boring.

If there's one thing that wastes massive amounts of time when working on cars, it's cleaning and painting. You'd think I'd just stop doing it, but for some reason I keep doing it. It's not like it really makes any difference, and with my track record it will just have to come out again and be replaced in a year. Yet I persist.

Before painting, I added a couple bungs to the oil pan, just in case they could be of use in the future. You never know when you'll need a clean bung-hole. 

Then the paint went on. Again I used Detroit Diesel Alpine Green, since I was really happy with the old-school industrial look.

Because I am tired of replacing the engine in this car, I have finally decided to get serious about monitoring certain critical engine parameters and implementing protection strategies. With this install I decided to add an oil pressure sensor, fuel pressure sensor, oil temperature sensor, and knock sensor. 

Oil pressure sensor

Fuel pressure sensor

Knock sensor, this will be mounted at the rear of the block

The oil temperature sensor will be installed in the small bung

Finally it was time to install the engine. This always feels like such a big step, but in reality it's like an hour and a half job that I can do in one night after the kids have gone to bed and I've cleaned up after the daily destruction. Compared to something like cleaning and painting painting the block takes a couple weeks of nights after the kids have gone to bed and I've cleaned up after their daily destruction, it's practically nothing. 

So there we are, the engine is sitting in the engine bay. But of course it still doesn't run. There is still something to be done, the car guy's greatest fear [loud spooky noises] WIRING!!!! [/loud spooky noises]