Alpine Green

I don't have a lot to catch up on (as far as the blog is concerned) but there's enough here in eye-candy to post. Last time, I cleaned up the crusty dumpster that is my engine, and had the heads rebuilt. Today you get to see it go back together. It's a satisfying post at the very least. But first, let's finish tearing the engine apart.

The five-oh being as crusty as it is, the timing cover was an absolute unit to remove. Two of the bolt heads twisted right off. I eventually found that this was because the bolt shanks had rusted and expanded, wedging themselves tight in the timing cover holes. Getting them out was a fun hour and a half. Coincidentally, an hour and a half is on the longer end of the typical wrenching session these days, so progress is glacial.

With the timing cover off, it could pull out the stock camshaft. The explorer cams are notoriously mild, which makes sense. They were designed to shuttle would-be pretentious suburbanites to and from the Eddie Bauer shop (and the Olive Garden!) at the new shopping mall, in their Eddie Bauer branded chariot, while listening to the latest Michael Bolton album and threatening to confiscate Zackery's Sega Genesis if he didn't stop pestering Britteney. So of course Frank and Barb wanted a nice smooth idle, and Ford obliged by giving them camshaft with 190/200 duration at .050" and only .450" lift. And Frank and Barb loved it, at least until the divorce, when Barb took the 1996 Eddie Bauer Explorer in Evergreen Frost Metallic along with Frank's golf clubs which were in the back. Frank still can't prove that Barb took them, but she did. And she sold the set at a pawn shop for 35 dollars.  The driver cost Frank four times that, in 1994. Zackery was prescribed Ritalin shortly after the divorce, who could have seen that?

I ended up going with a Lunati VooDoo camshaft, all thanks to a Hot Rod article. Duration is 221/229 at .050" with .549"/.550" lift. It's a very mid-range camshaft, that should peak right around 6000 RPM, and hopefully make near 340 HP at the flywheel.

Thankfully this cam is a roller cam, so I don't have to worry about wiping out a lifter and wrecking the cam during break in. I've never had a flat tappet engine and have no experience with that kind of thing but it sounds pretty stupid. That's right baby boomers, flat tappet cams are stupid, and you never hopped a Coke can with your Chevelle!

While I had the timing cover off, I decided to install a new timing chain. It is adjustable, so I can advance or retard the cam timing by a few degrees if I really feel it's necessary to move the torque curve up or down the RPM range.

After installing the head bolts, I remembered that the lower head bolts go into the coolant passages and need sealant. So I got out my trusty MAP gas torch and attempted to melt out the grease I had previously applied to the threads. Not sure if it worked, but an attempt was made.

Once I got the heads installed I could finish setting up the valvetrain. After assembly I quickly found out that there was a lot of extra lash between the rocker arms and the valve tips. They were looser than Barb after a few post-divorce margaritas. I am new to pushrod engines like this Small Block Ford, so I had to do a little research. It turns out the Lunati camshaft has a .200" smaller diameter base circle than stock. This allows the cam lobes to have more lift and still fit inside the cam bearings.

The fix for a reduced base circle cam is longer pushrods. I picked up a set of +.100" pushrods to take up the slack.

Now I could button it all up. Here's to hoping that I don't have to open it up again for a very long time.

After taping off the orifices, the color could finally go on. I was looking for an old school industrial look to offset the bling of the stack intake. I also thought a subdued green hue would pay homage to the Little Green Monster from which the original engine swap came. Detroit Diesel Alpine Green checked all the boxes, so on it went.

I couldn't be happier with the color.

*** BONUS CONTENT ***

For the first five years I had my dear old welder, Joan of Arc, I didn't have a garage to store/use her in, so I stored her in the living room and carried her out to the carport a couple times per week. Now I have a garage as well as a wife, so no more living room welder storage. But now that I have a garage, it makes sense to have a welding cart. I figured I would save a little money and repurpose an old file cabinet. This is just a for cabinet with an angle iron frame around it and casters on the bottom. The casters were the most expensive part.

Jen says I need to paint the welding cart a solid color. I'm thinking black, unless anybody has a better idea.

The Rushing of Great Winds (or the Creature from Arby's Dumpster)

In my last post I mentioned that when I saw the exterior condition of my new 5 liter engine, I almost returned it. Now that I’ve dug deeper into the engine, returning the engine probably would have been the smart thing to do.

I had intended to have a nice easy swap. Clean it up, slap on some performance parts, and call it a day. The clean up definitely took longer than expected. The engine block and heads were greasier than an Arby’s dumpster, though the rat population was probably lower, a thing I was grateful for. I scrubbed wire brushed and decreased for what felt like several days, and then brought it back into the garage.

While significantly cleaner, it was still filthy. I looked it over and realized that this engine had a thin candy shell layer of rust scale over the whole thing. I’ve dealt with rust before, but scale like this is another of the wonderful things about aquatic environments like Michigan. Because of this, I became acquainted with a tool I never knew before. This magical tool is called a needle scaler.

After some work with the needle scaler, the block was not fully clean, but clean enough to proceed. Because I'm adding a much more aggressive cam, and hope to make power for another thousand RPM beyond the stock redline, it was necessary to change the valve springs. Though I know I should be using a "3/4 race cam" so that my Falcon could "hop a coke can" and "tape a hundred dollar bill to the dash and give it to anyone who could grab it while I accelerate", I was tipped off to the cam (actually my whole engine plan) I'm using by this article from Hot Rod. It's a Lunati Voodoo 272/280 cam, which should have good driveability and pull strong until 6000 RPM. While it's popular in the hot-rodding world to have a big cam for a "lumpy" idle, I prefer to have a car that doesn't drive like crap 90% of the time because it surges and bucks at low speed and will barely idle at 1500 RPM.

I ordered a set of valve springs from Alex's Parts because they have a setup specifically for explorer engines that are getting a more aggressive cam. I had planned to change the valve springs with the cylinder heads attached, so I took out all the spark plugs

Some of the spark plugs were non-compliant, so I subjected them to an overwhelming display of force, brought to you by DeWalt. They quickly complied.

With the spark plugs out, I could insert my home-made cylinder inflator which provides a supply of compressed air through the spark plug hole. This would, in theory, apply force on the intake and exhaust valves up so that I could compress the valve springs and remove the retainer. At that point I would replace the spring, retainer, and keepers with the new, higher performance version from Alex's Parts. And this is what happened on the first cylinder.

On the second cylinder, the process did not go as planned. When I hooked up the cylinder inflator to the air compressor I heard the rushing of great winds. And when I compressed the spring, the valve went down with the spring. I soon noticed that the great winds were not a force of nature, but the ghost of a 302 escaping out it's exhaust valves. Now in a fantastic mood, I removed the cylinder heads and shined a ridiculously powerful flashlight in the exhaust port. The light was easily visible through the burned valves.

As I checked the other valves, I found another valve that was not sealing. I didn't bother checking the other head because I knew at that point that both heads needed a valve job.

This left me highly irritated. I had once already considered return this engine on account of it's poor exterior condition. By this point I was outside warranty, so returning wasn't even an option. I had also paid an extra $200 for this engine because it had GT40 heads. Had I purchased a GT40P headed engine, I could have saved $200 on the engine, $300 on the head rebuild, and $150 on the springs and been at least halfway to a really nice set of aluminum heads, or 90% of the way to cheap aluminum heads.  I rolled the dice on this engine and lost. I always thought Yahtzee was a stupid game. Sending this engine to the Arby's dumpster where it belongs started to sound more appealing.

As irritating as all this is, dwelling on it doesn't get me anywhere I found a local guy to rebuild the heads. It seems like a decent job, the only complaint I had was that I had to pay an extra $50 for one o' them fancy 3 angle valve jobs. It felt a bit like getting charged extra for  "unleaded" gasoline. Does anybody even still do single angle valve jobs?? There are cutters that do all 3 angles in one pass!

I had initially planned to have this guy "set up" or measure and shim my valve springs to put them at the right installed height. After looking into it, I found I could buy the tools and parts to do it myself for about the same price as paying him to do it. And when that's the case, the answer is always to buy the tool!

It took a while, but I measured all the spring heights and it turns out only two of them needed shims. The valve heights were all surprisingly consistent, so I hope that is an indicator of careful machine work.

Hopefully I'll soon find the time to finish cleaning up the block, so I can paint it and start on the motor mounts.

Since the last post, I also made some progress on making the garage a good workspace instead of a hoarder's hideout. Some quick work with the chopsaw and a bit of 2x lumber yielded a workbench.

A little more work, and I had a 14 foot workbench. It's not fancy or even flat, but it's adequate for the work I do.

The garage buddy approves.

He's not the only one who is excited to drive this car.

In the past weeks I've had a few nights to work in the garage after the garage buddy goes to bed (he's not actually a very good garage buddy, I have to constantly keep him from killing himself. I think that's mostly what parenting is...)  I'll keep taking these hour and a half baby steps a few times a week and eventually, maybe before the summer is gone, I'll drive this old heap.

Let Thy Cylinders Be Doubled

Here it is. For those who've been wondering what was up next for Grace, now you know. I've tossed around a lot of ideas for the last year and a half since I found out that not only did the head gasket go, but the cylinder wall as well. I've thought very seriously about inline 6 turbos like 1JZ-GTE, 2JZ-GTE, and RB25DET. I've also thought seriously about the 1GZ-GE, the Toyota V12. In fact I had made plans of how to execute almost all of these swaps. In the end though, I came to a realization that I don't have that much free time anymore. Kids will do that. Each of these swaps is fairly unconventional, and could take some serious time to build. I have a deep fear of a stalled project because I know that as stalled project is a sold project. I want to be able to use my car, and not have it eternally hiding in the garage, while I endlessly talk about what I'm gonna do. Someday. I need to keep it a lot more conventional than I have in the past, so I decided that a small block Ford is the way to go. 

After researching this engine, I decided to go with a 5.0 from a 1996 Explorer. The Explorer came with roller lifters on the cam like all the 5.0s after 1987, but they also have GT40 heads. These are the heads that were run on the 1993 Cobra, so they flow a bit more than the standard 5.0 HO engine. Because I want to still run EFI and distributorless ignition, the 36-1 crank trigger wheel is a big plus as well.  

I located an engine in a wrecking yard near Detroit and went to pick it up. Because of a mis-communication, they did not have it on the shelf so I had to go back after they had pulled it from the Explorer. I loaded it up and took it home. When I got it in the shop and unwrapped it, I nearly took it back to the yard. I knew that Michigan salt was rough on body panels, but I hadn't considered what it can do to an engine! This thing looked like trash. The corrosion was so severe on even the valve covers it looked like I could push a pencil through them. Even the aluminum corrosion was far beyond my expectations. I actually loaded it back up in my truck to return it. I talked to the owner of the wrecking yard and had him send me some pictures of the other explorer engines in the yard. In the end I decided to suck it up and accept that I live in Michigan, as depressing as that sometimes is. Pro-tip: Don't ever have a junkyard engine shipped to you from Michigan, no matter how cheap.

Crud, glorious crud.

And the other side

Coolant tubes that have seen things you can only imagine.

Valve covers that have been through 23 michigan winters

Dipstick rusted through.

A harmonic balancer that inspires confidence.

Fuel rail corrosion like this is just not normal.

The corrosion got under the paint on this intake elbow and popped it off in a gigantic flake. 

Sad headers. These things choke down to 1 sq in at some points.

Thankfully the corrosion was external only. When I popped the intake off and looked at the lifter valley, it actually looked pretty decent. The oil was reasonably clean, and there was no buildup or sludge.

Once I tore it down to the the basics, it began to look a little more appealing. Still, I was disappointed by all the corrosion to the parts I had removed. I was not looking forward to replacing a bunch of boring parts like fuel rails and coolant tubes to get back to square one.

Then I remembered that I had seen a good deal on craigslist that would take things a little different direction. If I was going to have to replace that stuff, I might as well be replacing it in style...  What I had seen was an Individual Throttle Body intake for small block Fords at a steep discount. Normally these things run in the thousands of dollars, but this was a cheaper version made by Speedmaster. These normally sell for well over $1000, and I picked this up for well under $1000. It was being sold by an older guy whose friend had bought three of these (I guess he had a barn full of parts) but had passed away. This guy knew what they went for new, but was just helping out his friend's widow by slowly selling off parts.

So that's it. I'm swapping to an all-motor SBF with an ITB intake. Much more conventional, but should still have some wow-factor. Max and Jen are coming back home tonight, and I'm more than ready to see them. What that means for you dear reader, is don't get used to updates this frequent. I'm going to try to get this thing running before August, so stay tuned as I slowly get to that point.

Exhibit A: Turd with a dollop of polish on top.