Off My Trolley

This weekend was spent making my giant skateboard. Saturday I was off to EH Hassims to get some lumber and some bolts. The dudes kindly shaved the lumber to size.

Tah Daaaah!!!

I badly needed a spot to put the gearbox and bellhousing unit so that was the first thing to go on even before I took a picture.

Just to make sure of the timing I undid the bolt and removed the cam cover. I wasn't too keen on using the peg so I made a TDC indicator with a dial gauge. I bolted it to the camshaft caps and used a rod that was a perfect fit down the spark plug hole. The cams lined up - you can just see the 5mm allen keys at the back on the left and right. With the locating pin screwed into the pulley I cinched down the bolt and everything was tickety-boo.

Now the engine is properly timed and all that remains is the torquing of the crankshaft bolt. I don't have the special tool from Ford so I must borrow one or make one up.

I am thinking to make one out of tube with castellations milled out, then welded to a long pipe. This will mate to the Crankshaft pulley slots. Might work.....

Today I fitted the one thing that has puzzled me - the alternator. I couldn't figure what the spacers were used for and it turns out they are not needed. I just winged it. I couldn't get the right tension on the belt and after some searching found that the alternator body was binding on the adjustable tension bar. So that came off and ten minutes with a die grinder on the bar and I had the necessary clearance.

The week so far....

After finishing the engine and gearbox I am now faced with the prospect of installing them into the chassis.

First they have to be joined - this should not be a hassle as I have lined up the gearbox spline with the clutch and pressure plate. To that end I have fitted the bellhousing and the annular clutch slave cylinder to the gearbox. A quick dimensional check of the input shaft/slave cylinder/clutch pressure plate relationship shows everything should fit together as it is supposed to.

To join the two both have to be laid on the ground or some other surface, there is no way it can be done on the engine stand, and then taken off - it is way too heavy.

My cunning plan comprises a castor wheeled low trolley on which I can lay the engine and the gearbox, and join them up. Then roll the trolley to the waiting chassis.

I already have a heavy plank, and yesterday I got some heavy duty castor wheels - some nuts, bolts and washers and I will have a giant skateboard!
Speaking of the chassis, I have not got either my shocks or rear uprights from the factory yet. I can do nothing without the uprights, shocks and wheels in place.

I have since cancelled using the heavy plank, instead I will buy some new timber....

Installing and timing the Camshafts

I picked up my shiny new cam buckets from the Ford dealer yesterday afternoon and installed those last night. These are just a drop-in fit so no sweat there.

Then I fitted the exhaust camshaft and checked the clearances - they are all 10 - 12 thou which is well within specification.

Up to this point the cam sprockets have been loose on the cams it was now time to install the timing chain. The workshop manual speaks of a bar that fits across the slots at the back of the two cams, but this is not usually available to the home engineer. I can however tell you that a pair of 5mm allen keys works extremely well in this situation. I had a pair of EVO 1 cam friction washers which ensures there is no "cam slip". This is very similar to the friction washer you get on the crankshaft damper - a little diamond encrusted steel washer.

With the keys in place I torqued up the camshaft bolts and draped the chain over the sprockets, installed the tensioner guides and arms, finally the tensioner itself and then pulled the pin. The tensioner instantly released and took up the slack and the whole camshaft, crankshaft, timing chain train is now completely assembled and ready for the front cover. Of course the crankshaft sprocket is loose on the crankshaft, as we still have to align the crank TDC with the cams.
I still have to get a Cam Position Sensor blanking plug, and a Cam Cover Breather banjo bolt. And a dipstick.....

Satisfied with my evening's work I covered the engine up (it's no longer just a block) and called it a night.

Progress from the Weekend Part 2

I got up on Sunday morning with the full intention of assembling the gearbox. I was actually looking forward to this because it represents a real step forward in completing the car.

Previously I reported that I had assembled the mainshaft and fitted it to the intermediate housing or sandwich plate.

Here's how it went:

I take the tail housing, and install the little selector shaft oil seal and its bigger brother the output shaft oil seal.

I take the casing (heavy bugger), clean it out and fit the magnet in the bottom.

I fit the needle bearings and spacers to the countershaft gear cluster, secure them with grease and insert the countershaft. I lay this in the casing.

I insert the mainshaft and sandwich plate from the one side, the input shaft from the other, complete with the caged bearing and join them up.

I invert the case, just like the manual says. I hear a "thunk" meaning the gears have meshed and then I make sure the countershaft lines up with its hole in the casing and I tap the countershaft home.

On goes the 5th driving gear with associated spacers and washers and nut, drive it home and tighten it up. I fix the 5th driven gear in place with its associated synchromesh and circlip,  then fit the selector shaft, forks and assorted goody-ma-gafters, on goes the tail housing and I am nearly finished....

BUT, in all the tapping and fitting, I have failed to notice that the 3rd/4th gear synchromesh has disassembled itself, and the spring and blocker bars have fallen to the bottom and stuck to the magnet. The reason is simple, the input shaft has moved forward in its housing, allowing the synchromesh, which sits between the input and mainshaft to come apart. Sheesh!!

I think they heard my scream in the next town......! Rita is still traumatised!!

Quickly I disassemble everything, retrieve the offending parts and go about reassembling the box. This time I make sure the input shaft cannot move forward by bolting the front retainer cover on.

Same process again but this time it seems to go a lot quicker. My only delay was cutting a new gasket. I did not want to disassemble the mainshaft to trace the sandwich plate so I resorted to the old standby of placing the gasket paper on the casing and bashing one out with a soft mallet. Works!

Assembly goes quickly and by dusk I have completed the gearbox. Quick check she goes through all the gears - SHE WORKS!!!!!! What a mission!!! Now all I need is a brass gear selector saddle, because a plastic one will not hold up. Burton's has them. I also need to make a tailhousing rear cover plate.

A whole day used up on this. But I am very chugged with myself. So is Rita, as it means a huge chunk of toe stubbing metal has disappeared from the store room to the garage

Progress from the Weekend Part 1

This last weekend was spent working on the Engine and the Gearbox.

Friday I collected the cylinder head, on which some of the bosses had been milled off to accommodate the Raceline water rail. I also collected some clutch cover bolts and a couple of the little valve retainer thing-a-me-bobs.

Friday evening I align the clutch cover with the input shaft and tighten up the clutch evenly with the bolts. Job done!

I fit the last valve, spring, spring retainer and two of the thing-a-me-bobs. Job done!

I clean the top of the block, clean the mating face of the cylinder head, fit the dowels, spray the gasket with Spanjaard copper sealer and fit that and put on the cylinder head. In go the bolts, tighten down to 45Nm in the proper order and take out the breaker bar. 90 degrees clockwise, then 90 degrees again. I am waiting for something to break or strip but thankfully nothing does. Job done!

Saturday morning I visit my oil seal shop and they have received my selector shaft oil seal which was on special order - it's an odd size. Then I go find myself an imperial feeler gauge at Autozone.

Now I am ready to dig in to the second most difficult job of the re-build, fitting the cam buckets, and the cams. To get this right you need:

Two Prozac, washed down with a stiff brandy
An Imperial feeler gauge - I can't work in mm
10mm spanner, and a 13mm spanner for turning the cam gear bolt
Your wits about you (difficult if you chew the Prozac instead of swallowing it)
Note pad and pencil
Laptop, loaded with the ACQ spreadsheet available from

www.biggles.net/download/ACQBucketSizerV20.xls

I had wisely kept a little sheet of the original cam bucket set-up when I stripped the engine so I re-assembled the cam buckets in their original slots and tightened my new Kent 210HP racing cams in their place - Green for Inlet, Yellow for exhaust. Liberal amounts of oil as well. I start measuring the clearances, I am looking for 8-11 thou clearance on the inlet, 10-13 thou on the exhaust.

The clearances on the intake side are OK, there are some anomalies, no doubt due to the new cam.

I find that on the exhaust side the clearances are very low - 8 to 9 thou, no doubt due to my aggressive valve lapping, or the new cam. This is no good because you can burn valves - 12 thou is better.

I write down the clearances I get, enter them in the little spreadsheet along with the bucket layout and HEY PRESTO! it tells me what to swop out, what to order yada yada yada.

Ford cam buckets come in a 3 number designation for example a 3.182mm bucket is just called a "182" and they go up in 0.02mm increments, which is 0.0008 thou. You find the number printed inside the cam bucket.

Of the cam buckets required on the inlet side luckily enough 4 of them sit on the exhaust side, so I can make up a full set on the inlet side.

I swop out the buckets to their advised postions, tighten down the cam and re-measure. I am pleased when I find the clearance for the whole inlet side is 9 or 10 thou, so I do not need any further messing about on that cam. I tighten the inlet cam down and make sure the cam bolts are threadlocked. Nasty moment when I get the one bolt crossed up and bugger the thread a bit but I catch it in time.

On the exhaust side I find I need 4 new buckets - 2 off 142's, a 162, and a 182. I phone Zerilda at EL Auto and give her the specs of the cam buckets I need - unfortunately the 142's and 182's don't exist in the spares directory, but the 162's do - huh? So I figger Ford must be getting a little looser on the specs so I redo my numbers and it turns out that going from a 142 to a 162 is going to give me 11 thou instead of 12 thou clearance and replacing the 182 with a 162 means 13 thou instead of 12. So I order 4 off 162's. Close enough, but watch this space.

The buckets will arrive on Tuesday. I finish off by temporarily fitting my zooty cam cover and water rail, just to see what it looks like.

I can't go any further here so that's it for the day. Tomorrow it is gearbox time. Sit back and watch the Bulls thump the Lions.

Work on the Engine

On Tuesday 10th my long awaited package arrived from Raceline! Inside: Lightweight flywheel, ARP bolts, Kent 210hp cams, valve springs, valve spring retainers, water rail, a cam cover and a host of other bits and pieces I needed, including a new clutch and a starter.

That evening is spent fitting the valves to the head. In a stroke of bad luck one of the little conical valve retainers goes PING! and is instantly teleported to the universe where these small parts go, never to be seen again. So I am one valve short of a full head. No matter I ordered another one (You can buy them singly!). On fitting valves, you can NOT pay me enough to do it again - it has to be one of the worst tasks you can do on an engine. I merrily assembled the inlet side, and then realised I had put the valves in, in the wrong order, I had not checked end which was the front of the head. Doh! Undo it all and do it again.

Advice to all: BUY A DECENT VALVE SPRING COMPRESSOR!!!!

My next move was to check the fit of the water rail to the head - something I should have done first. As luck has it the head I have is an old one and the water rail is meant for newer engines so my head has a couple of threaded bosses where the new heads don't have any, so it is off the the local engineering works to machine off the offending bits, so it can fit.

I move to the flywheel and thankfully that goes on to the correct torque - 95 ft lb!! =8O

Then I discover I have no clutch cover bolts. Grrr!!! So I can't fit the clutch and line it up using the input shaft.

I now have run out of things to do on the engine so last night I move to the gearbox with the intention of assembling the mainshaft. I assemble the shaft as per the instructions but to my chagrin I have a thin washer left over, which clearly has the staining of a splines on it so it fits SOMEWHERE but the exploded diagram does not show it. I dissassemble, check and reassemble - everything fits where it should. Then I see it is the same internal diameter as the 5th driving gear securing nut on the layshaft so it fits below the 12 sided nut, but is not shown on the diagram. Phew!!!!

So the mainshaft is assembled, I can only assemble the gearbox once I have got the selector shaft seal, and used the input shaft to line up the clutch once I have the clutch cover bolts.

The gaskets for the gearbox were toast so with the aid of some lipstick, gasket paper, a craft knife and a 11mm punch, I have created some new ones. It is quite simple, coat the surface with lipstick, press on the paper, you now have a pink outline on the paper, cut out with a craft knife and punch the holes. Piece of old takkie - very professional looking in a garish Revlon pink.

So to date I have a half finished engine, and a half finished gearbox.

We are getting awfully close to being able to fit the engine to the chassis and if I don't get the uprights and shocks soon I am going to be held up.

Progress on the Diff

This weekend was a pretty lax one.

First order of business was to collect the bearings from the local BMG agent on Friday. R800 later I had a front input shaft bearing 566096, rear mainshaft bearing 362021, Tail seal CR13527 (14.3 X 25.37 X 6.35), but no selector shaft oil seal. OK, so I stuck those away and on this morning I had a fresh look at the diff.

I have made mention of the oil seep from the front pinion and how I would have to replace the seal that sits behind the flange.

Now I really did not want to take the diff all the way out and I didn't want Hypoid oil all over the floor so I undid the front and rear mounts (the central mounts were not in yet) and removed the drive shafts. I hoisted up the diff with the flange up so the oil would stay in the box and I pulled the flange with a puller. This was the easy part. Behind it lay the seal which was dug in tighter than a tick, and nothing less than total destruction of the seal was going to get it out. Having done so I replaced the seal. I noted a worn groove on the flange so I seated the seal just a little deeper in its recess so it would have a fresh surface to seal on.

So I tighten that lot up and set to putting the diff back in its proper place. What a horror story this was, the damn thing is so clumsy you do need 3 hands - 2 to lift and hold in position, and one to slide in the bolts.

As it turned out, I was able to get in the 2 front mounts, but the bolt for the left centre mount refused to catch the thread. A mirror and strong light revealed the thread was damaged. Off to the hardware store to buy an M12 tap.

I cleaned up the offending thread and hey presto the two centre mounts were in but now the rear mount would not line up with the matching holes in the rear aluminium mounting plate. The mount wanted to be 3mm low and 5mm to the right of the holes. I could live with the low part, but the off-centre part I was not so sure.

OK, I was at a bit of a crossroads here, obviously the bobbin brackets welded to the frame were off so the left hand spacer was too "fat" forcing the diff over to the right. What I did was to drill new holes to accommodate the diff as she lay but I am going to have to relook at this because you can pick up that the diff is not exactly perpendicular to the mounting plate, but only if you knew and only if you look very, very closely. What this would do in operation I do not know but I am fairly sure that some sort of vibration would result as the main propshaft would not be inline with the diff, and the road wheels would not be perpendicular to the drive shafts.

So next weekend I am going to do this all over again.

I have just received notification my box of bits from Raceline has arrived so I will see those on Monday.

Slight setbacks

Ok, y'all read how we suffered to put the diff into its spot - well I discovered yesterday that the diff has a slight leak from the input pinion oil seal. I addition to that, I got the 12mm bobbins from the factory. After installing them, I found that there is no way in this world or the next that THAT particular diff is going to fit at the front, rear and centre mounting points. I am guessing that the rear mounts are going to have to be modified to suit the set-up. So out she comes.

This means that all my hard work installing the fuel tank will have to be undone. Curses. Alastair is going to blow a fuse.

The pistons that I sent to have fitted to the rods? Well the guy doing the fitting let one of the gudgeon pin retaining circlips "get away" in that it went "PING" never to be seen again. Well, you can't have 3 pistons fully clipped and one with only one circlip (spoils the balance you see...) so I told 'em to remove all the circlips and replace them with all new circlips of a different type. Not too sure they are actually needed as the stock set-up does not have circlips but Cosworth must have supplied them for a reason....

More positive aspects of the weekend....

I cadged one of my old pistons and set about fitting the Cosworth rings to the bores. Very much to my surprise the rings fit with no modification, the gaps are all within spec.

After I was unsuccessful with getting the pistons I also started with fitting the bearings, crankshaft and cradle to the block. Torqued it all up as per the book. It rotates smoothly and no trace of play. Installed the new rear crank seal and oil pump too.

Then I got carried away and started to fit my fancy low-profile sump but stopped in time because the pistons were not in yet! Stopped for the day and shrouded the block with a new black garbage bag.

I also finally made sense of the gearbox diagram and put all the gears loose where I could on the main shaft, now I am just awaiting the bearings and seals and I can put it together. But NOT before I get the spigot bearing, flywheel and clutch from Raceline because I need the input shaft to line up the clutch disc and flywheel before I bolt the cover to the flywheel. I also memorised the re-assembly procedure in my head. Fortunately I will be reassembling with the parts clean and lightly oiled, which is always so much more pleasant.

I used my Dremel to polish up the face(s) of the sandwich plate on the gearbox because whoever last stuck the gasket on must have used self-petrifying gorilla snot. No amount of scraping could remove it, so I reverted to the polishing wheel. Worked like a charm.