how to build an engine at the speed of plate tectonics

It's been about three or four weeks, now, that I've planned to make big progress on the engine build over the weekend, and then gotten about half a step into the job and not been able to go any further.

After getting the lower end together, the next thing was to install the cam and timing gears.  So, I sat down one Saturday morning and pulled out the instructions for installing the timing gears.  The instructions said to install the cam thrust plate.  Cam thrust plate ... cam thrust plate ... I don't have a cam thrust plate.

Turns out that big block Chevys before the 1980s didn't have cam thrust plates.  During that era, they all had flat tappet cams, and since the cam lobes are ground on an angle in order to spin the tappets, they decided to use that angle to also make the tappets constantly push the cam back in the block.  That way, you only need one thrust surface, which is where the back of the cam timing gear rides on the front of the engine block.

But, if you use a roller cam, then your lifters aren't supposed to spin, so there's no angle on the cam lobe, which means that it is free to move forwards in the block, which means you need to stop it from doing that.  This is done by way of a "cam button," which is installed on the front of the cam, and which butts up against the inside of the timing cover to keep the cam from moving forwards.

The two main types of cam button are nylon, or roller.  The nylon button is a hunk of nylon that rubs on the timing cover.  The roller button is steel and has roller bearings so that it doesn't rub on the inside of the timing cover.  It costs about twice as much as the nylon button, but that's about $8 compared to about $4, so I decided to get the roller button.

It seemed to me at the time that the stock stamped steel timing cover would be a little flimsy for locating the cam, but they say this is how it's done, so I just went ahead and ordered a cam button.

In the mean time, I decided to at least install the crank timing gear.  Comp Cams recommends that you buy a tool and an adapter for this job, but it's kind of expensive, and I thought, hey, I can make that stuff, and save some money.  So, I made an adapter out of a piece of pipe, and I figured I'd just use a harmonic balancer bolt to pull the balancer on (that's what I did on the Corvair).

To make the adapter, I used a pipe nipple and a pipe cap.  The pipe was large enough to fit over the crank snout, but it was also big enough for the harmonic balancer bolt to fit through.  By cutting the end off of the cap and flipping it around, I could make a piece that would prevent the bolt from passing through the pipe.

Here are pictures of the pipe pieces, to show the concept:

 

As purchased:

As modified:

As assembled:

So, I had an adapter, but it was a little too long for the bolt to reach through it, so I cut it down a bit.  Trouble was, I didn't realize that by the time I had cut it down to what I thought was the right length, it was going to bottom out on the front of the crankshaft.

So, I went to install the gear, and the adapter bottomed out.  But I didn't realize it had bottomed out, I just thought it was taking a lot of force to push the timing gear on.  So, I'm cranking away on what I didn't realize was two unmovable objects, and then I notice that, hey, I've been cranking pretty good here, but nothing's moving much.  So I try to back the bolt out, and ... it won't back out, either.  Now I'm panicking.  In addition to the fact that crankshafts are not cheap, there is also all the time that I've put into building the bottom end up, and that will have to all be un-done and re-done if I have to replace the crankshaft, or even remove it for repair work.  Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!!!

Eventually I was somehow able to extricate the bolt, but when it came out, it was missing about a quarter inch of threads on the end.  I should mention, I guess, that I was using the old harmonic balancer bolt for this, not the new one.  Anyway, it looked like this:

 

So, I'm thinking, crap, I stripped this thing out, but it really looks like the threads just came off the bolt, maybe the threads in the crank are OK, or maybe they can be salvaged.  So I took the new harmonic balancer bolt and tried to thread it into the crank, but it wouldn't start.  So, I went to Harbor Freight and got a tap and die set with fine-thread taps, and I tried to clean up the damaged threads in the crank.  I got it to where I could run the new bolt in and out by hand, although it feels a little tight.  I never ran the tap all the way down the hole, I just cleaned up the damaged threads at the front of the hole.  It's not a very good picture, but I tried to show the threads here:

 

 

The shiny silver threads at the front are the damaged ones, the gold-ish color towards the back haven't been touched.
 
So next, I did one of the things that I should have done in the first place and went down to Auto Zone to rent their harmonic balancer installer.  It has short adapters to fit different crankshafts, and a long bolt that threads into the adapter, and then a larger tube which is threaded on its outside, and which the long bolt runs down the middle of.  So you mount all that to the front of the crank, and then there's a nut threaded on to the larger threaded tube, and you run that nut down to pull the harmonic balancer (or crank timing gear in my case) on to the crank.  There's a bearing that goes between the nut and the balancer, too, but you get the idea.  Also, I still needed to make an adapter out of a new piece of pipe, but the extra length of the installer tool allowed me to make the adapter long enough so that it wouldn't bottom out.

OK, so anyway, the adapter for the installer tool has less thread length than the harmonic balancer bolt, as you can see here:

 

 

The adapter was going to be mostly grabbing the damaged threads, so I thought, well, this will be a good test to see if those threads are good for anything at all.  So I set it all up, started turning the nut to install the timing gear, and the whole installer tool was turning.  I thought it was turning in the damaged threads, and I thought, "crap, those threads aren't doing anything at all, they're junk, I'm screwed."  But, there are flats on the tool, so I tried putting a wrench on there to try to stop it from turning, and then I was able to use it to run the timing gear down.

HOWEVER ... I realized later that I was wrong ... it wasn't that the installer tool was turning in the crank threads, it's that the large threaded tube on the installer tool is just clamped between the long inner bolt and the adapter, but it isn't really secured to either one very well.  That's why they put flats on it, because if you don't put a wrench on the tube, it will just spin around the inner bolt.  I would guess that is by design, so that you are not transmitting any torque to the adapter, which might strip out otherwise.  Smart design.  Stupid operator, but smart design.

I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, though.  My original thought was that it looked like there were a lot of good threads behind the damaged threads, and that maybe a longer bolt could reach back and engage more of those good threads.  So eventually, after messing around with some other of this other stuff, I started trying to figure out what was the longest bolt that could fit into the hole, so that I could use as much thread as possible if I could find a longer bolt.

After taking a lot of measurements, I decided that there isn't even room for another quarter inch of bolt length.  You might be able to fit 3/16in., but not any significant amount.  So then I thought, well, what's my thread engagement right now, and I measured that out and decided that right now the bolt should be engaging about .515in. of good threads, plus another 0.2in. of the damaged/repaired threads.  I looked up an online calculator for minimum recommended thread engagement, and it was saying that for this size bolt, minimum thread engagement should be somewhere around 0.45in., which would mean that at .515in., I'd have more than the recommended minimum just with good threads, not even counting the repaired threads, which I think are also doing some good.

So basically, after all that and everything else, I've decided that I am OK just using the bolt I have in the crank as it is.  So, most of the money I saved by not buying the recommended tools went into buying the tap and die set.  But, when you consider all the money that I saved by shortening my life by a couple years through anxiety and worrying over the damaged crank, I still came out ahead.

 

Anyway, during that same week, my roller cam button showed up.  Now we're back on track.  Eager to make some progress, the next weekend I sat down with my instructions again, and I read a section that I somehow missed the three times that I previously looked through the instructions.  It explains about how the stock stamped steel timing cover is too flimsy to locate the cam accurately, and you really should get a cast aluminum or otherwise stiffened timing cover.  Son of a gun, seems like I've heard something like that before ... somewhere several paragraphs ago....

So, I look through a bunch of aluminum timing covers, and eventually order one that seems to be the best mix of not-too-pricey and not-too-flashy.  I didn't really want a lot of aluminum parts on the engine, but at least there's a good reason for this one, I guess.

I guess I should also mention that somewhere along the line with all this other stuff, I tried to put the cam timing gear on, and I found that it wouldn't go on.  It felt like the locating dowel was a press fit, but I was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be a press fit.  I think that, far and away, the best thing about Comp Cams is their tech support.  I mentioned in an earlier post about how I filled in their forms to get a cam recommendation, and I was contacted by an actual person with whom I was able to carry on a dialogue.  Customer service.  What a crazy concept.

Well, ever since then, even months after the sale, if I have a question, I can e-mail that same guy, and he will get back to me quickly (often less than an hour, but always within a business day) with an intelligent and helpful response.  So, I asked him, hey, is this cam gear supposed to be a press fit?  He said no, they must have put the wrong dowel in it.  So, we went around and around on options, but eventually I decided to just open up the hole in the cam gear a little bit with a rat tail file.  He said that would be fine.  He even said that he has run cams without a dowel, the main purpose of the dowel is just to make it so that you can't put the gear on in the wrong orientation.

Anyway, eventually my aluminum timing cover showed up.  I went out to the garage on Saturday to test-fit the cam button with the timing cover, and ... the timing cover wouldn't even bolt up to the block with the button in place.  It wasn't even close, either, it was almost a quarter of an inch away from the block.  So, I decided the thing to do is to find a machine shop that can remove some material from the cam button and the inside of the timing cover, to bring cam endplay into spec.

While taking measurements to try to determine how much material to remove from each part, I noticed that the cam timing gear is about 0.010" back towards the block from where the crank timing gear is.  So, there is a company that offers a thrust washer to put behind the cam gear, where it bears against the front of the block.  The cam gear needs to be machined to accommodate that thrust washer, but that works out well, because right now my plan is to put that thrust washer behind the cam gear, then get the gear machined by 0.010" less than the thrust washer's thickness, to bring the cam gear back in line with the crank gear.

At the same time, I'll get the same shop to machine about 1/8" off the cam button's length, and about 1/8" off the inside of the timing cover.  That should put me close on camshaft endplay, close enough that I can assemble the parts and measure it.  Then if I am over the endplay spec, I can measure how much I'm over by and get that thickness machined off the mounting flange of the timing cover, to bring it back towards the block and tighten up the endplay to bring it in spec.  That would also help if I end up having to run a 1965-style short water pump, instead of the 1972-style long one that I am used to, which will be a whole other thing ... but, one thing at a time....

file this under "C.S."

Older engines, especially larger older engines, are sometimes referred to as, "fix-it-with-a-hammer simple," or "fix-it-with-a-file simple," or various variations on this theme.  The idea is that they were made to be so robust, and with such loose tolerances, that no particular precision is required when working on them.  It is often said with admiration and nostalgia for the "good old days," but can also be used with snide derision.  The latter typically comes from someone who is either trying to sell you a newer engine, or someone who has just purchased a newer engine.

 

I would not classify my 1972 LS3 as either "fix-it-with-a-hammer," or "fix-it-with-a-file," but that doesn't mean that nothing ever gets hammered or filed in the process of working on it.

 

One thing that required filing was the piston rings.  Piston ring end gap is the size of the gap between the ends of the piston ring when it is installed in the cylinder bore.  On a stock engine, this is set per the manufacturer's specifications, and when stock piston rings are ordered, they almost always come with the correct end gap.  Performance engine builders, however, may want to set their piston ring end gap at some size other than what the manufacturer recommends.  For that reason, aftermarket piston rings can be purchased with zero end gap, and then filed to give whatever end gap specification the engine builder wishes to use.

 

I accidentally ordered piston rings that were not gapped, and would require filing.  Here is a picture showing that the ends of the piston ring butt up to each other in the cylinder bore.

 

 

The ring is actually made to have a negative gap, i.e., the ends want to overlap each other.  You would never want to assemble an engine that way, but I guess it allows the engine builder set any gap he wants to.  I suppose it might even also allow the engine builder to run the ring in a larger cylinder bore, if he wanted to reduce ring tension or something like that.

 

So, I accidentally ordered these rings, and then I found out that since I'm not using stock pistons, the piston manufacturer recommends a different end gap than the stock specification, anyway.  Their piston runs the top ring closer to the piston crown than a stock piston, so the ring tends to get hotter, which means it will expand more, which means it has to have a larger end gap or else the ends will butt up against each other and start to buckle the ring.

So, I ordered a ring end gap filing tool online.  There are much nicer versions of this tool, which are also much more expensive, but I figured I could get by with a little hand-cranked version.  I unbolted the bench vise and swivelled it out of the way, and used one of its bolt holes in the bench to hold the end gap filer down:

Coincidentally, I mentioned this project to a guy I work with, who used to work for Ford in their NASCAR program.  He said that Ford told the NASCAR engine builders to just let them (Ford) know what size ring end gaps they (the engine builders) wanted, and Ford would supply the rings.  He said that Ford just didn't think the race teams were careful enough when they filed their rings, and so Ford preferred for them not to do it.  So ... that was a little daunting, considering that professional engine builders supposedly can't do this job reliably, but I decided to just take it as good advice to be extra careful.  Anyway, I'd already ordered the end gap filer.

Here is a photo of a ring on the end gap filer, ready for filing:

The tool is very simple in concept, but the key feature is the two little pins sticking up on either side of the grinding wheel. In theory, you could use a hand file to file piston ring end gaps, but the danger there is that you have to be really careful to make sure that the ring ends stay parallel to each other (and perpendicular to the cylinder wall). I didn't trust myself to do that sixteen times (two rings per cylinder), so I bought the end gap filer. The vertical pins are positioned so that when you place a ring on the filer and push it up against the pins, it will keep the end that you are filing parallel to the grinding wheel, which will ensure that it will be parallel to the other ring end when you are done.

They say that you should always turn the hand crank towards yourself as you are filing.  I assume this is so that any burrs that don't get removed will be pointing away from the cylinder wall when the ring is installed.

So, you put a ring on the filer, turn the crank some, file a little material off, and then you have to check your progress.  To check the end gap, you install the ring in a cylinder and then measure the gap with a set of feeler gauges.  To install the ring, you just put it in the cylinder, and then use a piston to push it down into the bore.  The purpose of using the piston (upside down, with its crown touching the ring) is to keep the ring square in the bore.  If the ring isn't square, you won't get a good measurement.

I read some texts that said you should measure the end gap at the bottom of the piston's travel, and others that said you should measure it at the top of the piston's travel, but either way, they're basically saying to measure it close to where ring reversal will occur.  I did it at the top, because that way you can use the ring grooves on the piston to see where ring reversal will be.  In other words, if you have the piston upside down with its crown on the ring, and the corresponding ring groove is at the deck of the cylinder block, then that should put the ring in the area where ring reversal will occur.

(Regarding the photo above:  sometimes when you don't know what you're doing, you might wear a shirt that makes it look like you do.  Sometimes that shirt might have a nametag on it.  Sometimes that name might not be yours.  Sometimes that name might be "Kaiser.")

After the ring is in the bore, you can remove the piston and measure the end gap using a set of feeler gauges.  This photo shows a properly (I hope) gapped top ring in the bore:

For the ring set that I got, the top rings are a much harder material than the second rings.  I had to file a ring for more than five minutes continuously to even start to get close to the proper end gap.  When I did the second rings, I actually took off too much material from several of them because I didn't realize that they were a much softer material, and even after I knew that they were, I had trouble adjusting to how much easier it was to file them.  I ordered some more second rings to start over and get it right.

After the rings were filed, that meant I could finally start assembling the engine's bottom end.  First, I built up eight rod-and-piston assemblies, and installed the rings on the pistons.  The piston manufacturer said to use an engine assembly lube on the piston wrist pins, but not grease.  The engine assembly lube I'd been planning to use was Lubriplate, but the Lubriplate tube said "grease" on it, so I decided not to use it on the wrist pins.  Instead I used a Lucas Oil engine assembly lube, which is a green oil that is thicker and stickier than engine oil.  I figured it seemed like it fit the bill for what the piston manufacturer wanted, and it also has a nice minty smell to it (no, really!).  After building up the rod-and-piston assemblies, I was finally ready to start putting pistons in the block.

When I worked in my first job after college, I got to go to Switzerland to get trained in how to work on a 20L V8 diesel that our company made.  Their process for lubricating the piston and rings before installing them in the engine was just to dunk the whole piston in a tub of oil.  I thought that seemed like a smart and effective method, so I cut the top off of an empty five-quart oil jug, and poured in one quart of my camshaft break-in oil.  That gave me a convenient source of break-in oil for dunking pistons, as well as for lubricating cylinder walls, and anything else that needed oil.

It's messy, but it's effective.  I put a large zip-lock bag over it to keep it clean when I'm not using it.

So, one at a time, I dunked a piston, put it in the piston ring compressor, lowered the dangling connecting rod down into the appropriate cylinder, and tapped the piston down into the cylinder.

Then I seated the rod on its journal on the crankshaft, and torqued the rod cap.

Eight happily torqued rod caps:

A left bank's worth of happy pistons:

And if you can't tell that those pistons are happy ... well, I just can't help you with that.

forest update

So what's actually going on here?  I always get distracted looking at trees, and lose track of the forest.

Body work has been steadily progressing, probably because it's the one thing that I'm not responsible for.  Every time I see the guy at the body shop, he shakes his head slowly with a wide-eyed look and says, "I never would have guessed it was that bad under there."  Maybe it's an elaborate ruse, but I believe him.  I don't tell him that I'm not at all surprised, just because it seems like this is the way my life tends to go.

They ended up ordering a lot of brand-new, reproduction sheet metal for the car, including quarter panels, the filler panel between the rear window and the trunk lid, a new radiator core support, and new door skins.  There are other parts they would have liked to order, but they aren't available, like the trunk lid, the C-pillars, and probably just a complete 1965 Impala, really.  For those items, they just had to rebuild what was there using sheet metal.

Here's a picture of Matilda with the passenger side quarter panel cut off:

And here's a close-up of the C-pillar on that side, where you can see the remains of someone else's efforts to pull out a dent at some time in the past:

There was a small depression in the chrome trim on the drip rail, like someone had pressed their thumb into a piece of clay.  It fell right in line with that row of holes where someone was pulling out a dent, but I never would have guessed that all that was under there.  Can I pick 'em, or what?

Here's a photo of the driver side, after they put the new quarters on, and with the new filler panel between the back window and the trunk lid:

Notice, also, that they transferred the threaded holes for the blowout straps over from the old filler panel to the new one. They've been very kind about not laughing at me and telling me what a stupid idea that is.

And here is a photo after they had primered the car:

 

It's not a very good picture, I guess I didn't hold the camera steady, or maybe the lens was smudged, or maybe it's just that the full glory of the restored body can't be accurately captured by today's meager technology, it's hard to say.

 

The yellow masking is on there because they were getting ready to shoot the underside of the car with "Lizard Skin."  It's an undercoating that the bodyshop guy swears by. He said it's water-based, but once it cures you need a grinder to take it off. So it gives excellent protection from gravel and moisture and other stuff that wants to ruin the underside of your car.  It is ceramic-based, and it supposedly also helps with insulation from noise and heat.

 

Meanwhile, several weeks ago they got the frame stripped down, blasted and powdercoated, and delivered it to my garage.  I've got it sitting there on jackstands, awaiting installation of the suspension and drivetrain:

It is somewhat maddening to look at it sitting there, knowing that I have 90% of the parts I need to put it together, but unable to start without those last 10%.  I've got the front control arms bolted up now, but I need to get my rearend rebuilt before I can really put the rear suspension together.  There are a few other loose ends on the front suspension, too.  At the same time, I am making slow progress on engine assembly, so I will mount the engine and transmission before the frame goes back to the bodyshop.  I will also run some fuel and brake lines.

To try to organize my thoughts on what all needs to be done, I created a little work flowchart, and I try to get a little bit done every night:

It's similar to a lot of other common project management tools, but I think I kind of invented this exact format when I was working on a project at my old job.  One thing I like about this format is that it shows, at a glance, all the things that I could be working on, so if I don't feel like doing one thing at the moment, I can see what other items I could be working in parallel.

Also, as I go along, I typically remove items that are completed to make room to break out the next tasks into smaller, more detailed tasks.  That helps me remember all the little things that need to be done, and gives the satisfaction of crossing things off as "finished."

Anyway, it helps me to anticipate parts that I'm going to need in the future, but it also helps me to focus on doing what needs to be done next, instead of getting side-tracked on things that I don't need right now.  Like painting rocker covers, for example....

really important stuff

"The Devil is in the details."  This common phrase is often used to express the idea that overlooking some relatively minor thing can often compromise what might have otherwise been a successful plan.

Personally, I like details.  In my case, there could be an alternate interpretation, taken to mean that I am often sidetracked from what's important when I get distracted by some minor detail.

For example:  rocker covers.  I have been working on getting a set of rocker covers painted, even though I have a lot of other, more important things to do before I'm ready for rocker covers.

I wanted to re-use the stamped steel rocker covers that were on Bertha's engine.  I just like the look of the simple, stamped steel covers, and I don't know that I've ever seen aftermarket rocker covers that I was excited enough about them to make me want to shell out the money for them.

But, as long as I was blasting them clean and painting them, I wanted to do something a little bit special with the paint job.  In the early 1960s, it was standard practice for stock cars to have their engine's horsepower rating painted down each side of the hood.  I think that "410 HP" was a common number at the time.  Who knows how accurate these numbers actually were, but that was the practice at the time.  These were the days before sponsorships became sufficiently lucrative for a company to pay to have its name and logo across the whole hood.

By the mid-'60s, the power rating had been replaced by engine displacement.  NASCAR had imposed a limit of 430 cubic inches for Grand National cars, which is the series that grew into the modern Sprint Cup series.  Common displacements were the Dodge/Plymouth 426, the Ford/Mercury 427, or the Chevrolet 427.  I have seen photos of some Chevys that were labelled as 396s, some of the other GM makes ran some other displacements, and I think Ford qualified either their 428 or their 429 for competition for at least a little while, but most cars were 426s or 427s.

The displacement might be written as "427 C.I.D.," or "427 CU. IN.," and there may have been other variants, but those are the two that show up most commonly in photos I've seen.  Anyway, I just always thought it looked cool, and I had even considered several options for getting Matilda's displacement painted on her hood.  In the end, I decided that it would probably attract more attention than I would prefer, so I decided not to do that.

But, when I started thinking about how to paint the rocker covers, I had the idea that I could mimick the old hood lettering on the rocker covers.  In Matilda's case, her engine displacement is 414 cubic inches.  That comes from the original 402 cubic inches, plus a 0.060" overbore.

I had already blasted and cleaned the rocker covers, and painted them Chevy engine orange, so the next thing was to start going through all the MicroSoft Word fonts, to try out different letters and numbers, and different combinations of italics, bold, shadow, and so on.  In the end, I settled on "Impact" for the lettering, in italics, with a shadow.  The periods for "Impact" are square, though, and I wanted circles, so I used "Tw Cen MT Condensed Extra Bold" for the periods.  I mixed and matched font sizes to get everything in the proportions I wanted.  Then I printed out four copies, two for each rocker cover.  When I had the four copies, I carefully stacked them on top of each other with the edges aligned, and then cut all four of them at the same time with a razor blade:

 

The purpose was to cut them down to a size closer to the size of the rocker covers, but to keep all the edges aligned with each other, so that later I could line up the lettering with the shadow.

 

Next, I taped off the rocker cover in the area where I was going to be painting:

Then I took one printout and taped it in place, over the masking tape:

 

You can't see it very well in that photo, but once I had a printout taped in place, I took a pen and traced its four corners on to the masking tape.  These marks would allow me to line up the next printout, when I was ready to do the lettering.

 

My original idea was to trace over the lettering with a ballpoint pen.  I thought if I pressed hard enough, it would leave an impression in the tape, and I could go back and cut through the impression with a razor blade.  As it turned out, I couldn't see the impression well enough, so I ended up using the razor blade to cut the tape right through the paper.  Then I removed what was left of the paper and peeled up the unwanted sections of masking tape:

 

That looked like a pretty good setup, so next I masked off the rest of the rocker cover with paper.  I usually like to use junkmail advertisements for that, but I had just taken the recycling out, so I used some packing paper from a shipment of parts that I'd received:

After paint, I waited several days before removing the masking to check the result:

It came out pretty good.  Notice that I was careful not to remove the tape that had my alignment marks for the next printout.

The color of the shadow is called "cast iron," from VHT's high temperature engine paints.  My original plan was to have black lettering with a cast iron shadow, but when I saw how dark the cast iron color came out, I was afraid that black lettering would just blend into the shadow.  The more I thought about it, I realized there would already be a lot of black in the engine bay, so I decided that maybe white lettering would stand out better, anyway.

Another printout was taped in place, using those marks to place it correctly, then the lettering and numbers were cut out with a razor, and the whole cover got masked again:

I wanted to make sure not to leave orange gaps between the lettering and the shadow, so I tried to trim back slivers of tape until I could just barely see the edge of the shadow.  Then, I sprayed the lettering in white.

Several days later, I removed the masking:

All in all, I think it came out pretty good.  It took me a little while to adjust to the look of the white lettering, but it's really grown on me.

So, this has been a little bit of a distraction from other jobs that need attention, but on the other hand, sooner or later I will need rocker covers, and now that they are painted, they will be ready.

Although, just for the record ... I haven't actually checked that the stock rocker covers will fit over the modified valvetrain.  But, if they don't ... I don't know ... wall art?

KILLVAIR

So, I'm falling behind again, and in more ways than one.  Instead of getting work done and not writing about it, this time I'm not even getting work done.  Instead, I've been sidetracked by the Corvair, which tried to kill me a couple months ago when the steering failed on the way to work.  Hence the name of this post.  A lot of people, when a car tries to kill them, will call it "Christine," ripping off the old Steven King story.  But I thought, hey, I'm a special shining star, and an original-thinker; I will rip off someone else.  So I named this post after the one and only, the great KILLDOZER.

So the steering failed on the way to work, just a couple blocks from my house.  It was a very, very, very lucky thing that I was just accelerating away from a stoplight, and not out on the interstate, and that I was already in the right lane, and that the car drifted to the right as I applied the brakes.  I got it stopped, got my phone out, and then thought, "Wait ... who am I going to call?"  So I got out, got down under the front of the car, and discovered that a cotter pin must have broken and allowed the castle nut that holds the centerlink to the pitman arm to back off, so that the pitman arm came loose and I lost steering.  To get it out of the street, I took a coat hanger from the trunk, cut off a section, and stuck it through the cotter pin hole to hold the steering linkage together well enough to get me home.

In the short term, I made the minimum repairs necessary to make the car driveable.  But the steering felt really sloppy, and according to the Corvair shop manual, cranking the steering wheel all the way to the stop while the pitman arm is disconnected can damage the steering box.  Recalling my panicked efforts to steer a car with no steering, it occurred to me that this might be the case.  So I replaced the steering box.  That made things better, but the steering still felt a little loose and wiggly.

So eventually, I decided that I should put in new bushings and ball joints in the front suspension.  I've been thinking for a while that this needed to be done, and I decided to just do it before something else came apart on me.  Seemed like the easiest way to get this done in one weekend (so that I could drive to work on Monday) would be to buy rebuilt control arms with new bushings and ball joints already installed.

I ordered those parts, they showed up, and a couple weeks ago I set aside the weekend to do the job.  The first three control arms went relatively easily, and I was in great shape to finish the job on time, but then I got to the driver side upper control arm, and everything went south.

It was Saturday night when I got to the driver side upper control arm and discovered that neither one of the bolts holding it in place would budge.  It was pretty late, and after cranking on them with various different cheater bars, I decided that in the morning I would walk over to Lowe's and buy a cordless impact driver.  I'd been thinking about getting one for a while, anyway, so it seemed like a good time to get some use out of it.

So, Sunday morning I walked to Lowe's and got an impact driver, impact sockets, an extension, and a few other things.  Brought it all home, charged the batteries for the impact driver, put it on the first bolt, and promptly rounded it off.  Thinking that maybe getting the other bolt loose would open up some other options for me on the first one, I promptly rounded off the other bolt, as well.  During an extended public schooling career, and time spent in the diesel industry, as well as some exposure to the lobster fishing industry, I have learned a few curse words, and some of these may or may not have been deployed in the garage at that time.

When I did the passenger side upper, one of the bolt heads had broken completely off, which worked out great, because it just meant that I didn't need to work the nut all the way off of the bolt, I just drove the broken bolt shank out of the hole.  So, on the driver side I thought, maybe I can cut off the head of one of these bolts with the Dremel, and maybe then I'll be able to figure out a way to get the control arm off the rest of the way.

So, I got the Dremel out, and carefully cut off the head of one bolt.  I couldn't even really tell where the edges of the bolt were, it just looked like a solid piece of metal.  I tried to use a punch and a hammer to drive the bolt out, but it still wouldn't budge.  At this point, I felt like I had basically destroyed the car beyond use, and still hadn't made any progress.  Morale was not high.

I was checking Craigslist for used car opportunities when it occurred to me that, if I were to drop the whole front crossmember out from under the car, then I could get at the back side of the bolt, and maybe then I could get the control arm off.  By that time it was Sunday night, and there is a rental car place down the street from me, so I decided to rent a car for the week, and drop the crossmember later.

It was probably the next Friday night by the time I had time to work on it much again.  So, I dropped the crossmember down Friday night.  I wasn't sure if it would balance on a jack very well, so I took all the bolts loose a little bit (also needed to disconnect steering linkage and front brakelines first), then jacked the car up by the crossmember (with jackstands still under the frame rails, as well), pulled the bolts, lowered the car to the floor, then jacked the car up by the frame rails to lift the body up off of the crossmember, and rolled the crossmember out.

Of course, three out of the six bolts broke off.  Four out of the six are threaded into cage nuts, and one of the broken ones was in a cage nut, so that was just a question of extracting the nut from its cage and replacing it.  The other two broken bolts would need to be extracted, though.

Fortunately YouTube has a couple of educational videos where they show you how easy it is to extract broken bolts that have been purposely broken off for the purpose of creating YouTube videos.  Unfortunately, that situation has no bearing on the real world.  I tried using a torch, I tried using penetrating oil, I tried using a torch and penetrating oil, I tried drilling the bolts and using an "E-Z-Out" extractor (biggest scam ever perpetrated on automotive hobbyists), and none of it worked.

Of course, there was also still the issue of actually removing the upper control arm from the crossmember.  With the crossmember off of the car, I could get at the nut on the backside of the bolt, but I still couldn't get anything to budge.  It was like the crossmember, control arm shaft, bolts, nuts and everything had just fused into one solid piece of steel.  I cut the nuts off, and I still couldn't move the control arm shaft.  I tried all sizes and types of pry bars, I tried a hammer and chisel, but I still couldn't move it.

Finally I just took an angle grinder with a cutoff wheel, and I cut the ends off of the control arm shaft so that I could remove the control arm itself, and then I cut right through the middle of the control arm shaft.  Then I took a hammer and started banging away on the cut ends in the middle of the shaft, to use them as levers to try to turn the bolts and loosen them up.  Finally the bolts loosened up and turned a little bit, and I was able to remove the cut off control arm shaft halves, and drive the remains of the bolts out with a punch and a hammer.

After bolting up the new control arm to the crossmember, there was still the issue of what to do about the broken bolts in the frame.  In the end, I decided to just drill them out and put in Heli-Coil inserts to create holes for new bolts. That was also easier said than done, but once I bought a set of cobalt coated drill bits, it went much better. Titanium isn't good enough, get cobalt.  I decided to order a Heli-Coil set online, because I've never had good luck with the ones they carry on the shelf at the parts store.  I try to get the actual Heli-Coil brand, which the packaging says is manufactured by Stanley.

By this time the second weekend was about over, and I had reserved another rental car.  The Heli-Coil set arrived halfway through last week, and I installed the inserts using Permatex red threadlocker.  I let them set up over night, and then I chased each one with a tap, to clean out any excess threadlocker.

That left me ready to reassemble.  So Friday night (of weekend number three on this project) I bolted the crossmember back up under the car.  It turns out that the crossmember balances well enough on a jack, so I lined it up as best I could and pushed it up under there.  Saturday was a question of putting the shock absorbers back up in there, reconnecting brake lines, greasing ball joints, etc., etc.  Sunday my buddy Allen came down from Austin to help me bleed the brakes and attempt a rough alignment.  It drove OK after the alignment, but felt a little squirrely, so I ended up calling Pep Boys to see if they could do a proper alignment.  They said bring it on over, and later that afternoon I was driving it home.

So ... job done.  I think it will take some time to get used to the feel of the new steering.  Everything is stiffer because of all the new bushings.  When I got the car, everything was nice and worn in, but not yet worn out.  But the car does drive a lot better than it did before I started the project.  Maybe Cordelia was just getting jealous of all the attention that Matilda gets and decided to throw a fit so I'd have to spend some time with her.  Or maybe it's an inanimate assembly of steel and plastic, subject to the laws of physics.  Tough call on that one.

Matilda's runout on me

Matilda's engine is Bertha's old engine, and since Bertha had an automatic transmission, that means I don't have a bellhousing for the Muncie 4-speed that I got for Matilda.  Apparently, if you can trust the internet, bellhousings were bored when the block was line-bored at the factory, so a bellhousing ends up being matched to the block that it left the factory with.  That means that if you use a bellhousing that didn't come with your block, or if you use an aftermarket bellhousing (which is what I'm doing), then you need to check the runout of your block/bellhousing combo.

If a bellhousing is matched to a block, then the centerpoint of the bellhousing bore should be perfectly in line with the centerpoint of the block's line bore, i.e. perfectly in line with the rotating axis of the crankshaft.  If a bellhousing is not matched to the block, then there will be some offset between the centerpoint of the bellhousing bore and the centerpoint of the line bore.  Runout is a measurement of that offset, i.e. the distance between those centerpoints.

Last weekend I installed the crankshaft in my engine block.  This took a bit longer that expected, due to the time to plastigage the main bearings, and the confusing directions I had on torquing the mains.  In the end, I ignored most of the directions in favor of doing something that made some sense, instead.

You can see that I decided to go with studs for the mains, instead of bolts.  The advantage of studs is that they provide more accurate and predictable torquing.  There is less torque lost to friction, which means that more torque goes into stretching the bolt, which is what provides the clamping force to hold the parts together.  Also, because friction forces can vary from bolt to bolt, reducing the amount of torque lost to friction also reduces variation in clamp load from stud to stud.  This is all probably overkill for my application, but that's just kind of how I'm approaching this project, because it makes me feel good to know this stuff is in there, I guess.

So, once I had the crankshaft installed, that meant that I could measure my bellhousing's runout.  Wednesday night, I took the engine off the stand and put it on the floor (upside down) so that I could install the bellhousing.  Then I took a magnetic base, stuck it on the end of the crankshaft, and mounted a dial indicator to it so that its tip was resting on the inside diameter of the bellhousing bore.

The dial indicator does not need to be centered in the bore, as long as it is perpendicular to the wall of the bore, i.e. as long as it lies on the bore's diameter.  I didn't notice until I looked at the picture above that I did not have the dial indicator perfectly perpendicular, but the good news is that this will only make the readings look worse than they actually are, not better.  In other words, I might possibly get a reading that says I have a problem when I don't, but I can't get a reading that says everything's OK without everything being OK.

So, I turned the crank until I got a minimum reading, then I zeroed the dial indicator, then I turned the crank until I got a maximum.  The maximum was 0.009", which gets divided in half to give a runout of 0.0045".  You can see in the picture above where I marked the "0" point, and the ".009" point on the bellhousing.

Technically this reading is within the spec of 0.005", but only just barely.  Also, the stock dowels are not really long enough to fully engage the aftermarket bellhousing, so I would have wanted to order some longer ones, anyway.  I tapped the stock dowels halfway out so they would engage the bellhousing for this measurement, but I felt like I'd rather just have longer dowels for the final assembly.  As long as I was ordering dowels, I decided to get 0.007" offset dowels, to try to improve the runout measurement.

Lakewood has some pretty slick offset dowels, which I ordered through Summit.

 

You can see in the photo below that one end is slotted, and the other end has a flat machined on each side of it.  The slotted end is installed in the engine block, and the end with the flats is the dowel that locates the bellhousing.

 

If you look really, really, really, really, reeeeeally close, you can also see that the side with the flats is just ever so slightly shifted up in the picture, relative to the side with the slot.  This is the offset that allows these dowels to shift the position of the bellhousing.

 

The slot on the end that gets installed in the block is there to allow some flex in that end. This allows you to very easily insert the dowel into the block, and clock the dowel to the correct orientation.  Once the dowel is positioned correctly, there is a set screw that is tightened down, and this makes the slotted end solid so that it becomes a tight fit in the block that will not allow the dowel to rotate or slide out.

The picture above shows the set screw.  The picture below is an end view of the set screw in the dowel.  The four hash marks on the top side of the dowel indicate that that is the "high side," i.e. the bellhousing will be shifted towards that side of the dowel.

Below you can see the stock dowel, in place.

The dowels are pressed into through-holes, so they can be tapped out from the back side.  Below, the block with the dowel removed.

The machined flats allow you to easily clock the dowels using a wrench, as shown below.  Another advantage of the flats is that it gives you a place to rest an angle finder.  I used one to measure the angle formed by the "0" and ".009" marks that I'd made on the bellhousing when I measured initial runout.  Then I used the angle finder on the dowels' flats to set the dowels to that same angle.

Below is an end-on view of a dowel with the hash marks pointing down towards the "0" mark on the bellhousing.  Shifting the bellhousing .007" in that direction should make the .009" reading into a .002" reading, and change the 0 to a 0.007" reading.  So when the 0.002" reading is set as the new zero, then that makes the 0.007" reading into a 0.005" reading for the maximum, which gets divided by two to give a runout of 0.0025".

In actuality, the readings ended up being 0 at the old +.009" position, and only 0.002" at the old 0 position, for a runout of 0.001".  This is even tighter than expected.  I'm not sure why this is, but it may be in part due to the dial indicator not being perfectly perpendicular in the original measurement.  You can see in the photos above and below that it is not perfectly perpendicular for these readings, either.  Today I was careful to try to orient it along the bellhousing bore diameter, but I think it was actually leaning out somewhat, towards the camera, and the misalignment in these photos is partly a trick of the camera, due to the angle of the photo.

Anyway, regardless of these details, I feel good now that runout is as good as it is going to get, and well within the allowable tolerance.

Manure

Well, the owner of the body shop continues to at least feign amazement at what a piece of junk I brought him, saying that he would not have guessed from first inspection that the car would need so much work.  I am disappointed by how much damage was discovered after the body was blasted and cleaned up, but one advantage of always expecting the worst is that you are rarely unpleasantly surprised.  I appreciate his comments, though, in the sense that at least he doesn't make me feel like I should have been able avoid all of this if I'd known what to look for.  On the other hand, I saw some things once I had the car in my garage that were starting to get me concerned, and I feel like if I ever do buy another old car, I will have a better idea of what to look for, and where to look.  Anyway, I think we have at least turned a corner now where there shouldn't be much more in the way of surprises and they at least know what needs to be fixed.

Here is a picture of the trunk floor:

All the little white specks are holes that are rusted through.  You can also see the front edge of the drip trough around the trunk is jagged and holed with rust.

 

The passenger footwell looks similar: 

There was really only about one quarter of the floorpan that was useable, and even that got about a three-by-four-inch patch put in.

This picture shows the passenger side rear quarter panel, just behind the rear wheel opening:

The patch that is welded in here was in place when I bought the car.  You can see how crude it looks, but with bondo over it, I had no idea it was even there.  You can also see rust damage below it, and running up the lip of the wheel opening.  There's rust like this in various places all over the body.

 

In most cases, it is cheaper to buy a reproduction panel, cut out the rust, and weld in a new piece than it is to repair a damaged piece or make a patch panel from scratch.  If I'd bought a Chevelle or a Camaro, then pretty much every part of the car would be available as a reproduction, because those cars are very popular.  Of course, those cars also tend to be more expensive to buy because they are so popular, so I guess it's a trade-off.  But, I bought a 1965 Impala, so there are a lot of parts that are not available, and that means that the stuff has to be repaired.  I am just lucky that Dale Earnhardt made me a Chevy fan at an early age, because if nature had run its course and I'd developed into a Plymouth guy, then things would have gotten even more expensive.

 

One area on the car that required extensive repair was the part of the body that the door hinges bolt to.  What should have been a column of formed steel, sturdy enough to support the cantilevered weight of one of these big doors, was revealed to in fact be pretty much a big open hole with rusty, jagged edges.  For some reason I don't think I got any "before" or "after" pictures of that, but it has already been rebuilt by the guy at the body shop, just patched up and reconstructed, piece by piece, from bits of sheet metal.  I would have liked to see more about how he did that, and get some pictures of the repair in progress, but all I saw was that one week it was a big, gaping hole, and the next week it looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line in 1965.  Pretty impressive.

 

Another problem area was the leading edge of the dashboard, at the base of the windshield.  I noticed after I'd bought the car that it was rusted through at the corners, but after removing the windshield and blasting the body, it was revealed that the leading edge of the dash was basically perforated by rust holes all across the width of the car, to where it looked like you could almost just just tear the whole top of the dash off without a whole a lot of effort.  That was all reconstructed, also, using pieces of sheetmetal.  The picture below shows the repair before it was primered. 

I think there is some light filler on top of the repair there, which is what makes it look whitish, but it is new steel underneath.

 

When I was looking for a 1965 Impala, around the same time that I found Matilda listed on Craigslist, there was a guy advertising a pair of 1965s up in Austin.  One of them was a "parts car," and the other was an empty shell which had already had all the bodywork done on it.  He wanted to sell them together, and I didn't really want two Impalas, but I also felt like he was asking too much for the one with the bodywork done on it.  Well, I've already spent more on bodywork than what he was asking for that car, but on the other hand, I will have the peace of mind of knowing exactly what's under my paint, instead of taking someone's word that the car is solid.

 

I think another factor in my decision-making may be some feeling of guilt about letting Bertha rust away to nothing.  I get some satisfaction from knowing that I am getting a rough car restored to its "former glory," putting a car back on the road, as opposed to just sustaining a survivor.

 

Lastly, according to the liner notes of Rhino Records' "Ray Charles Anthology," Ray Charles once said, "I don't know how many times I've been asked to do 'The Star Spangled Banner.'  I've refused.  Never sang that song once.  I just don't hear myself doing it.  When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way; I want to foul it up so it reeks of my manure and no else's."  I've always remembered the gist of that quote, and I always think of it when I'm shopping for an old car.  If I see a car that's "finished," even if I like the way it's done, it doesn't hold much appeal for me as a buyer.  I know that I'm going to want to make a car my own, and I don't want to un-do someone else's work to make it what I want.  I'd always rather start with something that looks like Matilda, rather than something that looks like a finished showcar.

 

So for those reasons, I don't regret buying Matilda, even though she's turned out to need a lot more work than what I initially thought.  Of course, there's also the fact that regretting it wouldn't change anything.  We've got what we've got, and we're pushing ahead.

 

Speaking of pushing ahead, right now the body shop is waiting for parts that they've ordered.  New quarter panels are the major items, but some other pieces, too.  I am doing a poor job of making progress on my end, but I am getting some small things done.  I finished painting most of the bumper mounting brackets with POR-15.  Because of the number of coats of paint that they recommend, and the waiting time between coats, it actually requires a pretty sizeable block of time to get painting done.  There are still a lot more parts that need to be painted, and I think maybe some time this week I will try to get the crank installed in the block.  If I can at least verify that the bearing clearances are good, then maybe next weekend I will try to spend some time putting the whole bottom end together.

 

I have also been spending some time trying to figure out how I can customize the dashboard to look the way I want it to, and also make it easy to assemble and disassemble.  When I actually sat down and looked at the parts, it turned out that the dashboard will probably be a little harder to do than I first thought, but I think I'm starting to get some ideas figured out for it.

Historical Context

I like to look at race cars.  Especially old race cars, but also just race cars in general.

I have books full of pictures of old race cars, I search for videos of old race cars on YouTube, and I peruse Google Image searches of old race cars.  And pretty much any time that something with wheels and an engine is on a racetrack, on my television, I am going to watch that.

This all began, as best as I can tell, on Sunday, April 13th, 1986, my earliest memory of seeing a race on TV.

I'm not sure what it says about me as a person that I saw a man jump out of a car on to the ground, being burned by invisible fire and gesturing for his crew to put it out, and it made me think, "This is great.  I want to see more of this," but for better or for worse, a seed had been planted.

Literally the only thing that I remember about the race is the guy laying on his stomach in the pit stall and slapping the backs of his legs to indicate to his crew that the alcohol fuel was still burning him.  But, I also remember spending the rest of the afternoon riding my bike around the block while wearing my Chicago Bears football helmet, and imagining that I was a race car driver.  And I remember that in first grade we were supposed to practice writing by writing down what we did over the weekend, and I remember writing about the race and riding my bike.  So, through the modern miracle of the internet, I found that someone has actually uploaded dozens and dozens of old CART races from the 1980s, and I actually only had to watch three races from the Fall 1985-to-Spring 1986 time frame before I found the pit fire that I remembered.

As kind of a strange coincidence, the driver who was on fire was Dale Coyne, who is from Minooka, Illinois.  He now owns a race team which is based in Joliet, and when I was in college I drove down there one summer and dropped off a resume to see if they had any need for summer interns.  Not surprisingly, I didn't hear back from them.  But in an effort to illustrate my love of racing, and to put a personal touch on the cover letter, I briefly described riding my bike around the block in my Bears helmet, pretending to be a race car driver when I was in the first grade.  I didn't realize at that time that the guy who I was applying to for a job was the same guy who I had watched on TV on that afternoon in 1986.

One other thing that I think I can vaguely recall from that afternoon is my dad commenting to a neighbor, "Well, Arden discovered a new sport today," and then telling him that we had watched the race on TV.  That same neighbor's wife was a smoker, and I guess Winston cigarettes sent her a VHS video of highlights from the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (later known as the Nextel Cup Series, now known as the Sprint Cup Series), which she gave to me.  I think maybe she sent in UPC codes to get it.

I think I had seen stock car races on TV here and there before that, but almost all the NASCAR races were still on ESPN back then, and we didn't have cable.  But stock cars appealed to me quite a bit, and I loved that VHS tape.  Actually, I still have it.  That was where I first started learning about Richard Petty and David Pearson, Cale Yarbrough and Darrell Waltrip, and of course:  Dale Earnhardt.

Another name that I learned from that tape was Bobby Allison.  Bobby Allison was a great stock car driver, but he would later become significant to me because I found out that we have the same birthday, and because he drove for Junior Johnson when Johnson started running first generation Monte Carlos in the early '70s.  That was significant to me because Bertha was a first generation Monte Carlo.  And now I also recently found out that Bobby Allison was one of the drivers who drove one of the 1965 Impala stock cars that Smokey Yunick built, which strikes me as another small coincidence.  I even once found a photo of a Corvair race car that Bobby Allison raced.  This either illustrates that Bobby Allison and I share a common taste in cars, as well as a birthday, or else maybe just that Bobby Allison has raced a whole lot of different race cars.

I guess if you spend as much time as I do looking through old racing photos, stories and records, you are bound to happen on to a few coincidences here and there, but here's one more:  one of the most successful drivers to compete in a 1965 Impala was J.T. Putney, whose hometown is Arden, NC.

And all of this and a dollar-fifty might buy you a cup of coffee.  I don't really know, though, I don't drink coffee.

Body (Re-)Building

"This thing doesn't look that bad!"

Those were the first words of the body shop owner as he looked Matilda over when she arrived at his shop.  I was glad to hear that, because the more I'd looked at her after getting her home, the worse and worse I thought she looked.  Lots of evidence of bondo, and lots of rust that I hadn't noticed at first.

I dropped her off and talked to the guy about what I wanted done, but it sounded like he probably wouldn't be able to get to it for a couple weeks, at least, maybe longer.  I dropped her off on a Friday, and then the following Monday afternoon I got a text:  "Stop by the shop when you can."  This immediately set me to worrying that something had gone wrong.  My best guess was that they had found out that the car was stolen, then they had accidentally dropped a helicopter on it, and they also wanted to know if I knew anything about the ten pounds of heroin they'd found in the frame rails.  But then, you know me:  I'm an optimist.

So I drove up there Tuesday morning before work, and it turned out that they had just had some floor space open up sooner than expected, so they were starting to disassemble the car, and the guy wanted to show me all the rust they were finding as it came apart.  It turns out that his first impression wasn't quite right, but it at least made me feel better that I wasn't the only person who couldn't tell it was a rust bucket at first glance.

So far, though, he says it can all be fixed, and he and his guys are already hard at work on that.  I went in this morning before work to see how it's coming along, and they've already got the body off of the frame and on a rotisserie.  The hood and trunk lid and fenders and doors have already been blasted and primed, and the front fenders have already been worked over.  There was a guy working on block sanding the doors when I was there, and they are already lining up replacement parts for other items.  They are actually moving along on it so fast, I'm starting to worry that I won't be able to keep up on my end, and I may end up paying them storage fees or something.  I don't think the guy makes a habit of charging storage fees, but I guess we'll see how it goes.

Today when I was there the body was up on the rotisserie, and the guy was pointing out all the rust areas to me again.  It's pretty bad around the base of the windshield, sides of the windshield, around the back window, around the trunk, etc., etc.

 

Next to the rotisserie was the frame and suspension.  Looks like they haven't stripped that down yet.  A guy was supposed to be coming today to blast the body, not sure if they were planning to have him do the frame at the same time.

 

And here is one of the front fenders that they have already made good progress on.  I asked them to go ahead and fill most of the holes for mounting badges.  I'm planning to keep the emblem on the front of the car, and the one on the rear of the trunk lid, but I decided to just get rid of the side badges.  Getting rid of the hood spear, too.

So, things are moving along, actually much more quickly than I expected.  I think things will slow down when they start getting into repairing the rust on the body, but then again, they are already moving along faster than I expected, so maybe they will continue to do so...?  I guess we'll see how it goes.

It would be time to start building my engine, but right now the Corvair is keeping me busy with its own problems.  Hopefully I'll get those squared away this weekend, and I guess I probably ought to start that engine assembly in the mean time while I'm waiting for Corvair parts.

Better get to work....