Sorry - I have been so extremely busy - have to spend time with the family and the little one (6 months old), have to go to work, have to run the side business - so busy I haven't had time to update my pages. It's now February 2002 and I'm trying to memorize what happened last year, but, as I've mentioned before, the majority of your time when building a car, is spent on seemingly simple work - nothing fancy, nothing to take pictures of. You know, cleaning the parts, rubbing brushing washing blasting painting, the list goes on forever.
| Yes, I figured the best way to increase compression was to weld additional material to fill the dish on the pistons. On the left is the original piston, bead blasted. On the right is the new Egge piston, on which I welded approx 5 cc of Techno-Weld material, then coated the top with Tech Line CBC2 metallic ceramic thermal barrier coating. The skirt got coated with Tech Line dry film lubricant. These Egge pistons were 70 grams heavier than original to begin with, and with the Techno-Weld material, they are now 100 grams heavier (Techno-Weld is 90% zinc). The good news: this in an inline engine - no need to rebalance the reciprocating assy! The only mandatory thing here was to make the pistons with pins even weight, within plusminus 1 gram (hey, this is supposed to be a smooth running Buick, right?) |
I left off the lower oil control ring. We'll see what happens. Since the upper oil ring in the Grant ring set was a 3-piece type, I figured that the lower OEM one piece ring would be an overkill. Originally, both oil control rings were the 1-piece type. The worst that can happen is high oil consumption. |
| You know what - the lip seal
for balancer,
included in the Best Gasket overhaul gasket set, didn't fit the timing
cover!!!
Yes it says it only fits ´49 and newer. We are in metric Europe now, remember, so I machined, yes I did, a spacer with a 0,03" wall thickness (you should've seen the sweat on my forehead while turning) to get that seal fit snug in its cavity. The seal was 3" in diameter but the timing cover was a fraction (1/16" ?) more. |
 A 1949 and
later engine would have been better , since the rods are not babbitted,
but have removable bearing shells. |
| Who said it's nice to have shimmed main and rod bearings? It took a heck of elbow grease and Plastigage to measure and adjust the clearings to specs. The rope seal was my first one, too. Thanks dad, for telling me how do these things properly, while I would call you too late in the Sunday evening. My dad calls the rope seal a "dogshit" seal - fascinating |