I am the patron saint of lost causes . . .

[ardiesse]

In July, there was a post on the forum:

"Engine number 226569 (probably from an FJ).  Complete with manifolds, does not turn over.  Either someone takes it, or it goes to the tip."

How could I possibly resist?  Even if the rest of the motor's beyond hope, the cylinder head may be sound.  So I arranged with FCDave to pick the engine up, and I got a free gearbox (equally diseased) into the bargain.  When the engine was laid over onto its right side, some oil drained out of the sump. 

That's a good sign.

I got the motor home, unloaded it, and put it on an engine stand.  Do you reckon I could get this one going?



Rob

[DJ]

What betting odds are on offer?

[ardiesse]

Hopeful Sign 1: the oil pump turned.  Good.  That means not too much water got into the sump.

I pulled the plugs, and they were all sort-of ok, except number 6, which was covered in rusty crud.  So the motor had been sitting out in the open for >40 years, and whenever it rained, number six cylinder filled with water.  I put a couple of tablespoons of oil down each pot, replaced the plugs, poured maybe a couple of pints of oil down the inlet manifold, tipped the motor over onto its right side, and pulled the rocker gear off.

With a hammer and a brass drift on the end of the valves, it's surprising how quickly you can free up stuck valves.  Except number six inlet, which went all the way down, and stayed.  Hmm.  Don't want to pull the head off (yet), so I got a couple of chisels, and put them through the coils of the valve spring.  Some hammer work, and the valve came up.  Repeat many times, and even this one freed up.

Which just left a seized motor.  Over the next few days, I got a jemmy between the gearbox locating dowels and the ring gear, and levered.  And just when I thought nothing would happen, the flywheel moved one tooth.  One tooth became two, became a half dozen, and a couple of hours later I succeeded in turning the crank a full revolution. (Oh, and I did take the plugs out: oil in bores and inlet tract, remember?)

Now for compressed air and kerosene into no. 6.  And boy, did a lot of rusty crud come out.  I repeated the procedure for all the other cylinders, and then, with each cylinder at its respective inlet stroke, hosed each cylinder and the inlet manifold out good and proper.



I then put a litre or so of diesel into the sump, and with a power drill and screwdriver adaptor, ran the oil pump for a while.  Drained the sump, added some old oil, put the rocker gear back, and adjusted the valve clearances.

Now I needed to put the motor on my stand/trolley.  The rear welch plug was sitting a few mm proud of the machined face, and stuffed if I was going to take the flywheel off to remove it.  I collapsed the plug with a screwdriver and then bashed it into the block (rubber mallet on the spacer plate). 

Bellhousing, starter, carby, distributor, fuel pump, oil switch, and . . . no, it didn't start.  None of the valves seated properly.

Rob

[DJ]

Next?

[ardiesse]

As the Queen of Hearts says, "Off with her head."  And this is where the surprises start.  Five-sixths of the motor is in really good condition, 3.000" bore diameter, original Holden pistons, bugger-all wear in the bores.  The block is stamped DDBECC next to the bores from 1 to 6; and the pistons are stamped DDCEC, and number six is too badly corroded to make out; and behind number six bore, there's an octagon with MH126.



(Nos. 1 to 3, but at this small size of photo, it's difficult to make out.)
 


(Nos. 4 to 6)

Number six cylinder, though, is pretty festy.



Refacing valves with an angle grinder and a wood-lathe?  Yep, you'd better believe it.  I rescued five of six inlet valves.  They had rusted very badly, and I found a replacement for number six inlet.  The exhaust valves were in much better condition.



All the valve seats came good with a grind, 'cept no. 6 inlet, which didn't have a clean seal all the way around.  But close enough.

Rob

[ardiesse]

With the head off, it was little extra work to drop the sump and pop number six piston out.



The oil rings finally came free with a lot of patient work.  The compression rings, though, were seized, and by the look of them, had been before the motor was left out in the open.  The top compression ring was too narrow for the groove.  Possibly a ring for a Repco piston installed in a Holden piston . . .  I managed to get maybe an inch of the top ring free by working around it with near the ring gap with a Stanley knife  (with "enthinnened" blade), but then broke it.  I pried the top ring out in half-inch segments.

The only way to get the second ring out without ruining the piston was to grind out a section of the ring with a Dremel and a thin abrasive wheel, break the ends, and then pry it out in half-inch lengths too.



But the piston itself was in surprisingly good condition.  I cleaned the bore out with a scraper, a half-round file, and sandpaper, until the piston ran freely in the bore.  Don't laugh.  Except . . . I think the cylinder wall's cracked.  I might be the guilty party here (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), because the motor put up some fairly stiff resistance when I was freeing it up.

Rob

[DJ]

Big day so far. Should be running tomorrow at this pace.

[ardiesse]

Here I thought I could see what the cryptic B,C,D,E stampings on the block and pistons mean.  No.6 was supposedly a "C" piston.  It was quite a precise fit in No. 3 bore (B), and quite a loose fit in No. 4 bore (E).  So I'm guessing that the letters indicate the size of piston from lowest limit to highest limit.

Where to find replacement compression rings at no cost?  The FC's previous owner never threw anything out, and he had kept a box of pistons and conrods from who knows what motor he pulled apart for bits in the '70s.  The pistons still had rings, but the pistons didn't go into this motor's bores, so they were (at least) 3-1/16".  Who cares?  I'll enlarge the ring gaps until they fit in the No.6 bore.  I had to take maybe 3/16" off each ring to make them go into the bore.

I installed No.6 back in the bore . . . by the way, the big-end bearing and crankpin were in quite good condition, and the bearing shell had no markings, so was probably a standard size.  It took a few revolutions by hand and some WD-40 for the new, old rings to scrape out the residual crud.

The rest was just assembly work.  Rather than dicking around with feeler gauges to set the valve clearances, I found that if you screw the adjuster up until all the lash is taken out, then undo the screw 60 degrees for inlets and 90 degrees for exhausts, it's just about correct.  Certainly good enough for a motor that's only going to be run for a maximum of 30 seconds each time.  No cooling, you see . . .



And - bloody hell.  It started.  No rattles either.  Possibly the finest five-cylinder engine Holden has made.  Yes.  There's not much compression in No.6.  But I wonder.  Underneath all the crud, it's an original, very low-mileage, standard three-inch bore motor.  If I were to get No.6 re-sleeved, rings, bearings, new inlet valves . . .

Rob

[ardiesse]

Dave,

I got the motor three weekends ago.  I don't work quite that fast . . .

Rob

[DJ]

A great read regardless Rob, and a happy ending.
Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

[Harv]

Cool  .

Had me grinning all the way through the process. I've done the "tap the valves to free them" and "valve lap with the bench grinder" trick a few times.

I've been trying to lay my hands on a crank socket to suit the grey for quite a while. It would make it easier to get some force onto a siezed grey, albeit the old harmonic has to come off. Can get Chev and even red motor sockets, but nothing I can find for the grey. Might have to find someone handy with a lathe and tool steel. Either that or drill and tap an old harmonic to take a cheater bar.

Cheers,
Harv

[ardiesse]

Harv,

I'm just thinking about the amount of torque it took to start this motor turning.  Let's say it was a fifteen-inch jemmy, and it's what, three-quarters of an inch from the dowel pins to the ring gear teeth?  There's 20:1 already, and I was leaning down quite hard on the jemmy.  Fifty pounds effort is not unreasonable.  And a Holden flywheel is probably a foot in diameter.  So the torque required to make the seized motor free up was 50x20x0.5 . . . thinks . . . 500 ft.lbs.  Hmm.  That's not as much as I'd thought.  500 ft.lb with a 1.5" moment arm is 4000 lb effort.  So 2 tons (give or take) to make a stuck piston move.  Ah, but the piston was near the bottom of the stroke, so there's a 1/sin(crank angle) correction which may have doubled (or more) the 2 tons effort on the piston.

I was thinking that in really really seized engines, you'd make the harmonic balancer hub slip around the crankshaft and possibly chew out the key.  But the ex-railways guys in the workshops here reckon that a harmonic balancer is a tight enough pressfit that it won't move.

Rob

[Harv]

I've got three stuck motors here. They were advertised as smoky greys, stored under cover. Bought them, went to pick them up, and found them in the sellers yard. No plastic over them, and drizzling rain. Was none too impressed, and told the seller the same. The sellers response "I can't store everything inside... if you don't want them, I'll sell them for scrap" didn't help. Have bought stuff off the guy before, and got burnt that time too. Should have known better.

Got them home, and drained water out all of them. All seized... they had been outside for a while. They've had a six month soak, so might try the modified harmonic trick. Agree with the railway guys - the harmonic press fit is not that far removed from a Morse taper fit for tightness.

Cheers,
Harv

[zulu]

You are the grey motor Mac Gyver Rob
some people would say why, and you think why not!
Good on you for getting it going 

I take in grey motors, some turn and some don't but you never know until you try

[ardiesse]

Gary,

Now that this grey motor is reassembled and turns over, I need to turn my attention to a certain 186 that's sitting in the car-port . . .

Harv,

A socket and long breaker-bar on the "nut" part of a harmonic balancer puller, perhaps?  Although, with hindsight, it may be easier in the long run to pull the head off a stuck motor, clean the bores out as best you can, then turn the motor in the "down-stroke" direction for the worst-stuck piston.

I got the manifolds, pushrod cover and sump off without breaking the gaskets, and the head gasket was a copper-and-steel shim type, hence re-usable by definition.

Rob

[hsv-001]

Don't want to get into a long debate but you will find that all multiple piston four strokes will stop with opposing cylinders positioned with one on compression stroke and the other on the exhaust stroke [exhaust valve open] nothing new here ,but I probably would have removed the head and the sump ,soaked that cylinder with a mix of kero. and diesel .Likely I would disconnect the connecting rod of the offending pot from the crank and turned the engine over enough to clear the rod from the crank . Then used a suitably shaped block of wood bump the piston downward . Then using a hone ,remove the rust from that bore before removing the piston out the top of the block . I thought I would put this out there for all those people that get [in my opinion ] over exited about barn finds .  Some 30 years ago my FE sedan sat for 6 weeks during a flood in S.W. Qld. and when I got around to starting it I broke the rings in No.6 pot [rusted to the bore] . Interesting that the old Honda single cylinder water pump motors will sit around waterholes and bore heads for many years in the outback and because of the dry and the fact that they stop on the compression stroke [valves closed] they don't often seize . The only other thing I have noticed is that these old 6 cylinder engines seem to stop ,compressing on No. 1 or No. 6 and I would assume that this is because of the temp. difference between the front and back of the engine . Anyway ,enough from me .Cheers .Haydn

[ardiesse]

Haydn,

Just curious . . .  how badly rusted was No.6 bore in your 'flooded' FE when you pulled the motor apart?

Rob

[ardiesse]

I did a compression test yesterday, just to see . . .  The compression tester was a Ryco Universal Compressometer that I picked up at a swap meet, of unknown accuracy.

From 1 to 6, -

100, 50, 100, 100, 50, 60.

So my hasty re-ring job in a badly rusted bore worked better than numbers 2 and 5.

A squirt of oil in numbers 2,5 and 6, -

100, 90, 100, 100, 95, 95.

Looks like the piston rings are seized in cylinders 2 and 5.

But I have now parked this motor under a workbench for another day.

Rob

[FC Dave]

Hey Rob. Glad to see you had some fun with it. It had been sitting in that FC ute I picked up for 20 years i know of. So..................... I had it stored under cover for about 8 weeks. I think that made all the difference..............................don't you think?

Well, if anyone is up for a similar challenge, I have just dragged in a non-surviver FC standard sedan. According to Rob, it is an early FE engine number ,with possibly an FX head. (this one owes me, so some cost will be involved)There will be some other bits available as time goes on. Rob & Crumpsnr (who half owns this one with me) have their orders in.
I'll get some tag/chassis numbers for Ken shortly.