No Lamborghini drive, but work is progressing on the GT40

Well and truly time for an update. I've been away for the past few weeks and finished my previous job on Friday. I had lined up on Sunday to do a Ferrari and Lamborghini driving day. My mates are absolute champions and gave me a ticket for my 30th Birthday a few months back. Not all went to plan though. The skies decided to open up on Sunday for about the first time in 3 months. The driving day was cancelled. Damn Brisbane weather!

Oh well, at least things are progressing with the GT40...

While I was away, Dad continued stripping the engine down. He removed the crank and started trying to sand the stuffed bore to see if it could be fixed with a hone only.

We measured the piston clearance and it came up at around 0.014", which is way more than 0.008" that is regarded as the maximum according to the Chevy book. By the way I had to order a new version of the book mentioned in an earlier blog. I never found the old one that Tim brought around. The roof of a car is not a good place to leave books it seems...

On Saturday we had a fairly busy day: Disassembled the heads and cleaned them in kero, cleaned the valves, wire-brushed one head, removed marks on the crank and re-arranged the garage.

It took me many hours with the wire brush to bring the head up to scratch. You can see from the picture below that there was a fair bit of the rust behind the valve.

You can also see the pitting which was caused by the rust. It's cleaned up reasonably well. We will need to get the valve seat reground though.

Before

After

Tim cleaned up the valves and found one of them will need replacing due to rust.

Dad worked on removing some markings from the crank. It's good to have many hands with this tedious cleaning work.

We're starting to find that GT40 parts are taking over the garage and we are falling over each other. Therefore, we spent a fair bit of time re-arranging the garage and trying to clear a parts shelf.

I've decided that this is a perfect excuse to build a lawn locker. I've ordered a small 1.8x1.0m shed (it's all I can fit out the back). I spent a while today preparing the site for it and knocking up a timber frame for the concrete slab. It's rained nearly every day this week, so I'm waiting for a clear day to do the slab.

Yesterday I finished cleaning the other head....

Today I also finished stripping the block (welsh plugs, etc) and dropped it into the machine shop to be bored and honed. Lets hope they can save it. 

The wagon comes in handy once again.... 

Sorry for the large blog. I'll try to do regular smaller ones in future. On the plus-side, I start a new job on Monday. It's much closer to home than the previous job and I won't need to go away for a while. More GT40 time!