Stripping out the rear

Saturday was a day of crappy rain so the shed will have to wait. Despite this, we still had a good day of work on the GT40. 

First up, removed the brake calipers - front and rear. We'll need to rebuild these with new seals and hone them out if required. Dad noticed one rubber brake line was completely rusted out and one of the steel ones was broken. Plenty of work to do here.

Rear brakes (Alfa Romeo according to the previous owner)

Next, we started attacking the rear end.

Removed the rear suspension and moved all the wiring etc. Dad started cleaning it up with degreaser and it's already looking heaps better.

One Granada rear control arm 

GT40 stuff is taking over the garage, so I've decided to knock up a workbench with an under-shelf to go in front of the garage window, where the toolboxes are below.

I was inspired by this Autospeed article, so decided to knock up the workbench myself out of scrap metal and an old kitchen bench top. It should do the job. So far, it's cost me $70 for scrap metal and $15 for the kitchen bench, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time to finish it off, but will hopefully knock it over on a week night.

Building the shed slab

 OK, this blog entry is not strictly GT40 related, but building a shed does mean that stuff is removed from the garage to make more space for GT40 parts :)


So yesterday I cleared this space out the back for the house and knocked up the slab frame. Any want gravel? I've got a big pile of it left over now.

  









Today I went and picked up 14 x 30kg bags of concrete. Of course, at the end I discovered I needed 14.5 bags, so went back and picked up bag number 15.

Lugged these suckers all the way down to the back of the house. For some reason the dog thinks the wheel barrow is enemy number 1. No idea why, but it's pretty funny.

And 15 bags of concrete later. The finished result....

Oh yeah, a box with "KBS Coatings" on the side arrived today. This stuff is for tidying up the rust on the chassis. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

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!

Engine Out

Yesterday Dad, me and my mate Adrian got stuck into it. We borrowed an engine crane off my mate Danny and pulled the engine out in no time at all. This car is so easy to work on. I'd previously removed the rear clip and a few lines, so there wasn't much left to clear the motor. Unfortunately, I suck at remembering to take photos, so didn't take any of the engine on the crane. Anyway, here's the after pic. I'm looking forward to cleaning up and repainting that chassis.

We did notice a bit of rust on the chassis, but on closer inspection, it's just surface rust. Score!

Dad and I picked up an engine crane for $55+GST (who quotes prices ex GST these days?) at a place called Radum around the corner. Absolutely bargain price. It took a bit of messing around to get the engine mounted on the stand, since we didn't have any long enough bolts. I did a trip to Repco, but took the wrong bolt (IDIOT!), so had to do a second dash. Got it mounted up in the end and got stuck into stripping it down.

The bottom end doesn't look too bad. A bit of grime in there, but it doesn't look like too much water got down into the sump. Some small block chevs have 4 bolt mains. We thought this one did, going by the engine number and what the interweb revealed. Oh well...

Pistons out. They all look quite good.

We couldn't take the crank out, because we need a pulley puller to get the harmonic balancer off. Dad has one at home to use next time. The crank journals look OK. Someone has machined it in the past.

Next we started to try and clean up the dodgy cylinder (previously full of water). We started to rub down the bore to get to the bottom of the pitting. Then we can measure it and decide if a full bore is required or if we can get away with a hone only. This is how far we got... It's looking like a bore out will be required. Thankfully parts are amazingly cheap for these Chev motors. Not like the Jap parts I'm used to.

We're starting to build up a collection of parts here there and everywhere in the garage. I need more storage shelves and a nice work bench. Oh well, things can only improve from here.

Check out this crazy flywheel. Made up to suit Audi gearbox and adapter plate....

So all in all, we're quite happy with the engine. With the exception of the dodgy cylinder, everything else is in quite good nick. The previous owner said that the engine had been rebuilt and only had roughly 2000km on it (10 years ago) and it seems reasonable. Dad gave the dodgy cylinder head a quick clean up and it came up pretty good, too.

I'm off again with work for a few weeks. This is my last trip to New Caledonia (for the foreseeable future). I've got a new job that I'll be starting in a few weeks. Horray!

The missing book...
Tim came over a few weeks back with a book that his Girlfriend Renee had bought him "How to Rebuild a Small Block Chevy". I thought great, that will be handy. My mate Jim also gave me a Chev magazine from 1974. Also good reading. Anyway, yesterday I thought I'd dig up Tim's book, but then realised I hadn't seen it for a while. I figured he must have taken it with him. After sending him a text he said "Last time I saw it, I put it on the roof of the Mini". Doh! Not a wise move. That was a crazy day: I had a job interview, I had mates over and I had to go into the city that night. Needless to say, I most likely drove off with the book on the roof. Being a short-arse, I wouldn't have noticed it sat on the roof. Oh well, I just ordered a new copy to give Tim....

A few more pics

I noticed this blog doesn't have many pics of the car before we started attacking it. Here are a few more..

Plenty of work to do.

Crème Brûlée in a cylinder?

Hey All,

Sorry it's been a while since the last post. I've been away with work and camping for the last 2 weekends. Blah blah blah, on with the updates...

So I was back in Australia for all of 2 hours and Dad gave me a call "Do you wanna work on the car tonight?" Is the Pope Catholic? Of course I do. The supervisor also came along (Bomba the dog)..

We removed the heads and were unfortunately greeted with a horrid site. As much as I like Crème Brûlée, I'm not such a fan to see it inside an engine cylinder....

The cylinder was full of water with a thick crust of rust. It even cracked nicely like a good Crème Brûlée. It turns out that the inlet valve on this cylinder was open, so it is most likely that water came down through carburettor and through the intake manifold. Not sure how, since the car was under a thick cover for the past few years. I guess Brisbane has had horrendous rain in the past year, so anything is possible. Oh well, that's life. We expected to find some challenges along the way.

The cylinder head doesn't look too good either.

After giving the cylinder a light clean-up, the bore still looks quite corroded. You can see the 'tide mark'.

So we've had a fair bit of discussion lately as to the future for the engine. We've thrown around options of replacing the engine with a modern GM LS1/2 engine. These engines obviously have many advantages such as being light weight, having electronic fuel injection, huge aftermarket parts range and also capable of bolting up to the same gearbox adapter plate (bar 1 hole). The other alternative is to rebuild the 350. We've decided to go with the rebuild option to keep the costs down. As tempting as it is to drop an LS1 in, there would be many hidden costs and further delays. If we decide to upgrade the engine in the future we can always sell off the 350 Chev.

The car is now pretty much ready for the engine to come out this weekend. I'll be getting hold of an engine stand and borrowing an engine crane off a mate.

Oh yeah, this project was a perfect excuse to buy an air compressor and air tools... Loving the rattle gun. It makes easy work of rusty bolts :)

Here's how the car is looking at the moment. I love working on this thing. It's so easy. The entire rear clip section was held on by two bolts and the air strut. I lowered it on to my garage creeper and wheeled it out of the way. Too easy!

Update coming soon..