Well I've been wrestling t-rexes, drop kicking space aliens, and most definitely NOT cowering from the bitter cold of my garage. However, between head-locking thunder lizards and double-legging Xenu, I have managed to order a bunch of parts and prep my crank cases for bottom-end assembly.
So far the most tedious part of this entire rebuild is prepping the mating surfaces of the two crank cases. This basically involves removing the silicon-based gasket material from the upper and lower crank case halves.
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| You can see the black gasket material in the holes. The funny texture is due to some liquid gasket remover I tried which was a waste of $15.00 |
My impression is that most people use a die grinder with some abrasive pads. Now, I have very little confidence in my ability to use power tools so I figured the next best thing is a razor to shave off the excess gasket material. This resulted in a decent scar on the mating surface... nothing serious but its definitely there. Lucky for me having (apparently) twitchy hands is well suited for scrubbing away with scotch brite pads and occasionally steel wool so thats exactly what I did... Except theres so many silicon filed holes that the pads can't easily get into which were a HUGE pain to clean out but in the end I think I did a pretty good job.
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| BAM! Cleaner than eating utensils |
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| Cleaner than surgical instruments |
The first thing I was about to do was to reinstall the alternator shaft bearing. However its a REAL tight fit and needs to go directly into the upper crank case. I decided to put the bearing in the freezer can do a little shop cleaning and the end result is:
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| Tada! Now I'm more organized |
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| Crisp new pistons |
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| Clean enough to eat off of |
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| Tub o tranny parts (mostly) |
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| and I cleaned up my bench too! New additions to the bench include the 4 inch vise and parts cleaner courtesy of Princess Auto :-) |
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| OEM goodness! Notice the Tsubaki timing chain. I've got a APE manual tensioner too (not in pic) |
For more pics from this post, go to my photobucket page
here.
