New Cylinder Heads To The Rescue!

I went to spend the new years eve with my friend and we planned to get the engine running during the weekend. At midnight on friday, we first watched the fireworks, took a few beers and entered the garage. The "new" heads were already bolted on so while he started attaching the intake manifold, I took care of the oil pan. After a few hours, the engine was almost complete but still needed coolant, oil and a few hoses. Then it was time to go to sleep before the children woke up.

We continued our project on saturday and quickly completed the engine. After adding oil, we noticed that some of it had leaked on the floor. Luckily it was only caused by loose oil plug in the pan... Perhaps I should have checked it while lying under the car :)

Then it was time to start the engine. Unfortunately the battery was dead so a charging session caused a little break. After a couple of hours we tried again. The engine turned but did not start. Eventually we had to set the no. 1 piston to TDC and check the distributor. Its gear was off by one teeth... It had been off the engine too many times because we installed it according to a wrong marking.

Another try. This time the engine fired up right away! After a little distributor turning it was running great and everything seemed to be in order. If only it hadn't overheated... In a few minutes the temperature rose to the red limit and we had to stop the engine.

A quick check later we figured that there must be air in the cooling system. We started the engine again and my friend let the air out by disconnecting the heater return hose from the water pump for a second. After this the temperature dropped immediately to normal level. After doing this couple of times, the temperature settled to normal level and we let the engine idle for a few minutes. Then it was again time to take care of the children for a while and return at night to do a proper test.

We attached an electric fan to the radiator for cooling and started running the test. We ran the engine for half an hour from idle to 2000 rpm and it worked! Temperature gauge showed pretty stable 200 degrees fahrenheit (about 93 degrees celsius) and gone was the overheating problem! As happy men, we went to sleep.

On sunday we ran the engine again and took the car for a short test drive. There was a lot of snow on the road so you couldn't really touch the gas pedal but at least the engine was working and you could drive the car. Well, actually, we were really lucky that the whole car didn't burn as we later found out but for now we were really happy to finally see some progress in the project.