Engine Paint

With the engine all buttoned up, it was time for paint.  I used "Motor Coater" in the Metallic Pontiac Blue that was used during the years my engine was produced. You can apply most of these kinds of paint with a brush.  I did that with the POR-15 I used earlier and it came out really nice.  However, since this was a metallic, it would have streaked on anything that wasn't cast iron, so I shot it with a spray gun.  All I had was my little 3.5 HP compressor with a 10 gallon tank.  I could shoot about one side of the engine before running out of air.  If you tried to paint a car with an HVLP gun and a small compressor like that, you would burn up the compressor before you finished the side of the car.

The engine was cleaned to the point of not having loose debris when it came back from the machinist.  The heads were really clean because he did quite a bit of work on those with new valve seats and things.

The Motor Coater system is just like the POR-15 paint system.  There is a degreaser that's used first.  That part of the process took forever.  I did a lot of soaking and a lot of work with a wire wheel to get it to the point where a cloth wiped clean and then it got some flash rust about as soon as it dried from the rinse.

After that comes the "Rust Blaster".  It's a phosphoric acid solution that converts the rust (iron oxide) into a zinc phosphate that is bound to the metal and to which paint can bind.  You don't have to get all the rust off and it's even advisable to have a little still on there instead of bare, shiny, clean metal.  You just can't have any loose rust.

Here's a before and after.  Some day I'll dress it up a little with some chrome valve covers and stuff, but for now, I'm more interested in getting it on the road than looking pretty on an engine stand.

For now, I've painted the stock intake to save some money.  I plan to upgrade it later.

Closing up the engine

I got a lot of work done on the engine the last week or so. 

 The first piston in

All the pistons went in without a hitch.  I checked gaps and clearances.  Everything seemed good. I rotated the crank after each piston and at each stage after this.  Everything was smooth as silk.

The timing chain went on next with the timing marks both at 12 o'clock and the #1 piston at TDC.  Then the fuel pump concentric went on.  This is what holds the cam shaft in it's proper place.  I was confused about it being able to freewheel earlier.

I turned the engine over and installed the windage tray.  Pontiac installed these in the high performance engines for a few years.  They reduce the foam in the oil so the oil pump can pump a solid flow of liquid.  I didn't even have to rotate the crank to know I had a problem.  The enlarged counter balances on the Stroker Crank were touching the tray as soon as I put it on.  I fabricated some spacers that dropped the tray about 1/4" to give me the clearance I needed.  Then, everything rotated fine.

I'm slightly OCD and worry about and triple check everything.  I put the oil pump in a container of break-in oil and ran it just to make sure everything was operational.  Oil pump installation was a little touchy trying to get the bolts, gasket and drive shaft all lined up and in place all at the same time...and I failed.  After installation, as is my OCD tendancy, I rotated the crank and, CLUNK.  It was stuck.  A little investigation told me that the drive shaft for the pump had somehow slipped out and got away.  The crank shaft had caught on it.  The bad news is I had to redo it all.  The good news is, I found it now instead of when the motor is in the car!

Not wanting to leave anything to chance, I did make one minor mod on the oil pump.  After inserting the pickup tube into the pump assembly, I made a small tack weld to insure it stays there.  It's not a pretty weld, but I was mostly concerned about burning through the pick up tube not making it pretty.

Then the timing chain cover went on.  In a previous post, I showed how I had cleaned this in my wife's dishwasher after I had done all I could with solvent.  That worked great and got all the grease out of the minute scratches.  It came out looking new.  Just sitting for a couple of months, the inside became discolored.  Antifreeze is some nasty stuff.

I refurbished the old oil pan and reused it.  It's not pretty, but on my car it won't be seen at least in the near future and I need to put my money where it will make a difference.  So, I just beat the dents out of this one, made sure it was flush and put it back on.  I'm not impressed with Pontiac's oil pan gasket design.  That 4 piece gasket gives a lot of opportunities for leaks.

Before permanently affixing the heads, I put some modeling clay on a couple of piston heads then, put on the head gasket, lightly secured the head with old bolts, and rotated the crank.  As you can see in this after photo, I have plenty of valve clearance.  The valves didn't even put a mark in the clay.

After checking the valve clearance and cleaning everything up, I installed the heads with ARP head studs.  My mechanic son was questioning why some studs didn't seem to be in all the way.  I had the same question when I installed them and it's the way the engine was bored and tapped I guess because the holes weren't all a uniform depth.  Yes, there were some studs that were longer than others and I got them all in the correct placement or they wouldn't have fit at all.  I'm not too worried about it because none of them were seated shallow or anything like that.

Finally! A new high flow water pump with new internal dividers because the old ones were rusted through.  Everything's masked ready to start cleaning, prepping and painting.

It doesn't even look like the same engine.

Cam & Crank

It's finally time to start putting in something that moves.  I had the machinist install the cam bearings.  I paid him less to do it than I would have spent on the tool I would need to do it myself.

Old cam on the left new cam on the right

I went with the Summit Racing 2802 cam.  I've read a lot of reviews that talk about it being pretty wild in a 350, a little lumpy in a 400 and maybe not big enough in a 455.  Since mine is bored and stroked to a 461, I felt pretty comfortable putting it in.  I also talked to a couple of people who have it and they like it.  In the picture above, you can't really see much difference from the stock cam on the left.  I measured it and there's a few thousandths difference in height from center, but the big difference seems to be in the pinnacle of the lobe which is wider and will give a little more duration for an open valve.

So, in it went.  No problems as I carefully put it in through the bearings and continually lubed it with Royal Purple Assembly lube on the bearings.  Then I coated the lobes with the break in lube provided by the manufacturer.  I know a lot of people put the crankshaft in first.  I preferred cam first, because it gave me so much more room to fiddle with the cam from the bottom of the engine without the crankshaft in place.

I was a little worried / concerned about how the cam would stay lined up with the lifters.  As far as I could see, there would be nothing to keep it from sliding back against the block or forward against the cam retainer shown here.  When I put on the timing chain later, it became clear how it's all held together.

Next came the crankshaft.  I used plastigage on each bearing.  They were all very consistent at about .0017 (a little more than the .002 mark but not as wide as .0015) which was right in the middle of my range.  So, in went the crank.

Now, things will start to progress a little faster.  I'm using Royal Purple's assembly lube.  I had a lot of good reports about it and so far, I really like it.  It has the consistency of honey and it's a little difficult to actually get off stuff where you may not want it unless you use brake cleaner or something.  I guess the real test will be when I finally turn the key.