Lets call him 'Mr Anti-Midas' and assume he's been everywhere and touched everything. At this point I see his work, sigh, and carry on. I'm going to point out just
two more of his little touches, and then stop so the thread gets a bit more positive
I continued stripping and cleaning the engine tonight. I took the unusual step of removing the injector rail on this one because all the inlet manifold bolts are rusty and full of crud, and the injector rail is in the way of getting a tool straight on to them. These are too bad to risk a slightly off-square allen key, plus the manifold needs sandblasting and repainting anyway.
The vacuum manifold system was disconnected when the actuator pods broke rather than fixing it
Lots of schmutz round the base of the manifold, and this is after cleaning!
a little grubby inside, but I can clean this when it comes apart
I turned the engine over and took the inlet manifold off with it upside down
to make sure none of this grit and tar fell in to the inlet ports
I cleaned it upside down too, lying on the floor. You have to pay extra for this
Final Mr Anti-Midas touch - the guide pins always break when the manifold comes off, so he drilled them and held them back in place with small nails. Inventive, but sadly pointless as they are readily available and very cheap
Usual muck in the valley. I forgot to get an after pic, but its all nice and clean now
Condensation aside, the engine is remarkably clean inside for a quarter of a million miles, and the chain tensioners are barely worn. This engine was fitted when the car was on 200K and the engine was about 127K. The car now has 320K making the engine 247K ish. For most of 2020 the car lived in the workshop, and had to be moved in and out frequently, doing about 50 yard journeys. As a consequence, the engine is full of condensation and the oil is quite brown, but this will all evaporate when it gets running again and has an Italian tune-up. The colour inside and total lack of sludge indicates that at least it has had regular good-quality oil changes, and has done lots of nice long journeys.
It wipes clean and is in excellent condition under the coating of light mayo
Ew! Normally this would be indicative of very bad things, but I know exactly why it like this so I'm not concerned
Also this evening Mike and I contrived a plan to repair the broken engine mount boss, without welding it. My tig guy is a trained and coded welder and even he isn't sure what would happen welding the hypereutectic Alusil engine block, so we're not going to. Since the engine hasn't fallen out in the last 120K miles, the remaining two bolts can apparently take the dynamic loads generated in this area so rather than risk damaging an otherwise good engine by welding it we have a mechanical solution instead. Its going to involve some custom tooling, and a custom repair piece to re-form the thread. More on that as it develops