My Murple

[Ronin]

that is ridiculous! I thought my 2,8QS was bodged because parking sensor connector was held with a zip tie, this is something else!

[MikkiJayne]

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

[tintin]

Now, that doesn't happen very often with me - the first one today was Apricity (to describe today's lovely weather in Manchester..), which I though was quite a good one - but Hypereutectic is even an even better one! Day off tomorrow now

[Ronin]

Home come the inlet manifold of V8's is metal, and plastic on 2,8?

[MikkiJayne]

Cost I would expect. The V6 went in cheaper models and so given the larger volumes it would have been cost effective to tool up for injection moulding, plus the port length changeover is a much simpler mechanism. That might not have been practical in plastic for the V8.

[MikkiJayne]

Soooo.... wind back the clock to Sunday when everything was just oily and not broken. Insert Time And Relative Dimensions In Space joke here...

I've decided this AQH is too much work right now, as I have a couple of fixed points in time coming up and I need this one turned round quickly. While the engine mount is fixable, its going to take a week or so of ordering and making tooling, making the repair insert, and actually applying it, plus fixing everything else like the inlet manifold, injectors etc and I just don't have time. I've got a spare AVP from stock and I'm going to do all the same work to that instead, and I'll sort the AQH out later.

Part of the role of this car is to allow me to test all my spare engines and get them all rebuilt and ready to use, so I've just shuffled the order a bit.

AQH on the left, wrapped up to stop anything getting in the inlet ports, replacement AVP on the right



Started stripping it down







So much cleaner!





Obviously this has set me back a couple of days of cleaning, but it will save much more than that since this engine is in a far better state to begin with It also had a genuine timing belt kit and water pump fitted shortly before it was decomissioned so all that stuff is in pretty good condition and can be re-used, apart from the belt which will be new.

[Ronin]

hmm, I can see that the breather hoses are also a much better design than on 2,8 where it has those nasty corrugated plastic pipes that make it easy for debris to settle on to and crack after a few years...