Well, I had a right carry on today. Got there in the end though...
Thought I’d cobble the timing side together, got a load of new gear so (rather naively) thought it’d be a quick ‘nail it together’ job.
Ha! No such luck, it didn’t go together nice at all, felt tight and just generally ‘not nice’.
Fortunately I’ve got the old engine still, so was able to mix n match parts until I got, what felt like, a nice feel to it on both engines.
So, on with the spindle plate and tighten it all up:
Cam followers are a lovely fit in the Maney block:
Those who have been paying attention will recall me announcing that I was done with fancy piston coatings. Well, here are my pistons... complete with fancy coatings!
In my defence however, the coating hasn’t been applied by a bunch of drunk, blind, pikey’s as it probably was in the past. This coating is a result of discussions with the piston supplier (JS) and I sent them back to him for the treatment. Fingers crossed it’s as good as it’s supposed to be:
But when I dropped the barrels and pistons on (without rings) the thing still didn’t feel nice! Since tightening it all up something had changed and felt slightly ‘nothcy’ at one point in the crank rotation. I could turn it over quickly and pretend it felt good, but when I turned it over slowly I wasn’t happy with the feel. The culprit turned out to be the new crank pinion. That’ll be going back to AN.
This time I decided to fit the Comnoz auto chain tensioner, just because I could really.
I’ve got 3 head gaskets of different thicknesses from JS so will hopefully be able to get the squish and CR where I want it without having to get too drastic:
Just waiting for the head to come back from being tumble cleaned and I can crack on...