correctomundo

most people store the trans without the cable (they break off) - so it'd be easy to not realize it's supposed to be there until it's not shifting and blowing fluid on the ground.

to clean the mating surfaces (any gasket)... beartex on an angle air grinder. Or, simply the little scotch pads they make for the cheapie (3") angle air grinders...

 

Cool and thanks! I will see if I can pick it up this weekend and first identify what it is and then we can make some plans! Thanks brother!

 

Are these rebuilt or simply painted?

 

Use a wire wheel on a drill or grinder. I usually stay away from sand paper because the grit gets in places you don't want. Try and turn the block sideways and spin the wire wheel downwards so you don't get crap in your face. And when it's all done you're gonna need about 4 cans of brake clean and an air hose to blow everything out then do it again but use paper towels to wipe for your final cleaning.
Then you're ready for paint and assembly

 

Yeah just painted, the seals were in really good shape so I just cleaned them up and painted them.

 

If you are going to be using the Felpro 1094 .015" head gasket, Felpro recommends a smoother deck finish than would be normal for a regular composition gasket. I have been reading up on the subject, and it turns out that 180 or 200 grit will give the proper finish for the 1094 gasket. Birdsmith is pretty on the ball, though, if he has had good luck using the 1094 gasket with an 80 grit finish, I'd take his recommendation over Felpro's any day.

I haven't actually done it before, so it will be kind of an experiment, but my plan is to obtain a 1/2" thick piece of glass, about 18"x5", wrap the 180 grit sandpaper around it, and use that to clean and hopefully flatten the deck. (color in the deck with a Sharpie or something, and sand until there are no low spots left) Cheap way to get a flat deck, not exactly what you'd call precise, though! A machine shop can get the decks both exactly the same distance from the crank centerline on all cylinders. Make sure you take pains to keep the sandpaper dust and iron filings out of the engine, unless you are going to send it back to the machine shop for a thorough cleaning, which might be money well spent, after honing and sanding the deck, and to really get those internal coolant passages clean.


Scott

 

If you are really going to bake those calipers, for Pete's sake, make sure you remove all the rubber pieces first, or the Christmas ham may come out tasting really bad! And then, as long as they are apart, well, why not rebuild them, right? *whileimatit whileimatit whileimatit*

Seriously, though, I don't think they need to be baked, just run 'em.


Scott

 

about baking

don't do it


it will seriously ruin your oven. The paint off-gasses into the oven and it will never smell right again. If you want a paint-curing oven, find a cheapie or free one on craigslist, and do the curing outside if at all possible - that stuff smells awful.


about dishwashers... it seems like such a great idea - however, my dad owns a company that builds kitchens for restaurants and used to get lots of trade-ins of dishwashers. We took a stainless dishwasher and tried running parts through it... even with some pretty harsh chemicals (and we could get the good stuff), it really didn't work that well. Machine shops use a washer cabinet, but it's completely different in how it work - it uses high pressure, mobile jet sprays to wash the parts because engine grease is far more difficult to get off than food debris (also the engine part is more robust).

 

Scott (s),

Using the glass is a pretty good idea...in the absence of that a piece of nice, flat 1/4" thick steel or aluminum would make a good (and safer if you dropped it!) substitute. There are adhesive-backed sandpapers also, sticking a piece of that onto a nice flat sanding block would likely be a good way to go...

Not so sure about Chevys, but my (former 302 and now 331) SB Ford had aluminum heads that were cut with reciever grooves for Fel-Pro 'K-Ring' head gaskets (12.2:1 compression) and they repeatedly blew, and were expensive on top of that. When I turned that motor into a 9.75:1 stroker for street use, I had the reciever grooves machined off (they were .015" deep) so I could run a conventional gasket. It blew a set of those in short order, so I did the hand-sand the decks with 80 grit routine AND put a tiny bead of grey Permatex around each water hole on both sides of the gasket. that car typically sits for months at a time, then I scrape some money together to put gas in it and go for a blast through the countryside. Four years now with no problems...

Also, while 'indexing' the decks is a common 'blueprinting' process, in Fatcat's case I didn't recommend it because a) He's on a budget and b) The fact that the block has already been bored would likely indicate that it may have been decked as well at one time or another...I'd hate to see him mock up those eagerly-awaited pistons and find them level with the decks or worse, sticking out...

And please, everybody, about the baking paint in the kitchen oven/ cleaning parts in the dishwasher bit...IT WAS SARCASM, OK?!!??

 

a word of advice about sarcasm.... read this thread about how things can get on the internet....
http://mustangforums.com/forum/5-0l-...-this-car.html

 

Wow!

 

saw a video on you tube of an old guy that did exactly what your saying. don't ask me what the name of it is, don't have any idea

 

honestly, unless the motor had a blown head gasket - I wouldn't spend my time trying to sand cast iron flat. I would get a good straight edge and use a flashlight to shine under it to see if there is warpage, but if there is - then I'd simply have it decked. Surface irregularity is why we have head gaskets, and they all have a machining requirement for proper sealing. That said, if it ain't broke, why mess with it?

Now, were it an aluminum 215 Buick in a 1962 Buick that I could rescue, but get perverse joy from watching it rust into the ground (my first car, learned how to change both heads, plus sand in 4 hours)... then have at it with sand paper and a glass block....

 

yeah, quite sure aluminum would sand much easier then cast iron also

 

Well, as they say..."Ya can't fix stupid!!". Ouch.

 

yeah, but even the best of us have been lead along the path by someone else we trusted.... kind of a "but for the grace of God there go I" kind of deal.

There is some noise which suggests that the OP of that thread was leading the entire board along on a wild story (which would be funnier than what he did to that mustang )

 

Man this wore me out today..

 

looks good

 

One thing we have not discussed I realized today is changing the cam bearings. They are in my kit, is this something the machinist needs to change for me?

 

they're not hard to do, but you do need the proper tool to put them in....