Also, part of the reason I've been so slow on this even when I am at the unit:
My brother got a Mk2 Jetta. The wiring has been a little ... lovingly attended to; and the Weber carb was retrofitted with -- no joke -- cable-ties and sikaflex.
I... may or may not have exploded the carb off the manifold trying to start it. There was -- hypothetically, yer 'onour -- a lot of sikaflex shrapnel, and a very impressive fireball.
Here he is, bolting down the proper adapter that turned out to be wrong anyway, because we were told by its previous owner -- a mate of his, who only bought the car to save it from scrap, anyway -- that it was a 34/36 progressive. Don't be fooled, I may have had the "dug out of the '80s car days' photo album" filter applied, but it was in fact more recent than that.
It was not, in fact, a 34/36 progressive. Cue some creative engineering -- but more engineering than cable-ties and sikaflex -- to save the day, and give the next owner something to go WTF over.
Return to the truck...
Re-checked that top ring on No.6: 25 thou.
...eh, I'll just send it like that. A little extra gap won't do it any harm.
December 2020
Anyone who said hell might freeze over before I get this truck done, might be right! :o
Wow. What a year. I would have preferred to have gotten more done on this beast since moving it here in ...whenever I moved it. September-ish?
Work's been flat-out, though; and I've had no opportunity to book time
off because one of my co-workers decided to go on a camper holiday to
Wales in the middle of a pandemic, rammed his quad-bike into a tree,
and broke his hand quite badly; which basically left us with no real
slack capacity. (He did return mid-December, and is well on the way to
mended; but is never going to be 100% for a very long time, if
ever. He has refused to even look at the trailer with the quad-bike
in, and it is shoved right down the yard in disgrace. ) Anyway: constant 50+ hour weeks of
violently-variable work, and the stress of ... gesticulates at
everything else left me not wanting to deal with anything much at
all.
In the meantime, I've had to do repair work on the car, including new front struts (50% done) and investigate the other clunk/variable-geometry suspension (10% done because it's bloody cold out!) before I can throw it through MOT hopefully early in the new year.
So I headed down to the unit yesterday, and did the first work on the truck in months; basically since I shoved it into the unit, which was a two day ordeal. I didn't film the first half, which is probably for the best, but here's the second half:
(made the mistake of not completely obliterating the music in the background, because it was pretty quiet; apparently it wasn't quiet enough, so it's been hammered with content-ID claims. (It's processing on trying to mute those segments, so we'll see how that goes.)
Anyway, work yesterday started with pulling the camshaft back out to fit the front plate & gasket. On refitting the cam, and going to fit the crank gear, I made the delightful discovery that the crank was apparently locked up solid.
...yeah, it's that rear rope seal again. Slackened off the rear main cap and she turns, so I've re-oiled the seal and it's not quite so bad now. I think it really needs to run in, and then it'll be fine. That's what I keep telling myself, anyway.
Grand sum of progress today:
I'll trim that gasket paper down later, I promise. Rear main cap has been left slightly loose so that I can turn the crank a bit easier for the time being; I'll torque it back up once I'm done having to spin it over by hand to put pistons in and whatnot.
Pistons are all prepped, still sat where I left 'em after checking rings. Head came back from the machine-shop, pretty shortly after I dropped it off; can't remember if I mentioned, but they had to skim 8thou to bring it level again. I'll re-CC the chambers once I've got the valves back in, and work out what the CR is now.
If it ever runs again after I've had it this far apart, through two
workshop moves, it should be pretty sprightly! It was already damn
good with 80% of the rings stuck, down a hole completely, and that's
even before the compression got bumped! 
It'll get done, I swear...
in the new year!
Bit cramped in there. First time back in since the giftmas holidays, now
that the weather's beginning to be ... well, less frigid, at
least. Still blowing a gale and raining sideways. Didn't plan to do
much, just dropping off some little bits n pieces (Ali brazing rod &
flux. I have plans), and making sure the truck's still there.
So I unpacked the head-gaskets I got months ago and never opened...
And they're the right ones. So that's nice. (Might measure one up to have a dimensioned drawing, while I have spares, just in case.)
Was also going to put a grounding lug in near the battery, fastened to the new chunky steelwork I've put in, rather than the old grounding point that's in the thin sheet metal of the passenger's seat base. But I couldn't find my bag of bolts, so I went home instead. Storage boxes have been ordered, so that I can organise bolts, because it's getting ridiculous now.
I've decided to set myself a goal, so I at least have something I can point myself towards; and that is: Have the engine running by the end of 2021. Yes, it doesn't seem like a massive target, and there's still 11 months, but!
- Engine is still pretty much a bare block at the moment.
- I have to build up the fuel-injection kit, too.
- Going to have to build at least one manifold from scratch.
- Going to have to build a new sump (and pickup) from scratch
- ...there's going to be all sorts of other roadblocks I can't see yet.
Anything else I get done will be a bonus. And, to that end, I'm going to brave the snow and head
out to the unit.
Late January
Okay! As I was leaving to head off to the unit, I spied that my length of aluminium tube (for the inlet manifold) had arrived. Marvellous!
That means I can combine it with these bits I made a start on earlier:
And thus, with a bit of grinder-y action, my Mad Science goggles...
...some careful experimentation with the aluminium brazing rod + flux I picked up the other day, we get:
Not the prettiest, but good enough for a first go, and it cleaned up
nicely; so out with the hacksaw and some chopping action, and the
result is:
Then it's merely a case of repeating twice more. (Also, some beautification work making those flanges look somewhat like the original ones. Ideally, I'd like to fit them straight into the original ones and trace it, but I think the original manifold is in a locker on the offside of the truck. Which is right up against the wall. Same as my extension leads, and a bunch of other stuff. sigh)
I've gotten injector bosses ordered, and there'll be some serious thinking before I go and attack them with the torch to braze them in, since they all need to line up at the same angle across all 3 inlet runners; which pretty much means I need to have the manifold in its final form by that point so I can use a jig to hold them all in place at the right angle respective to each-other.
Which, of course, means I need to have gotten to the point of, y'know, having the manifold designed and near enough finished before I can do that. So I probably need to figure out what direction I want to go with the manifold.
Other than that, I've started lapping valves in. Should probably have had the seats very lightly cut just a little bit while it was at the machine-shop, but oh well; the coarse paste has done a pretty good job.
Pistons on rods, and rings on pistons, on Saturday. Heater on full blast, both to warm the pistons up to make the gudgeon pins a nice easy slip-fit, and to stop me from freezing.
Heater was coughing and spluttering a little bit by the time I was onto the last piston, so I'll need to get some more diesel. (Annoyingly, there's still at least a gallon in the tank of the heater; but because it's a wide, low tank, the level is low enough that the pickup ... can't. So it flames out, and fills the workshop full of smoke. Oh, the joys.)
Anyway, I did sorta video me doing those last two pistons (phone
propped up on toolbox; I have stumped up for a new camera & tripod for
videoing this stuff, simply because otherwise I'll never do it, since
the current setup is such a pain in the arse.), so that'll be part of
the engine rebuild vid, I guess, when I get around to that.
In the meantime, I've started on putting together the bits of engine-work video I do have, because if I save it all up until the engine rebuild is completed, the rest of the truck will be done before I ever get that video stitched together.
Also, in case anyone needs to know, the timing cover oil seal is a GACO 6350016, which apparently cross-references to a Payen NA512 C939 as (apparently) used in other Vauxhall products of the same time period.
Timing cover has been cleaned up, given a coating of etch primer, and is now hanging around waiting for me to make a gasket for it, paint it in its finished colour, fit the seal, and all that. (Should probably add some sort of mounting point for crank position sensor before painting it, too.)
I also have all six pistons in the block, and the rod caps loosely attached; need to roll the block over in order to torque the caps, next. It's gotten significantly more difficult to rotate the crank now, with the drag of 24 rings adding to the stiff rear-main seal, and no good way to bar it over! (having no flywheel, or crank pulley, yet.)