Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Back From Vacation

After being out of town on vacation camping and breaking things on our pop-up trailer, I’ve had to use some precious car-time making the camper whole again. With those issues behind me, I was able to spend last evening automotively engrossed.

First, I answered Lucy’s call for attention by troubleshooting a turn signal/brake light issue. The problem was a cracked blinker switch housing which caused the sliding contact to hang up. Thankfully, just wrapping the housing with electrical tape brought everything back into alignment. While looking at this issue, I discovered the left front blinker bulb wasn’t blinking. A new bulb and all was legal again.

Next, I had to clean up the garage. With the frantic preparation for vacation, I had not done a good job putting tools back where they belonged.

Finally, I was able to get back to assembling Ringo’s new engine. I got the exhaust manifolds bolted in place, the oil pump greased, assembled, and a new cover with a single gasket installed. I then rolled the engine over on the stand and tried to turn the pump shaft. It wouldn’t budge. Now I knew why the Corvair Ranch included a second gasket in the kit. With that gasket stacked on the initial one, the shaft turned with a minimum of drag – just what I’d expect. Next on was the oil pressure switch followed by the blower and pulley. The latter of which caused me my next problem. EMs used smaller diameter bolts to hold the blower and pulley to their mounting flange than the LMs. I could not find a LM pulley in my collection of parts. Since I’d torn down at least one LM engine, I was quite frustrated with the turn of events. My solution was to drill out the holes in an EM pulley, but first I took one out to Victoria’s car to make sure there were no other differences between the two – specifically the height. From what I could tell, they are the same, so I opened up the four holes to 5/16ths and complete that portion of the assembly. The oil cooler was next up. I cleaned it in my solvent tank and then ensured all the air passages were open by sticking a zip-tie through all of them. After rinsing it out with water and blowing out the oil passages with air, I set it outside to let today’s sunshine evaporate any dampness left inside. The rest of the time in the garage was spent test fitting the sheetmetal shrouds that surround the engine. Ariel has cleaned and painted the pieces and it took a few minutes to figure out where everything went, but it’s all sitting in place just waiting for the oil cooler to be installed first.

The clean aluminum against the newly painted black sheetmetal looks really nice. I’ll shoot a few pictures this evening and try to get them posted.

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