OK, so after the last debacle, I was left with three options:<\/p>\n
Option 3 wasn’t really an option at the moment – simply put, I don’t have the money. \u00a0So it was between the first and second ones; I elected for the second one as the engine was known to be good (the one thing we didn’t lack on Rally GB 2007 was power, and the fault that put us out was the throttle body), and it was actually a toss of a coin between fitting this engine and the one which has just died. \u00a0However, before doing so it would need to be checked for piston protrusion, just like the last one. \u00a0And once it had been grabbed out of the shed, cleaned off and then had the head removed, it measured up pretty well – 0.5mm against the spec 0.8, but I was happy that was close enough, particularly given circumstances. \u00a0However, it was missing the flywheel. \u00a0Now I know that on many engines the crank and flywheel are balanced as a pair, but the last Skoda crank I took for balancing needed nothing done to it at all, the flywheel ended up being balanced on its own. \u00a0And given this, and the fact that I just don’t have time to spend a week waiting for it to be balanced, having taken the engine apart, I took the flywheel from engine #1 (which had been lightened and balanced) and fitted that. \u00a0Next up, time to fit the head, which involved lots of careful cleaning, fitting of a new gasket, and setting the valve clearances. \u00a0Doing this meant putting the front pulley on properly (it was just placed on since it had been removed for use on another engine), and when I did this up…. the engine stopped turning. \u00a0Most puzzling, so I just carried on setting the valve clearances by turning the engine using the flywheel. \u00a0However, this still meant that I had a problem – the front pulley getting done up stopped the engine turning. \u00a0I checked inside the front cover and couldn’t see anything, so the only conclusion I could come to is that the thrust bearing (which controls the side-to-side movement of the crank) had moved – on the Felicia engine it’s a large ring which has a tab on it to stop it spinning, and if the crank moves to the back of the engine, this could rotate and get stuck. \u00a0So the sump had to come off (and gave me a chance to give it a good clean inside), and lo and behold, I was right – the bearing had indeed spun, but was easily put back into place, and then fitting the front pulley held everything in the right place. \u00a0Sump back on, another hour taken up. \u00a0Fitted the water pump, checked everything over, and then got the gearbox on, with the help of my Mum – again it was dead easy doing it on the stand. \u00a0What wasn’t easy, though was refitting the engine – I’d spent a fair while bent over sorting out the bearing problem, and managed to sprain something in my lower back. \u00a0Not really badly, not like last year, but bad enough to give me real pain. \u00a0Soldiered on and got the engine and box bolted into place (again, another thing that goes far more smoothly with a sling holding the engine in the correct balance), and then took a break for an hour to hopefully recover a bit (not much, alas). \u00a0Then the typical work of refitting the inlet manifold, starter, thermostat housing, alternator, driveshafts and hubs, etc. \u00a0Then… it rained! \u00a0So that was that for Saturday, and a good thing too as I was pretty much done in!<\/p>\n
Sunday afternoon it was time to finish off the things that were needed to see if it would run well, and thankfully I had Tammie (my girlfriend) on hand to help out! \u00a0She’d been visiting this weekend, but had kindly gone shopping while I was fitting everything, and was happy to give me a hand for an hour to finish everything off, so she did various jobs including filling gearbox oil, engine oil and water, while I did the other things that were needed. \u00a0And then time to get it running. \u00a0As ever, firstly built oil pressure with the injectors and coilpack disconnected, and then reconnected them to fire it up. \u00a0Two things happened – it fired, but ran only on two cylinders, and revved a LOT. \u00a0Not a good start.<\/p>\n
I did a compression test, and found all four cylinders good and consistent, so hopefully not a mechanical issue for the misfire, and put a new set of platinum plugs in. \u00a0And found the reason for the high revving – the servo hose was off, letting far too much air in. \u00a0With it refitted, I fired it up, and it sounded good! \u00a0After a bit of blipping the throttle to warm it up, it seemed happy enough, so I got Tammie to keep it going and felt the breather to see how heavily it was breathing. \u00a0It wasn’t at all – seemed really sound, so very little blow-by, a real relief.<\/p>\n
So, third time lucky? \u00a0Let’s hope so. \u00a0The bearings will need changing at some point, but that’s \u00a340 and an hour’s work, easily done as I’ve done it before, both big ends and mains can be replaced in situ. \u00a0But for the time being, that should do the trick, and won’t make any difference to the engine’s mapping situation, so I can start driving it during the week to get it set up properly for RallyDay 2010, and spend the week getting better myself as well. \u00a0Rides in the Skoda will be available on eBay!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, so after the last debacle, I was left with three options: Fit a standard bottom end, but with a different camshaft in it (I have a standard Felicia engine in the shed) Fit a previous rally engine (One used on Rally GB 2007), which went really well, but was a bit low on oil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-build"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1131,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions\/1131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}