My Big Can of Worms Build

Holy shit how have I missed this thread?

 

Well bi-annual thread update I guess - and I thought it had only been a year lol.

Immediately following the teardown of the OG engine, an retired mechanic down the street said he could get his friend to help me rebuild the engine and that he's been driving a vehicle with an engine already rebuilt by him.

With the engine out of the way, began gusseting the motor mount perches.



Don't have any more pictures.

The more time spent having the engine out, started thinking of that &%*$ long bolt on the upper. Wanted to use two bolts like I saw someone on dezertrangers do where they cut the middle of the sleeve out and used a nut and a bolt on each end of the uca. Unfortunately the shock hoop wouldn't allow for me to put a bolt in from the front up front.



So I cut the coil bucket altogether and decided I would make mounts using my solo gussets as a template to make them from.



This was the last thing my Handler 140 did before I couldn't do anything more to fix it - I had replaced the hose / torch / power cable throughout the years and just couldn't get any penetration anymore. Bought an Eastwood MIG 180 on sale for Father's Day which was around $450-500 shipped to my door.

Started building the plates to build the mounts with.






Got all the welding on the first mounts wrapped up. Started on the other side.






Figured I had maybe weakened the frame a little by cutting out the coilbuckes in the area where they were welded on. Made overlay plates.




Got the coilover back in to make sure it bumped out the same way and it was ok.



My amigo Anthony told me I should put a tube to the shock hoop where the coil bucket had been so I began doing that. Design constraints were fitting between the headers and the new UCA bolt heads that would be passing by it.

Started out with 1.75 and wasn't able to get enough room to even clear the nut on the CO.




Went to 1.50 and that fit perfectly.




The main theme for doing all this rework on the suspension was to make it easier to work on. I made the tube removeable just in case I needed to remove the headers etc. necessitating getting close to the engine from the side.

Used some 3/8-24 nuts ground down to make inserts on the bottom and tube clamps on the top.





After that I got any unboxed areas closed on the hoops.






Then it was time to move on.

Though it pains me to say it, I had a negative experience with the retired mechanic down the street that "helped" rebuild my engine.

These pics he sent me looked good before I picked it up:






However upon closer inspection the guy

* Installed the head bolts WITHOUT THE WASHERS so idk whether they bottomed out in the holes
* Misaligned the cams (didn't use a service bolt)
* Left a bunch of corrosion under one of the bucket shims (I got it cleaned off later)
* Got RTV all in the bolt holes around the water pump that didn't even need rtv with the gasket I gave him
* Stripped out one of the bell housing bolt holes in the block

Man I tried to be an adult and let him know what I saw and we'd make it better either together or just leave off some of the remaining $650 balance I owed him and his friend (who is puportedly an aerospace machinist with a shop in his back yard). He showed up one day while I was at work and started tearing into the engine and had his son call me when low and behold, he couldn't find the washers near the engine? I hadn't even been told he'd be coming by to do that so when I told his son that, the guy left the engine torn apart and bailed. It was awhile ago but this is what happened after that:

I called him to tell him I'd like to work on the engine together and fix the mistakes and that I had all new oem head bolts and we could use an extra set of headgaskets I had to reseal the heads. He said to call him back and call him back and call him back until three months went by and he was able to swing by.

When he came over he had said he'd bring a nice snap on beep type torque wrench, but had 0 tools and was going to his car when he mentioned he needed the money I owed him (mind you this was roughly only 1/3 of the price I paid him for a "running engine"). I said no problem, however I thought we'd be able to negotiate a bit since I had to buy all new oem head bolts to replace the ones he installed and a new water pump gasket where he had put RTV all over the oem one I had given him. Well that just did it - he started yelling he should have "gone to Las Vegas this weekend" and "We're done" and peeled scaring the neighbor as he chirped down the street.

I texted him asking him to be reasonable and that $650 shouldn't make a difference between friends (naively I thought we were friends) and that we can just talk it out while fixing the engine. He just keeps saying "We're done."

Long story short, I paid him minus the cost of the new head bolts (well paid his wife as God knows where he was) when I went to give him a nice new engine stand (he'd lent an old beat up one to me) and haven't talked to him for over a year.

Still not sure whether I want to take the engine to a reputable builder / machine shop, JDM longblock, or junkyard motor swap it at this point in time.

ANYWAY, moving on...

All the major work on the suspension (minus some grinding and redoing some ugly looking welds I don't like looking at), and it was time to work on the lower arm mounts.

HappySmiley on here (Fabien) had given me an idea about making lockout tabs that fit inside of the cam tab slots. I made them to try out.






However they were making the installation of the lower arms too difficult as they really locked that bolt in there. Plus when I removed them, the tack welds I had used to stick the outer and inner pieces together just weren't holding them together and they were falling apart. I think I could make these actually work well with a plasma / laser cutter and a tig welder, but using my angle grinder and mig, didn't really work out.

So I just reused the outer cam lock out plates with some KPOffroad gussets I modified to give more of a reinforcement to the lower mount with.





Well that one side in the front took like a whole evening to weld and facing the prospect I had 3 to go, I "worked smart" and made the "high lift jack stand" and used my engine hoist as a poor man's lift system.




and knocked out the rest in at least a better welding position haha



I used a heavy duty 3/4" high strength steel piece of all thread to make a jig of sorts to make sure my lower arms would slide nice and easily into the mounts (I don't think my truck or solo's jig is on the same page as one another and I needed to still do some more work later after this to make the arms fill up the space inside the mounts). This isn't the 3/4 all thread - this 5/8 mid grade would strip before it pushed the mounts into place.




Now with all that done and going from this:



to this:



It was time to have this thing do something it hadn't done in a year: roll!

 

Now that all that major work had been completed, it was almost time to lay out the lines for the braking system. I installed the Sky Offroad GM master cylinder adapter and a full size GM truck master cylinder to give me an idea of how I'd lay out the lines.



I didn't like how far the MC is placed out from the firewall and how heavy it was so I plan on making a support for it off of the engine / shock hoop brace that is closely positioned next to it.

I went to G and J aircraft to buy a set of AN -3 hardware and a length of 3/16 stainless brake line. With my ghetto "diagram" I was able to get all the adapters I needed and was treated with good customer service.




To do all the work on making brake lines and such, the bed would have to be coming off and it had been folding on itself when I lifted it without the support of the outer skin so I knew I had to make the rear stiffer.



I must have deleted the pictures, but I put a piece of 2x2x1/8" angle iron under the bed and sandwiched the bed between it and a piece of 1/8" on top with your every day kind of bed stiffeners to boot.




I hated the thought of losing a tail light due to only 3 out of 4 of the mounting screws lining up with the bedsides removed. I decided I'd need to make mounts that bolt into the bed stiffeners.




Now I can get on the brakes and laying out hard lines without the bed in the way.

 

I like the bracing/ gussets on the bypass hoop. Im going to have to copy that next time I have the engine out