Practical Engine Building: Step 7: Short Block Assembly
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Step 7: Short Block Assembly
1.04.58
| 00:00 | - With all of our components now clean, we can actually get stuck into the assembly of our engine short block. |
| 00:06 | Before we start final assembling any parts though, this is a good opportunity to now go through an check and confirm all of our clearances are exactly what we requested from our engine machine shop. |
| 00:18 | Now the techniques that we're going to be able to use in order to check these clearances obviously will come down to the tools you have on hand. |
| 00:26 | In this case we're going to be making use of our micrometer and dial bore gauge to check our piston to cylinder wall clearance as well as our main bearing clearance and our connecting rod big end clearances. |
| 00:37 | To start with what we need to do is use our micrometer to measure the outside diameter of our piston skirt. |
| 00:45 | It's important to note here, we do need to be quite careful about where we actually make this measurement. |
| 00:52 | And in this case if we use the JE recommendations that are on the specification sheet that comes with the piston, the gauge point where we want to measure is half and inch up from the base of the skirt. |
| 01:02 | So I've actually already made a little match mark here so we can be quite accurate where we're going to be measuring this using our micrometer. |
| 01:10 | So let's go ahead and make that measurement now. |
| 01:14 | So in this case I am going to be using an imperial micrometer, but when we're using the micrometer just to zero our dial bore gauge, it's not really the measurement on the micrometer that's specifically that important. |
| 01:25 | What we're going to do is make sure that we've got our micrometer located accurately on those gauge points that I've market and we're just going to get it into the correct location there, making sure that that thimble is tightened down correctly, we'll lock the micrometer in place, and now we can remove it. |
| 01:41 | Now once we've got our micrometer set on the outside diameter of our piston skirt, we can then use this to zero our dial bore gauge. |
| 01:51 | So the process here is to get our dial bore gauge located between the two anvils of our micrometer and we want to rock it backwards and forwards, and look for the smallest measurement here. |
| 02:03 | So we can see at the moment we're quite a long way off being zeroed, so we need to make some adjustments to our dial indicator in order to correct that. |
| 02:14 | This is a bit of an iterative process so let's just go through and get that zeroed now. |
| 02:30 | Once we've got our dial bore gauge zeroed using our micrometer, we can now place it in each of our bores and measure our piston to cylinder wall clearance. |
| 02:39 | It's not a case here of just making a single measurement though. |
| 02:41 | What we want to do is check the bores in two directions perpendicular to each other and this will allow us to measure any out of round. |
| 02:48 | We also want to check the bores from top to bottom and this will allow us to confirm that the bore walls are in fact parallel from top to bottom. |
| 02:55 | It's also important to note here that the measurement that we're looking for, the specification sheet from JE asks for a clearance of four thousandths of an inch. |
| 03:05 | Now we're actually using a metric dial bore gauge so this is the equivalent of 0.10 millimetres so that's what we're actually looking for here on our dial bore gauge. |
| 03:14 | Let's go ahead and check our bores. |
| 03:20 | Alright so we'll locate our dial bore gauge in our bore. |
| 03:23 | If we just rock is backwards and forwards here we can see that we're coming right up to our 0.10 mark on our dial bore gauge so this is showing us the clearance that we are expecting to see. |
| 03:35 | Now we'd also want to move that down the bore and check our bore for taper. |
| 03:40 | So I'll move down a little bit further and just check again. |
| 03:43 | And we can see that we're almost coming up to exactly the same point here. |
| 03:46 | And we can also check of course perpendicular to that first measurement. |
| 03:50 | Now it is important to just mention that with our particular SR20 here, we have had the block torque plate bored and honed. |
| 03:59 | Now this makes the readings or measurements that I'm making right now a little bit redundant so I'm really demonstrating this process just for those of you who are not having your blocks torque plate bored and honed. |
| 04:12 | If we have had this block torque plate bored and honed, then the correct way of checking our piston to cylinder wall clearance is also to have the torque plate fitted during the checking or measurement process. |
| 04:24 | The reason for this is simply because the torque plate can end up distorting the bores, that's the very reason why we're using the torque plate in the first place. |
| 04:32 | In our case here though we have gone through this carefully with our machinist and we're comfortable that our piston to cylinder wall clearance and our bores are where we're expecting them to be once that torque plate is installed, which is also of course how the bores are going to be once our head is torqued in place. |
| 04:52 | Let's move on and we'll have a look at our bearing clearances. |
| 04:55 | The process of measuring our main bearing clearances is very similar to what we've just looked at with our piston to cylinder wall. |
| 05:02 | Now what we're going to do is take a smaller micrometer and we're going to measure our outside diameters of our crankshaft main bearing journals. |
| 05:09 | We're going to use that to zero our dial bore gauge and then finally insert our dial bore gauge into our engine block to measure our bearing clearances. |
| 05:17 | So let's go ahead and start by measuring our front main journal diameter. |
| 05:22 | Now again when we are measuring our journal diameters we want to be a little bit careful here, generally we're going to be taking measurements in multiple points across the journal. |
| 05:31 | This allows us to ensure that there isn't any taper or out of round on the journal. |
| 05:36 | So we've got a measurement now for our number one main bearing journal on our crankshaft. |
| 05:44 | We've already adjusted our dial bore gauge here with the correct extension to suit this diameter, so we're going to again go through the process of zeroing that in our micrometer. |
| 06:03 | With our dial bore gauge now zeroed, the process is simply to insert the dial bore gauge into the journal we want to measure and then we'll be able to see our oil clearance. |
| 06:13 | Now what we can see here, with our four cylinder SR20 engine, we're clearly only going to be able to measure the front three bearing journals, we're not going to be able to get to the rear with the length of this particular dial bore gauge. |
| 06:26 | Of course you do still have options there. |
| 06:28 | You can temporarily remove the engine from the engine stand and this will allow access to those rear two bearing journals from the back of the engine block instead of from the front. |
| 06:38 | For our demonstration here we'll just have a look at measuring our front two bearing journals so let's go ahead and do that now. |
| 06:46 | When we're making our measurements here we want to make them perpendicular to the parting face of the bearings. |
| 06:51 | And we're just going to rock our dial bore gauge backwards and forwards gently and we also want to move from side to side so we can measure the full width of the bearing and what we can see here is that we're just rocking backwards and forwards through the 0.05 millimetre marker or five hundredths of a millimetre. |
| 07:09 | Now in terms of our imperial measurements which we have been working in here, this gives us a clearance of just under two thousandths of an inch which is exactly where we're expecting to be. |
| 07:19 | And this has been the result of quite a bit of corrective work by our engine machinist in order to adjust and line hone the engine block to suit our new Mazworx main studs. |
| 07:30 | Let's go ahead and make a measurement there on our second main bearing as well. |
| 07:37 | So we can see that our second main bearing there is also sitting at five hundredths of a millimetre. |
| 07:43 | So both our front two bearings that we've just measured there are both within our specification or on our specification of two thousandths of an inch. |
| 07:52 | And of course the process here is to continue and check the remaining bearings. |
| 07:56 | It's also worth mentioning there that I did make my measurement off our front main journal on our crankshaft, and of course in the perfect world we would expect all of our journals to measure exactly the same, that's not always the case though so to be absolutely perfectly accurate, we would want to use our micrometer and measure each bearing journal and then in turn zero our dial bore gauge on that micrometer reading and this will give us the exact oil clearance for the particular journal we're measuring. |
| 08:27 | The last clearance we're going to have a look at right now is our connecting rod big end oil clearance. |
| 08:31 | And again this is a rinse and repeat of what we've already seen. |
| 08:34 | We need to start this process by ensuring that we've got our connecting rod bearings installed in our caps and that the cap and body of the connecting rod are correctly torqued together. |
| 08:45 | Once we've done that we're going to take our micrometer and we're going to use this now to measure the big end journal diameters on our crankshaft so let's go ahead and take a reading now. |
| 09:08 | Once we've got our reading on our micrometer we're going to get our dial bore gauge and again we're going to zero our dial bore gauge between the anvils of our micrometer so we'll go through and do that process now. |
| 09:28 | With our dial bore gauge correctly adjusted, we can now take our connecting rod and we want to install the dial bore gauge perpendicular to the parting face on our cap. |
| 09:39 | Then we can take a reading of our bearing clearance so let's have a look and see what we've got here. |
| 09:49 | So we can see here that similar to our main bearings we're looking at a measurement there of five hundredths of a millimetre. |
| 09:55 | This is just under two thousandths of an inch so again, on the specification that we're looking for here. |
| 10:01 | Of course we would now repeat the process we've just looked at for our remaining connecting rods and at this point we've got the confidence that all of the key clearances inside our engine are where we've asked our machinist to set them. |
| 10:13 | We now move on with the further assembly of our short block. |
| 10:16 | There is one more clearance that we will be looking at a little further into the assembly and this is our thrust clearance for our crankshaft. |
| 10:24 | This is easier to check once we've actually got the crankshaft assembled in the engine block. |
| 10:30 | The next process we're going to cover off here is gapping our piston ring set. |
| 10:34 | Now in this case we've started by checking the existing gap on our oil ring rails and these are quite typically already large enough straight out of the box to be within JEs specification. |
| 10:48 | In this case we can see that if we look on our specifications the oil ring rail end gap needs to be at least 15 thou, and it's important to note that this is not 15 thou per inch of bore, it's just an overall measurement of 15 thou. |
| 11:03 | So we've gone through, confirmed all of our oil ring rails are already in excess of that, this means that we can concentrate our efforts solely on our top and second compression rings. |
| 11:14 | Now a tip when you're trying to decide between the two rings, in most instances we're going to find that the rings are a different thickness, so this is a really good guide as to which is our top and which is our second ring. |
| 11:27 | Make sure that you test these in the piston before you get started so that you're not gapping the wrong ring. |
| 11:33 | So what we're going to do now is we're going to take our number one piston top compression ring and we're going to insert it into our bore. |
| 11:41 | What we're looking for here is to see what our existing end gap is, so let's do that now. |
| 11:50 | Now I've just got that ring started by compressing it slightly wth my hands. |
| 11:54 | And we now need to move it slightly down the bore so that we can get an accurate measurement and we're going to do this using our ring squaring tool. |
| 12:02 | If you don't have one of these, you can also temporarily install a second compression ring on one of your pistons, then use the piston upside down to achieve the same aim. |
| 12:11 | But let's go ahead and move our ring down the bore so we can actually measure and check what our existing clearance is. |
| 12:20 | Alright we've got our ring squared, and one of the first things we want to do here is just inspect our ring end gap and make sure that the two ends of the ring are parallel. |
| 12:29 | If they aren't then we're going to need to correct this as part of the ring gapping or ring filing process. |
| 12:35 | In this case we can see that the two ends are actually nice and square so we can go ahead and take a measurement. |
| 12:41 | What we're going to do is take our feeler blades here and we're going to see where our current end gap is. |
| 12:49 | I'm going to start here with an eight thou feeler blade 'cause I can see that our ring end gap is quite tight. |
| 12:54 | So we're a little bit looser than eight thou but not too far off. |
| 12:58 | We'l just jump up here to 11 thou and see if we're on the money there. |
| 13:05 | OK so 11 thou is just a little bit too tight to go through. |
| 13:08 | We'll drop down one and we'll try our 10 thou feeler blade. |
| 13:19 | OK so our 10 thou feeler blade does just fit through there so at the moment our ring end gap is 10 thou for our number one cylinder top compression ring. |
| 13:28 | Now of course we need to know what we're actually aiming for here. |
| 13:31 | And again this is where the instructions or recommendations from JE pistons come in. |
| 13:37 | Now in this case we can see that we have a recommendation for an engine that's being built for street or moderate turbo nitrous, for our bore diameter multiplied by 0.0050 of an inch. |
| 13:50 | So we're going to use that measurement there, we'll just bring up our calculator. |
| 13:54 | And what we want to do is enter our bore diameter, in this case 3.405, multiply that my 0.005 or five thousandths of an inch, and you can see this gives us a recommended end gap of 17 thou for our top ring. |
| 14:11 | Now while we've got the calculator still open we're going to also do that calculation for our second ring. |
| 14:16 | In this case we've got the same bore diameter obviously. |
| 14:19 | This time we are going to be using 0.0055 or 5.5 thou. |
| 14:23 | You can see this comes to 18.7 thou. |
| 14:27 | We're just going to round this, we're going to call than 19 thou. |
| 14:30 | We always want to be a little bit generous there. |
| 14:32 | Just a note on those ring gaps that we are going for there, for a dedicated competition motor running high boost, these are possibly a little tighter than I would normally aim for. |
| 14:43 | However it is important to know that for this particular engine it will be running on E85 fuel when it's running in a high power high boost configuration. |
| 14:53 | Because that fuel runs a little bit cooler, we can be a little bit tighter with our ring end gaps than we would otherwise be. |
| 14:59 | So now we know that we're going to be removing around about seven thou from our top ring. |
| 15:06 | We'll go ahead and perform that change now. |
| 15:09 | We're going to be using our electric ring file for this operation. |
| 15:12 | Now I've already adjusted the bed here to suit our bore diameter. |
| 15:16 | And this makes sure that our ring end gaps are going to remain nice and square. |
| 15:21 | So I'll just lock that ring down on the bed of the file and we're just going to adjust it so we're just barely touching our grinding wheel. |
| 15:30 | Now what we're going to do is zero our dial indicator here. |
| 15:34 | And we're going to remove a few thousandths of an inch of material. |
| 15:39 | Now it's important to note here, even though I do have a dial indicator fitted to this particular ring file, I always like to remove a small amount of material and check my work frequently. |
| 15:50 | And this allows us to creep up on the correct bore size or ring end gap size without overshooting it and this makes sure that we don't end up wasting a ring set and needing to replace it. |
| 16:01 | So let's go through and we'll adjust our ring gap now. |
| 16:28 | Alright we've made our first small cut there and we'll now install our ring back in our bore and just check our progress again. |
| 16:36 | And it's the same process, we need to of course go through and square our ring before measuring the end gap so let's have a look and see what we've got to. |
| 17:06 | Alright so our first adjustment there has taken us from 10 thou up to 12 thou. |
| 17:11 | It's about exactly what I had expected to take off there with the small cut we made. |
| 17:16 | We're going to continue there until we've got our top ring at 17 thou which we're aiming for. |
| 17:44 | Alright so we've got our first ring there, our first compression ring gapped at 17 thou. |
| 17:52 | The process we're going to go through now is exactly what we've just looked at so we're going to go through and gap the remaining rings. |
| 17:58 | Of course it's worth mentioning here that once we've got the rings gapped correctly, it's important to make sure that they do remain with that particular bore which is why you can see I've got my piece of paper labelled here with my bore numbers. |
| 18:10 | Once we've gapped those rings they're gonna remain in the correct location. |
| 18:13 | Let's go through and we'll gap the remaining rings. |
| 19:32 | Alright so at this point we've got all of our rings correctly gapped. |
| 19:35 | There's one last task to complete on these rings though. |
| 19:38 | As the grinding process can often leave a small burr on the edge of the ring where we've filed. |
| 19:44 | So what we're going to do here is use a fine needle file and we're just going to break down any of those burrs on the edges of the rings that we find before thoroughly cleaning the rings. |
| 19:52 | So let's go through and do that now. |
| 20:10 | Alright we've got all our rings filed, we'll clean those down, and then we can progress to getting our pistons mounted onto our connecting rods. |
| 20:18 | We've got everything laid out here on our work bench and to start with what we're going to do is install one of our wire locks. |
| 20:24 | Now this can be a slightly tricky exercise and what we're going to do here to help us along is we're going to use a bulldog clip and this is going to be used to help retain the wrist pin inside of the piston. |
| 20:37 | Just to make it a little bit easier for us to install the first wire lock. |
| 20:42 | Let's take our first piston here and we're going to start by just installing our little bulldog clip into the wire lock groove. |
| 20:50 | Now we can take our wrist pin and we'll just gently slot that into the pin boss and you'll see that slides through quite nicely and locates against that bulldog clip. |
| 21:03 | This gives us full access to the wire lock groove on the other side. |
| 21:06 | Now what we can do is take one of our wire locks and we're going to install it into the wire lock groove. |
| 21:12 | Now this as I've said is a little bit tricky and what we want to do is start by locating the wire lock so that it is overlapping the little window or pocket and this is going to be essential to make it really easy to remove this wire lock for strip downs at a later point. |
| 21:28 | And what we're also going to be doing is using the flat underside of the piston here and this is going to help us slide the wire lock into place. |
| 21:37 | What I generally find with installing wire locks on any pistons is that the first one or two pistons take a little bit of playing around to just find exactly where you need to locate the wire lock to start with and then the specific technique or where you need to press and apply pressure on the wire lock in order to allow it to smoothly and easily slip into place. |
| 21:59 | Once you've got that technique sorted out, the rest of the pistons become quite easy. |
| 22:06 | Now to help us with this as well, I am going to be using a small flat blade jeweller's screwdriver. |
| 22:11 | Now obviously when we are using this we need to apply a little bit of common sense and care. |
| 22:16 | Obviously we don't want to scratch or scrape our piston or in any way dent the surface finish of the piston. |
| 22:23 | Now for this reason, what we're going to be doing predominantly is applying pressure directly onto the wire lock. |
| 22:28 | So let's get started now, we'll get our wire lock located and I'm just going to start with our wire lock located in the bottom of the wire lock groove there. |
| 22:37 | And we can see that that presses the wire lock up. |
| 22:41 | But what I'm going to then be able to do is using just the pressure of my thumbs, get the wire lock sliding along the underside of the piston skirt and as it slides along there that's going to compress it. |
| 22:51 | From here what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my little flat blade screwdriver to just help work it into that wire lock groove. |
| 23:00 | Now as I've said, this is going to predominantly be us applying pressure directly onto the wire lock rather than against the piston itself. |
| 23:09 | Alright so we've got the wire lock started there and again just applying a small amount of pressure, we can see that the wire lock begins to slip in and at this point we no longer require any effort to actually hold the wire lock in place. |
| 23:23 | Now what we can do is simply work around using our little flat blade screwdriver here. |
| 23:28 | And we feel and hear the wire lock snap into place. |
| 23:32 | As we can see, we've done no damage to the piston. |
| 23:34 | So now what we're going to do is go through and repeat that process with our remaining three pistons. |
| 24:07 | So we've got our first wire lock installed in each of our pistons. |
| 24:10 | The process now is to install our connecting rods and then of course that final wire lock to make sure that everything is going to stay in place. |
| 24:19 | When we're assembling the pistons and the conrods for the final time, of course we also need to apply some assembly lubricant. |
| 24:25 | And in this case, rather than engine oil I am going to be using a moly based assembly lubricant. |
| 24:30 | This just provides a little bit more protection, particularly during engine start up. |
| 24:37 | So let's go ahead and do that now, we'll start with our number one piston here. |
| 24:41 | We're just going to temporarily remove the wrist pin and I'm going to take our moly based assembly lubricant and I find the easiest technique here is to just apply a little bit of that assembly lubricant onto my finger and then we can use that to generously smear that through the wrist pin boss and of course we're also going to repeat that process on the pin or small end of our connecting rod. |
| 25:10 | Now it's also important when we are installing the connecting rod for the final time, just to be sure that we have got the connecting rod fitted around the correct way. |
| 25:20 | Now the specifics here aren't actually that critical, what we want to do more particularly is make sure that all four of our connecting rods are aligned in the same direction. |
| 25:29 | Alright so we've got everything lubricated there, what we're going to do is start by taking our wrist pin, install that through the pin boss. |
| 25:36 | We're going to then take our connecting rod and we're going to move the wrist pin through the connecting rod, put it all the way into place. |
| 25:46 | Now we're going to go through and do that with our remaining connecting rods. |
| 26:12 | We've got all of our connecting rods now fitted, last task is to install that final remaining wire lock. |
| 26:18 | Just one last visual inspection's a good idea here to make sure that you've got your conrods all fitted around the correct way. |
| 26:24 | Easy way of doing this is just to check the little cut out for our locating tang on our connecting rod bearing, make sure we've got this aligned with the same side of our piston. |
| 26:34 | Really easy with these pistons as they are an asymmetric skirt. |
| 26:38 | Let's take our first conrod and piston assembly here and the process we're going to go through is essentially exactly what we've already looked at. |
| 26:46 | What we're going to do is take our wire lock and we're going to locate that into our wire lock groove. |
| 26:53 | Again making sure that we are aligning this over that little pocket so we're going to be able to easily remove that wire lock at a later point. |
| 27:01 | From here what we're going to do is just use our screwdriver to manipulate that wire lock into place as we've already seen so let's go ahead and we'll do that with all of our pistons now. |
| 27:36 | With the installation complete it's always a good idea to just go through and have one final inspection to make sure that both of your wire locks are properly located and seated inside that wire lock groove. |
| 27:48 | With the wire lock it is normally pretty easy to tell when they are correctly installed because you will hear them snap into place. |
| 27:55 | But it is always a good idea just to have one final inspection. |
| 27:58 | And while we're doing this, it's also a good opportunity to just use a clean rag to remove any excess moly lubricant from the pin boss that's been pushed through during the assembly process. |
| 28:11 | Once you're happy with everything there, we can install or fit our pistons into our rack, ready for the next step so let's go through and check our remaining pistons. |
| 28:32 | When it comes to installing our rings, we're going to be working from the bottom of the piston towards the top, starting with our oil control ring, followed by our second compression ring and finally our top compression ring. |
| 28:43 | We also need to pay attention to the orientation of our ring end gaps. |
| 28:48 | And the documentation that we have from our ring manufacturer provides a nice diagram showing where the orientation of each of those ring end gaps should be. |
| 28:57 | So we're gonna start with our number one piston here, we've got all of our rings laid out nicely and we're going to begin by installing our oil ring expander rail. |
| 29:07 | With the oil ring expander we also need to take special note of the two ends. |
| 29:12 | We need to make sure that they are orientated so that they're facing downwards, and that once they're installed on the piston they're aren't overlapping. |
| 29:21 | So we'll start with our number one piston and we'll just drop this down. |
| 29:23 | It can be easily expanded just gently by hand and we'll get that into our oil ring groove. |
| 29:30 | We can check here with our little orientation diagram and in this case we'd orientate this with the front of the engine across to my right, and this shows us that our oil ring expander should be orientated over here closest to me. |
| 29:45 | Once we've got our oil ring expander installed, we can now located and install our two oil ring rails. |
| 29:50 | One of these installs above and one installs below the oil ring expander. |
| 29:55 | Now these are relatively straightforward to install, they can be located in the groove and then just spiralled gently into place by hand. |
| 30:03 | It's actually easiest with these oil ring rails, to locate and install the top one before we do the bottom one. |
| 30:11 | Now again, just checking with our orientation diagram, we can see that our top oil ring rail end gap should be located around this position on our piston so what we'll do is we'll just get our ring rail installed, get our gap set in the correct orientation and then we'll just gently spiral that down onto the piston and into the groove by hand. |
| 30:35 | And it's a good idea once we've got that installed as well, just to visually check and make sure that the two ends of the expander haven't overlapped. |
| 30:42 | Following that we'll install our lower oil ring rail. |
| 30:46 | And we can see that the end gap should be located around about this location. |
| 30:51 | This is just a repeat of what we've just looked at here. |
| 31:01 | Again with the oil ring rail installation complete we're just going to check our end gaps are in the right location and that our expander is not overlapping. |
| 31:10 | Now we get to our two compression rings, starting of course with our bottom compression ring. |
| 31:16 | And if we check our orientation diagram, we see that our second compression ring end gap should be located on this side of the piston. |
| 31:24 | So we'll get that ring, and this is an area where it really is a good idea to make sure we're using a ring expander tool, these are really cheap so it just helps install the ring without any chance of damaging either the ring or the piston. |
| 31:40 | When we're installing these rings as well, we also want to take note of the little marking on the top of the ring, in this case we can see there is an N on the top of the ring. |
| 31:49 | Now this just dictates which side of the ring should face up. |
| 31:52 | In some instances it may be a dot or it may be a number, but this is always the side of the ring that will face up. |
| 31:59 | So what we're going to do is just install our ring into our ring expander and gently expand that. |
| 32:06 | We don't want to over expand the ring, we just want the bare minimum amount of expansion that will let us slip that ring down and locate it in the ring groove. |
| 32:15 | Let's go ahead and do that now. |
| 32:22 | Now once we've got the ring installed correctly we can of course easily just turn that and rotate it until our end gap alignment is as per our diagram. |
| 32:32 | Finally we can take our top ring and we're going to repeat the same process, again we've got an N on the top of the ring that denotes which side should face up. |
| 32:40 | We're going to install that in our ring expander tool and we're just going to gently slip that down until it locates in our ring groove. |
| 32:50 | And we can see here from our diagram that our top ring end gap should be on the side of the piston facing me. |
| 32:56 | So we've got all of our rings installed on our number one piston. |
| 32:59 | We're going to go through now and repeat that process for our remaining pistons. |
| 33:41 | So there we have it, all of our rings are now installed on our pistons and we're one step closer to getting our conrod and piston assemblies fitted into our short block. |
| 33:50 | We're at a point now where we can start the final assembly of our short block. |
| 33:55 | At the moment our short block is still bare so this is a good time to reinstall all of those blanking plugs we had for our oil galleries and water jacket that we took out right at the start of our process. |
| 34:07 | Now in order to do this, we need to understand that these particular threaded plugs are a tapered plug, and they rely on the taper in order to seal but they're not gonna do that on their own, they do need a teflon based thread sealant. |
| 34:23 | In this case we're using Loctite 567. |
| 34:25 | So we're going to go ahead now and reinstall and tighten all of those blanking plugs. |
| 35:07 | Unlike the blanking plugs that we've just fitted, the blanking plug for the water jacket which fits to the side of our engine block actually seals with a copper washer so it's a good idea to start here with a brand new copper washer to ensure the best possible seal. |
| 35:29 | With all of our blanking plugs back in place, we're now going to refit a couple of components from the underside of the engine block which we need to get to before we finally install our crankshaft. |
| 35:39 | These include our under piston oil squirters, as well as a little baffle plate that fits in one of the breathers. |
| 35:45 | We'll start with our baffle plate here. |
| 35:47 | And we've cleaned this down, we're just going to locate this back in the block where it sits and there are a couple of M6 bolts that hold this in place. |
| 35:57 | Now despite that fact that these do use a spring washer, I always just like to use a small dab of Loctite on these just to ensure they're not going to come out in service. |
| 36:56 | We'll move on now to our oil squirters. |
| 36:58 | Now we've thoroughly cleaned these down and it's just important to mention here that when we are cleaning down the oil squirter assembly, we wanna use compressed air because these are actually spring loaded and these will only open at a certain oil pressure and this ensures that there is sufficient oil pressure when the engine is at idle. |
| 37:16 | So we'll need to clean these down thoroughly with brake clean, and then also use compressed air down through the middle of the bolt, that'll open up the system and make sure that there's no debris trapped in there. |
| 37:28 | So we're gonna go ahead now and fit our oil squirters. |
| 37:30 | We're going to be tightening these down to Nissan's recommendation of 30 newton metres. |
| 38:34 | Now we can go through and install our bearings for the final time and of course before we do this we're going to give the surfaces in the block, the surfaces of our bearing caps, as well as the bearings themselves, one final clean, so we'll go through and do that now. |
| 39:07 | With all of our components now clean for the block half of our bearing installation, we can actually install the bearings. |
| 39:15 | What we want to do here is locate the little tang on the bearing shell with the recess in the engine block. |
| 39:21 | What we want to do then is just use some light pressure from our two thumbs and force forward or push forward just to compress the bearing very slightly and allow it to drop into place without scraping any of the backing off on that sharp edge of the engine block. |
| 39:38 | We'll go through and continue installing the rest of our shells. |
| 39:51 | We've got all of our bearing shells installed in our block now and we're going to go ahead and do exactly the same on our caps. |
| 40:37 | At this point we're going to reinstall all of our main studs. |
| 40:40 | Now when we're installing our main studs, we don't need to use any Loctite in the engine block and these don't need to be over tightened as they go into the engine block. |
| 40:51 | All we want to do is bottom the little extension on the end of the stud in the bottom of the hole, and basically they just need to be done up slightly beyond finger tight. |
| 41:00 | What I'm also going to do is apply a small amount of clean engine oil to the threads that are going to go into the block, just to lubricate them slightly and make sure there isn't undue friction there. |
| 41:12 | So we'll install all of these studs now. |
| 42:05 | At this point we've got all of our main studs reinstalled and the next step is to apply some lubricant to the bearing surfaces before we drop our crankshaft into place. |
| 42:12 | My own personal preference here is to use an engine oil. |
| 42:16 | However you are also able to use an engine assembly lubricant if that's your personal preference. |
| 42:33 | Prior to installing the crankshaft for the final time, it's a good idea to give it one final check over and one final clean down with brake clean and a clean cloth on all of the bearing journals. |
| 42:44 | Once we've done this, we can simply pick up the crankshaft carefully and we want to gently lower this down into the main bearing cradle. |
| 42:53 | Obviously we want to also pay special attention to make sure that we don't end up nicking any of those journals on the studs we've just installed. |
| 43:02 | Once we've got our crankshaft installed correctly, we can now go ahead and install our thrust bearing washers. |
| 43:09 | This is also going to give us the opportunity to check our thrust clearance. |
| 43:13 | In the SR20 our thrust washers are going to locate in the centre main journal, and we've only got two of these washers, they both locate on the upper half in the engine block itself. |
| 43:23 | We've got our two washers here, and the only thing we really need to watch when we are installing these is to make sure that they are installed around the correct way. |
| 43:32 | You can see that on one surface we have two cut outs and this helps with oil distribution. |
| 43:37 | This surface faces the crankshaft, while the opposite side with no cut outs, this faces the engine block. |
| 43:44 | What we're going to do is apply a generous coat of our moly based assembly lubricant to the surface that is going to run against the crankshaft face and then we can simply slide these into place. |
| 43:57 | now it's a good idea, when we are doing this to make sure that to start with, we locate the crankshaft either all they way towards the front or all the way towards the rear of the block, and this will just give us more room to maneuver these thrust washers into place. |
| 44:12 | In this case I've got the crankshaft moved towards the front of the block, so we're going to install our front thrust washer first. |
| 44:19 | Now the process of doing this is to simply lower it into place, against the thrust surface of the crankshaft and then we can just gradually work it around by hand into location in the block. |
| 44:37 | You'll also see that there is a cut out in the block that also matches the little tang on our thrust washer. |
| 44:45 | Once we've got our first thrust washer in place, we can now move the crankshaft towards the rear of the block and this will give us sufficient room to install our second thrust washer. |
| 45:13 | With our two thrust washers now installed, we're going to be able to install or fit our dial indicator and we'll be able to check our thrust clearance or our crankshaft end float. |
| 45:24 | So that we can check our end float or thrust clearance on our crankshaft, we've flipped our engine block around so that we can fit our dial indicator onto the snout of the crankshaft. |
| 45:34 | What we're going to do now is just rock the crankshaft backwards and forwards agains those thrust washers using a pair of pry bars, what we're looking for is the amount of travel that we end up with on our dial indicator. |
| 45:47 | Now the clearance we're looking for here is quite broad as the thrust clearance isn't as critical as the other bearing clearances in our engine. |
| 45:54 | Anywhere from four thou through to 10 thou in imperial units. |
| 45:59 | Our dial indicator here is metric so that's the equivalent of 0.01 millimetres through to 0.25 so quite a broad range. |
| 46:08 | What we can do now is take a pair of pry bars, or you can use a long flat blade screwdriver, we're just going to locate these between the counterweights of the crankshaft and the engine block. |
| 46:21 | We're going to rock the crankshaft backwards and forwards while we're watching our dial indicator. |
| 46:27 | So we can see that we're running to about 0.15 millimetres of end flow. |
| 46:33 | So that equates to approximately six thousandths of an inch so we're in the middle of our clearance range there, we know we're comfortable with that. |
| 46:42 | We can now carry on and we'll begin assembling our main bearing caps. |
| 46:47 | Before we can install the bearing caps, we want to apply a generous amount of lubricating oil to the bearing surfaces, just like we did with the bearing shells that were located in the engine block. |
| 46:59 | Now when we spin our bearing caps over, we want to take note of the marking on the cap. |
| 47:05 | This tells us where abouts in the block the cap locates. |
| 47:08 | Now in some engines there will also be an arrow pointing towards the front of the engine. |
| 47:14 | in our SR20 case we don't have that arrow. |
| 47:17 | It's always easy to tell though. |
| 47:18 | What we want to do is spin the cap over, and we'll look at where the locating tang is on the cap. |
| 47:25 | The locating tang on the cap sits on the same side as the locating tang on the block. |
| 47:31 | So in this case we're looking at our front main cap, and we can drop that into location. |
| 47:37 | We're going to go ahead now and do the same with our remaining caps. |
| 47:49 | With our main caps installed we can now drop our cradle or girdle into place. |
| 47:53 | Now again we need to be careful of orientation here and this time there is an arrow indicating which way faces forward so we can locate that over our ARP studs. |
| 48:04 | The next step is to install our ARP hardware which consists of our washers as well as our nuts. |
| 48:11 | We want to make sure that we're using an ARP moly based lubricant on these fasteners so that we're getting consistent clamping force when we torque them down. |
| 49:02 | With our ARP hardware now installed loosely, we're going to begin by tightening this down, initially just finger tight, then we're going to use a half inch drive ratchet just to pull everything down so that the caps are located correctly in the register in the block. |
| 49:16 | Now we want to do this gradually, we're not going to tighten one cap down the whole way, and we're going to work our way outwards from the centre before we move on to using our torque wrench. |
| 49:56 | Now we can swap over to our torque wrench and what we're going to be doing here is torquing our fasteners down to 75 foot pound of torque, and we're going to be doing this in three stages. |
| 50:05 | So we're going to split that relatively evenly, we're going to go 25, then 50, the 75 foot pound. |
| 50:12 | Now the order that we're going to be torquing these in, is the SR20 factory manual order. |
| 50:17 | In which case we're starting in the middle and working our way our diagonally towards the outside edges. |
| 50:23 | And this just helps pull all our caps down without causing any deformation. |
| 50:28 | Let's go through that process now. |
| 51:19 | Now just as a final sanity check, once we've gone through and we've torqued everything in the correct order, I like to go through and do one last final check all the way from the front to the rear, as this just allows me to make sure that I haven't accidentally overlooked one of those fasteners. |
| 51:44 | So once we've got everything torqued down there, this is a great time to actually rotate our crankshaft and just ensure that it's going to turn freely in the journals. |
| 51:57 | So we've got our crankshaft rotating nicely, the next step, we can turn our engine block over on our stand and we can begin installing our piston and conrod assemblies. |
| 52:07 | Before we can fit the connecting rod and piston assemblies into our block, what we need to do is go through and fit our connecting rod big end bearing shells. |
| 52:16 | The process here is exactly the same as what we've looked at for our main bearings, we want to start by cleaning down the housing in the connecting rod as well as the cap. |
| 52:24 | Of course we also want to clean down our bearing shells one final time, and then gently assemble those, we'll go through that process now. |
| 53:51 | With all of our bearing shells now installed, we can begin installing our piston and rod assemblies. |
| 53:56 | What I've done here is I've rotated the crankshaft so that one and four big end journals are at bottom dead centre. |
| 54:02 | So we're going to start by installing number one piston and we'll follow that up with number four. |
| 54:08 | So we'll take our piston assembly here from number one cylinder, and it's a good idea to take special note of which way around these pistons are going to face. |
| 54:19 | Now on our JE pistons we are installing here, they actually have INT for intake marked on one side of the piston. |
| 54:25 | If you don't have that though, generally you're going to note that the valve cut outs or pockets for the intake valves usually are going to be larger than the exhaust side. |
| 54:34 | So it's really important that you take special note of that and make sure that you face the piston around the correct way. |
| 54:40 | In this case the intake side of our engine is on this side, so we know which way around our piston assemblies are going to go. |
| 54:47 | I'm going to begin here just by flipping my connecting rod over and we'll apply some lubricating oil to our big end bearing shell. |
| 54:56 | Again we want to be quite generous with that. |
| 54:58 | And just smear it over the entire surface of that bearing shell using our finger. |
| 55:03 | At the same time we also want to lubricate our piston. |
| 55:07 | We want to apply some lubricating oil to the skirt as well as our ring pack, and again I'm just going to smear that around with my finger, making sure that I've got good coverage so let's do that now. |
| 55:33 | Alright we've got our piston prepped and ready to go in. |
| 55:35 | Now we want to also prepare our ring compressor. |
| 55:38 | And for this example I'm using our ARP tapered ring compressor, we've got the correct bore diameter here of 86.5 millimetres. |
| 55:48 | It's a good idea with these to always just clean down the internal surfaces. |
| 55:51 | If they've been left oily after their last use, they can collect dust and debris and that can end up scoring or damaging our piston. |
| 55:59 | Once we are comfortable that it is clean, again we're just applying a small amount of lubricating oil to the inside of that ring compressor and smearing that around, making sure we've got good coverage just using our fingers. |
| 56:12 | We can now take our piston assembly, again taking note of which way around the assembly is going to go in our engine, and we're just going to gently drop that down into our ring compressor, and I just want to get the bottom of the skirt protruding from the ring compressor. |
| 56:29 | We're going to locate the skirt now in our bore and we can just press down with some light force from our two thumbs and this will push the piston down into the bore, and at the same time we want to make sure we're applying a little bit of pressure downwards on our ring compressor, so let's do that now. |
| 56:48 | So that's our first piston installed. |
| 56:51 | Now it's only right up at the top of the bore now, and what we're going to do is just push that gently down the bore. |
| 56:57 | At the same time I'm going to be feeling up from underneath the bore, locating the body of the connecting rod and guiding that down into place on the crankshaft. |
| 57:07 | This is important just to make sure that it doesn't end up getting hung up on one of the counterweights of the crankshaft or potentially damaging the conrod journal. |
| 57:16 | So let's go ahead and get that into location now. |
| 57:29 | Alright we'e got our number one piston into location. |
| 57:31 | Now I'm not going to apply the big end cap to that rod just yet. |
| 57:36 | While we've got the engine this way up, we're going to go ahead and install our number four rod and piston assembly as well through the exact same procedure we've just looked at. |
| 58:05 | With our number one and four piston and rod assemblies installed, we're now going to flip our engine block over on our stand and we can fit our bearing caps. |
| 58:14 | The process of installing our big end caps is exactly what we'd expect. |
| 58:18 | We want to pay careful attention here to make sure that we are fitting the correct cap to the correct rod so look at your numbering on your rod body and your rod cap. |
| 58:28 | Obviously we also need to lubricate those bearing surfaces well. |
| 58:32 | And an added complexity here with our cradle on our SR20, you can see that access to our big end caps is going to be a little bit tight. |
| 58:41 | So in order to get good access there, we can just rotate the crankshaft very slightly. |
| 58:47 | So we'll start by taking our cap for number one, just confirming the numbering on that cap, we're going to apply our lubricating oil here. |
| 58:55 | We want to also take note of the tang location for our conrod cap, make sure that that is aligned with the tang on our body, we can drop that down into location, and we're going to take our fasteners here, now these are the ARP 2000 fasteners supplied by K1 Technologies. |
| 59:16 | They also supply their own high pressure lubricant, so it's important if you are going to be taking note of K1's torque recommendations that you do also use the lubricant that they recommend. |
| 59:31 | So I'm just going to apply a small amount of this lubricant to the threads of the bolt, as well as the underside of the head, and once I've done that, I can drop that bolt into location. |
| 59:44 | And at this point I'm just going to get it started by hand. |
| 59:47 | Let's go through and we'll install our other bolt and install our other cap. |
| 01:00:14 | Now that we've got our caps installed for number one and four, we're going to go through the process of torquing these down. |
| 01:00:19 | And we can either use the torque plus angle specification that K1 provide, or alternatively if you've got access to a conrod bolt stretch gauge, you can use their stretch values. |
| 01:00:30 | It is important to just take note of the specification sheet that comes with your rods. |
| 01:00:36 | There are a series of different bolt lengths and bolt diameters used by K1, you need to make sure that you are matching the specifications to the correct bolt that you are using. |
| 01:00:45 | In this case the bolts fitted to our rods are the 3/8th inch diameter 1.5 inch long bolts and we can see that these require a torque of 25 foot pound, followed by an angle of 55 degrees. |
| 01:01:00 | So we're going to do this in stages, let's get started with that. |
| 01:01:24 | Now when you're doing up any fasteners using the torque plus angle method, it's always a good idea to make a mark on the bolt, generally facing forwards and this is just going to give you visual reference to make sure that you have in fact tightened each of the bolts. |
| 01:01:39 | You can use a sharpie market or in this case I'm just going to use a paint pen, we'll just make a little dot on the front of each of those bolts before we tighten them further. |
| 01:01:58 | Now in order to achieve that 55 degrees for our second stage of tightening, we're going to be using our Snap-on digital torque wrench but we could just as easily use an additional torque angle meter that can be fitted to a conventional torque wrench. |
| 01:02:14 | So let's go ahead, we'll set our torque wrench up with a 55 degree angle, and we'll go through and we'll tighten those. |
| 01:02:56 | Alright as a visual check here we can now look at our paint marks on each of our bolts and just make sure that they are all pointing the same way. |
| 01:03:04 | And also just a little sanity check here that makes sure the amount that we have rotated this does at least match what we're expecting there, in this case around about 55 degrees of rotation. |
| 01:03:15 | In this case, everything's looking good so we know we've got our number one and number four rods installed for the final time, we're going to go through the process now for number two and number three. |
| 01:04:20 | With all of our rods and pistons now installed, we can either refit the front crankshaft bolt or alternatively use a large crescent on the oil pump drive and we can spin the crankshaft over, just make sure that everything turns freely. |
| 01:04:35 | Now when we're doing this, we do need to understand that there is going to be a lot more friction than what we felt when we were just spinning the crankshaft over on its own, as a result of the rings running against the bores. |
| 01:04:47 | But in this case everything feels good. |
| 01:04:49 | Our short block assembly is now complete and we can move on with the next step of our process. |
