Practical Engine Building: Oil Pump Priming
Oil Pump Priming
02.29
00:00 | - One of the areas of assembling a fresh engine that's easy to overlook is the oil pump. |
00:05 | Now particularly when we've had an engine apart, everything's been cleaned down or perhaps we're even replacing the oil pump with new components, understandably that oil pump is going to be completely bone dry, there's going to be no oil inside the pump at all. |
00:19 | Now if we leave everything like that and simply assemble the engine, what we're going to find when it comes time to start the engine for the first time is it's going to be impossible for us to gain oil pressure while we're cranking the engine over on the starter motor. |
00:33 | The reason this occurs is that the oil pump relies on the oil inside it to create a seal and this way it can create the suction that is required to suck the oil out of the sump into the oil pump and then it can be pressurised and pumped through the engine. |
00:50 | So in this module we're going to have a look at the technique of priming an oil pump prior to fitting it to the engine. |
00:58 | For our example here, I've got the front cover assembly which includes the oil pump from a Subaru FA20 engine but the technique can be applied to any oil pump. |
01:08 | Now I've got the oil pump gears here, they're actually fitted into the front cover now but we can see the two gears, I'll just drop those back into place and all we're going to do for this demonstration is use an engine assembly lube to pack the oil pump gears prior to installing the other cover. |
01:27 | Equally a lot of engine builders also use vaseline, I simply use engine assembly lube because we've already got this on hand for other parts of the engine assembly process. |
01:38 | So we're going to take our engine assembly lube and all I'm going to do is liberally apply this down inside the oil pump gears. |
01:45 | And essentially we're just applying enough to create a seal. |
01:49 | And this is going to mean that when it comes time to actually start the engine, it will be easy for us to gain oil pressure. |
01:58 | So at the same time we're also actually using that lubricant to lubricate the oil pump gears as well. |
02:06 | So we can see, what I've done here, I've just applied that liberally, we've got it completely packed with our assembly lubricant and now we can go ahead and fit the other cover to our oil pump. |
02:17 | We're going to require an impact driver in order to correctly tigthen that down. |
02:22 | Our oil pump's now ready to go and we can fit it to the engine. |