My truck, a work in progress
Friday, March 30, 2001
Part 5: Delays; a baby is born; more delays; more money is spent (03/30/01)
Well, it's been two months since I last updated this report, so I might as well bring things up to date.
When we last left off, I was just about to take the engine into the dyno shop for some tuning and testing, with the hopes of putting the wraps on the engine project. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of stuff happened before I could do that.
The first significant event
The first significant event took place on the night of Sunday, February 25, as I was giving the truck One More Test Drive before I took it into the dyno shop the next day. My intention was to do a few high speed runs on the freeway, just to make sure that things were running as they should be --no sense racking up several hundred dollars of dyno time unless I was sure the engine was running right.
The test drive went OK, but as I was pulling back into my neighborhood, I noticed that the truck wasn't running too well, and, oh shit, is that a big plume of white smoke from my tailpipe???
Convinced that I'd popped the headgasket, I limped into the driveway in a miserable a mood. "How could I have blown the headgasket?" I wondered. "Wasn't O-ringing the block supposed to solve all of my headgasket problems??" And yet, I couldn't ignore the big plume of white vapor emanating from the tailpipe. O-rings or no O-rings, something wasn't right, and I was screwed; there wasn't going to be any dyno session until I fixed what appeared to be a bad headgasket.
In a frenzy, I gathered the things I would need to change out the headgasket the next evening. I wanted to get the head off, change the gasket, and get the head back on as quickly as I could, because my wife was 8+ months pregnant, and although the baby wasn't due for another two weeks, I knew I didn't have a whole lot of time left to dick around with the truck.
The second significant event
Now, "prescience" is the ability to know the course of events before they occur, and "irony" is the disconnect between how you expect things to work out and how they actually work out. What happened next was very ironic, but in the back of my mind I knew it would happen this way; I had spent too many months working on this engine to have it turn out any differently.
On Monday evening, I began tearing the top off the engine. Because I was trying to work quickly, I was using whatever space I could find, and the driveway was soon filled with tools, manifolds, and an engine hoist -- you can guess the scene, just a whole bunch of crap spread out everywhere. And me in the niddle of it, trying to change things out as quickly as I could, up to my arms in my engine's internals.
I started at about 5:00pm, and by 7:30 I had the head lifted up with the hoist and was beginning to get the old gasket sealant off the block and head. I didn't see anything particularly wrong with the old gasket, but couple of the head studs had loosened, so maybe that was the cause of the leak? In any event, a cursory examination of things indicated that the number two cylinder was where the trouble started, so maybe a new gasket and a careful reassembly, followed by a lot of post-op torque checking, would be all the patient needed.
At about 8:00 pm, in the midst of this chaos, my wife came downstairs and told me in a very quiet voice, "Jeff, I think my water just broke..."
Suddenly, the headgasket was about the last thing on my mind -- it was time to clean up my mess as best I could and get her to the hospital!
OK, I apologize for making this story so drawn out, but the whole flow of these events is etched so strongly in my mind that I have a hard time condensing it. Somehow, in the following 15 minutes, I did manage to get the entire driveway cleaned up, get the hood back on the truck, and disassemble the (rented) engine hoist and store it in the back of our old car, so that someone could return it the next day. I also managed to clean myself up, throw some things in an overnight bag, and carefully walk my wife down the stairs and begin the drive to the hospital. But I really have no recollection of doing those things, and no clue how I managed to do them so quickly.
Still, we checked into the hospital at 8:30 pm (!), and by 8:30 the following morning (8:17, actually) our son Aaron had been born. Everyone was healthy, and tired, and excited, as you would expect them to be. And the truck and its problems were pretty far from my mind.
Aaron, in an unusually quiet moment
What happened next
As you would expect, things have not been moving forward with the same sense of purpose and determination since Aaron came into our lives. Time is something I just don't have any more. Still, I have managed to get a few things done.
After reassembling the head with a new headgasket, and experiencing the same (if not worse) symptoms, I determined that the head is cracked. Because we used my old 150k mile head, I am not really surprised. We had it pressure tested before we did all of the work, but I think the stress of the new internals (especially a set of rings that actually sealed) were just too much for it, and we revealed some new flaw in the head that probably would have asserted itself earlier if it had had the opportunity.
To fix things the right way, I bought a new head (literally: a brand new casting from Toyota), and decided that as long as I was going with a new head, I might as well approach it like I've approached the rest of the engine: big-as-they-come Ferrea 48MM and 40MM valves, new bronze guides, and a full-on port and polish from DOA. Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound ;-) As I write this, the head is still in Tim's hands, but I hope to have it in another week or two. There will be pictures and a full report on the new head in Part 6 next month.
Since I did manage to get a few miles on the new engine before things fell apart, I had the chance to evaluate it's performance with the new computer and other new pieces, and I was not as swept off my feet as I had expected to be -- it was quicker, certainly, but it didn't seem to be making significantly more power than the old mill. As you can imagine, this was very disturbing, but I thought about why this might be. The engine had more compression, so it should be quicker, but if I wasn't moving considerably more air through it, it wouldn't be making considerably more power. My suspicion was the turbo, which I had purchased the previous year and had sized for the stock compression and factory computer, was just too small for what I wanted it to do. When I had ordered it, I told the tech I wanted a quick spooler, but since I knew my old EFI system couldn't handle more than 250 hp, I was more concerned with having something that spooled up quickly than something that made max power. Things had changed, though, as my new compression ratio would take care of the low end response. If I wanted to make another 100 hp over what I was making before, I needed a turbo that could move some more air!
I called up Turbonetics and told them what I had (T3/T04B ball bearing turbo with a Super S compressor, -72 turbine w/.36 A/R), and they confirmed that that combination would spool up real quick, but would top out at 250 hp, max. That jibed with what I had been experiencing, so it was time to *really* cash out the poker bank roll, and order a turbo that would be a proper match for the rest of the engine: a T3/T04E ball bearing turbo with a 50 trim compressor and a Stage II, .48 A/R turbine wheel. This combination is definitely good for 350 hp, and should be a great match for the other components. To make sure that the turbo would have enough fuel, I also ordered (from another vendor) the "small" Bosch electronic fuel pump -- the 580, little brother to the 10208. Whew -- let me tell you, THAT was an expensive morning. And that's about all of the speed I can afford for a while -- the bank is tapped, so this combination had better live up to its specs, which I reckon to be about 350 hp at the crank.
Now, if I can just find the time to put it all together, and get it to the dyno shop without busting any other parts, we'll see if "the little engine that could" can actually post some numbers I can be proud of.
Look for another update by the end of April, by which time I hope to have all of the parts installed and take the beast back on the road.
Well, it's been two months since I last updated this report, so I might as well bring things up to date.
When we last left off, I was just about to take the engine into the dyno shop for some tuning and testing, with the hopes of putting the wraps on the engine project. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of stuff happened before I could do that.
The first significant event
The first significant event took place on the night of Sunday, February 25, as I was giving the truck One More Test Drive before I took it into the dyno shop the next day. My intention was to do a few high speed runs on the freeway, just to make sure that things were running as they should be --no sense racking up several hundred dollars of dyno time unless I was sure the engine was running right.
The test drive went OK, but as I was pulling back into my neighborhood, I noticed that the truck wasn't running too well, and, oh shit, is that a big plume of white smoke from my tailpipe???
Convinced that I'd popped the headgasket, I limped into the driveway in a miserable a mood. "How could I have blown the headgasket?" I wondered. "Wasn't O-ringing the block supposed to solve all of my headgasket problems??" And yet, I couldn't ignore the big plume of white vapor emanating from the tailpipe. O-rings or no O-rings, something wasn't right, and I was screwed; there wasn't going to be any dyno session until I fixed what appeared to be a bad headgasket.
In a frenzy, I gathered the things I would need to change out the headgasket the next evening. I wanted to get the head off, change the gasket, and get the head back on as quickly as I could, because my wife was 8+ months pregnant, and although the baby wasn't due for another two weeks, I knew I didn't have a whole lot of time left to dick around with the truck.
The second significant event
Now, "prescience" is the ability to know the course of events before they occur, and "irony" is the disconnect between how you expect things to work out and how they actually work out. What happened next was very ironic, but in the back of my mind I knew it would happen this way; I had spent too many months working on this engine to have it turn out any differently.
On Monday evening, I began tearing the top off the engine. Because I was trying to work quickly, I was using whatever space I could find, and the driveway was soon filled with tools, manifolds, and an engine hoist -- you can guess the scene, just a whole bunch of crap spread out everywhere. And me in the niddle of it, trying to change things out as quickly as I could, up to my arms in my engine's internals.
I started at about 5:00pm, and by 7:30 I had the head lifted up with the hoist and was beginning to get the old gasket sealant off the block and head. I didn't see anything particularly wrong with the old gasket, but couple of the head studs had loosened, so maybe that was the cause of the leak? In any event, a cursory examination of things indicated that the number two cylinder was where the trouble started, so maybe a new gasket and a careful reassembly, followed by a lot of post-op torque checking, would be all the patient needed.
At about 8:00 pm, in the midst of this chaos, my wife came downstairs and told me in a very quiet voice, "Jeff, I think my water just broke..."
Suddenly, the headgasket was about the last thing on my mind -- it was time to clean up my mess as best I could and get her to the hospital!
OK, I apologize for making this story so drawn out, but the whole flow of these events is etched so strongly in my mind that I have a hard time condensing it. Somehow, in the following 15 minutes, I did manage to get the entire driveway cleaned up, get the hood back on the truck, and disassemble the (rented) engine hoist and store it in the back of our old car, so that someone could return it the next day. I also managed to clean myself up, throw some things in an overnight bag, and carefully walk my wife down the stairs and begin the drive to the hospital. But I really have no recollection of doing those things, and no clue how I managed to do them so quickly.
Still, we checked into the hospital at 8:30 pm (!), and by 8:30 the following morning (8:17, actually) our son Aaron had been born. Everyone was healthy, and tired, and excited, as you would expect them to be. And the truck and its problems were pretty far from my mind.
Aaron, in an unusually quiet moment
What happened next
As you would expect, things have not been moving forward with the same sense of purpose and determination since Aaron came into our lives. Time is something I just don't have any more. Still, I have managed to get a few things done.
After reassembling the head with a new headgasket, and experiencing the same (if not worse) symptoms, I determined that the head is cracked. Because we used my old 150k mile head, I am not really surprised. We had it pressure tested before we did all of the work, but I think the stress of the new internals (especially a set of rings that actually sealed) were just too much for it, and we revealed some new flaw in the head that probably would have asserted itself earlier if it had had the opportunity.
To fix things the right way, I bought a new head (literally: a brand new casting from Toyota), and decided that as long as I was going with a new head, I might as well approach it like I've approached the rest of the engine: big-as-they-come Ferrea 48MM and 40MM valves, new bronze guides, and a full-on port and polish from DOA. Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound ;-) As I write this, the head is still in Tim's hands, but I hope to have it in another week or two. There will be pictures and a full report on the new head in Part 6 next month.
Since I did manage to get a few miles on the new engine before things fell apart, I had the chance to evaluate it's performance with the new computer and other new pieces, and I was not as swept off my feet as I had expected to be -- it was quicker, certainly, but it didn't seem to be making significantly more power than the old mill. As you can imagine, this was very disturbing, but I thought about why this might be. The engine had more compression, so it should be quicker, but if I wasn't moving considerably more air through it, it wouldn't be making considerably more power. My suspicion was the turbo, which I had purchased the previous year and had sized for the stock compression and factory computer, was just too small for what I wanted it to do. When I had ordered it, I told the tech I wanted a quick spooler, but since I knew my old EFI system couldn't handle more than 250 hp, I was more concerned with having something that spooled up quickly than something that made max power. Things had changed, though, as my new compression ratio would take care of the low end response. If I wanted to make another 100 hp over what I was making before, I needed a turbo that could move some more air!
I called up Turbonetics and told them what I had (T3/T04B ball bearing turbo with a Super S compressor, -72 turbine w/.36 A/R), and they confirmed that that combination would spool up real quick, but would top out at 250 hp, max. That jibed with what I had been experiencing, so it was time to *really* cash out the poker bank roll, and order a turbo that would be a proper match for the rest of the engine: a T3/T04E ball bearing turbo with a 50 trim compressor and a Stage II, .48 A/R turbine wheel. This combination is definitely good for 350 hp, and should be a great match for the other components. To make sure that the turbo would have enough fuel, I also ordered (from another vendor) the "small" Bosch electronic fuel pump -- the 580, little brother to the 10208. Whew -- let me tell you, THAT was an expensive morning. And that's about all of the speed I can afford for a while -- the bank is tapped, so this combination had better live up to its specs, which I reckon to be about 350 hp at the crank.
Now, if I can just find the time to put it all together, and get it to the dyno shop without busting any other parts, we'll see if "the little engine that could" can actually post some numbers I can be proud of.
Look for another update by the end of April, by which time I hope to have all of the parts installed and take the beast back on the road.
