Guess that rattle

[xwill112x]

oh and to get the tstat out, use a small screw dirver and small hammer taps to wiggle it loose. atleast thats what worked for me.

[blalor]

When in doubt, read the manual. If you're still confused, re-read the manual.

I bit the bullet and went with the starter motor trick for breaking the harmonic damper bolt free. Worked a treat. I'm glad I went this route, because I realize now that I was misreading the Bentley manual. It says to "hold the vibration damper hub stationary while the bolt is loosened" using a "heavy duty holding device" such as BMW special tool 11 2 150. The very next step says to lock the crankshaft at TDC with a different tool, 11 2 300. I thought that the point of locking the crankshaft was to make it possible to get that bolt off, and I couldn't have been more wrong.

Moving on, with the timing case open, I saw this:

Well, there's yer problem.

Still haven't done a leak-down test; chain's a little too wonky right now to actually turn the crankshaft and not have the chain slip on the sprockets. Hopefully tomorrow, but otherwise Saturday.

[blalor]

My future father-in-law came over this morning to help me assess the motor. He's currently rebuilding a '47 Ford Coupe and has about 50 years more experience with engines than I do. We started out with a leakdown test of cylinder 1 … and found 100% leakage. The air coming from the intake tract was pretty audible, and you could feel it blowing up the spark plug holes for the other cylinders. Since he had another couple hours to burn with me, we decided to press on and pull the head, just to see how bad it was. It's pretty bad.







That last one is of the intake valves for the #1 cylinder. And yes, the valves are "closed" there.

So.

Now I have to figure out what to do next. A friend recommended Clearwater Cylinder Head in Florida to get a replacement head, but they charge about $1,000 including shipping both ways for a refurbished head (complete w/ cams, I believe). Before I commit to buying another engine (most of the available ones right now seem to have similar miles to mine, or about 182k, so I'd still want to do the timing chain stuff), I'm going to try to get a local machine shop to look at the head and give me a quote for repairing the seats, guides if necessary, and installing new valves.

The other "interesting" thing is that it's apparent that the exhaust valves suffered a similar fate at some point in the past: there are similar divots in the pistons on the other edge, but they're coated in carbon. There's that red Permatex stuff on the head, too. I'm gonna have to go back and look a little more closely at those receipts the previous owner gave me…