The Adventures of 42137: A Shipwright's Tale

Time for an update.

Things have not gone well. Rob and Brian came over to help with shift shaft alignment and for the inaugural re-start. Shift alignment went fine. After some tinkering and fuel priming the engine started, but ran poorly. After some troubleshooting we found that the front bank wasn't firing.

The next night I went in to troubleshoot. This is what I found and in this order as I worked through it:
1) front header not getting hot at all when running, all four front cylinders.
2) Timing light says cylinder 5 fires intermittently
3) Timing light says cylinder 6 never fires
4) Timing light and degree wheel says that cylinders 7 and 8 fire and at the right time
5) I found a small piece of black crud in the spark plug gap on cylinder 5. Removed and it fires now.
6) Re terminated spark plug wire for #5 at distributor cap and it fires now.
7) Fuel definitely getting to front bank. Spark definitely sparking on front bank. Still no heat in the headers.
8) Compression gauge says #5 has lower compression than I'd expect. Interesting. And bad.
9) Compression gauge says #6 has virtually no compression. Very interesting. And very bad.
10) Are the cams not turning? They have to be – the distributor works – right? I made a silver sharpie mark on both front cams. Hit the starter for a second and went back to see that the intake sharpie mark was gone but the exhaust cam mark had not moved.
11) One more thing that I just thought was annoying at the time but is another piece of the puzzle – I had an oil leak from the front right of the engine.

There really can only be one thing that could cause one cam to turn and not the other. The pin that connects the cam pulley to the cam must be missing, broken, or something. I didn't have a spare pin laying about. Surely I put it back in.

So I'd run the engine for a few minutes with the exhaust cam not spinning. This can only mean one thing – bent valves. I pulled the front cover off the next night and found the strangest thing.

I'd timed the last cam and put the pin in but I hadn't finished the job. I hadn't put the bolt all the way back in. I don't know if I was tired or got distracted or what, but I'd put the belt cover back on before the last cam was done. The pin was laying on the edge of the pulley in a pool of oil. The oil is from the bolt being loose on the end of the oil-filled cam and the o-ring isn't at all sealed.

I started pulling the motor back out the next night. The only upside here is that it is like working on a new engine. Everything is clean, nothing corroded and stuck like last time. So nice in a totally sucky way. (Like my friend who looked forward to his weekly chemo/cancer treatments because the nurse was hot. We look for silver lining where we can.)

Now my friend Brian is an optimist. Overly optimistic I say, but he insists that I check for bent valves before removing the head. So I do. I set the pistons all at halfway up the bore so I can turn the cam and I run a feeler gauge around all the shims. And they are all still in spec.

No way. I don't believe it. I want to be sure before proclaiming I am the luckiest SOB ever. I go to Harbor Fright and buy a leak-down tester.

I play with the tester a little and it inspires very little confidence. A leak-down tester should be a precision instrument and that's just not Harbor Freight's forte. I have a hard time getting the same reading twice. But regardless, it tells a story. Well, the compressed air in the cylinders tell the story, the rest of the kit is just an expensive adapter for air hose quick-release fitting to spark plug threads. But anyway, I have no leakage past any of the exhaust valves. Amazing! Too good to be true!

Yes, it is. I have major leakage past one of the INTAKE valves on #6. I don't think this is related to any of the other things going on, I think this is just wear. And I admit if I'd gotten this far and the engine was still in the car I'd time the front cam and run a 3-Oh-7.5 until winter. I really want to drive the car. But the engine is already out. Again.

So that's where I am tonight. The Hill Engineering head nut tool came in the mail from Ricambi today. Brian – ever the optimist – recommends opening the valve a few times and seeing if it just a piece of crud stuck in the seat. I might try that. I think he's nuts, but then again he was right about the exhaust valves. Could I be that lucky twice?

 

100% it was me. I put a spacer under the bolt while doing the cam timing. This allowed me to rotate the cam and insert the pin while ensuring the cam pulley was still flush with the cam flange. I could rotate everything and work with the timing without continually dealing with the bolt or getting the pulley cocked on the cam. When I found the hole I liked I would leave the pin in and remove the bolt and spacer and then put the bolt back in for real. Except that last little part I didn't do on this one. The spacer was still under the bolt.

So it was me.

 

I had a little hmmmm moment reading this. My car doesn't have the locking tabs. I had forgotten all about those. My 2V GT4 had them, I remember dealing with the tabs.

Checking the Ricambi parts pages the GT4 parts page shows the tabs on the cam pulley bolt and the QV parts page shows that there are no locking tabs on that bolt. Apparently someone in Maranello found those unnecessary.

 

So my friend Pierre comes over last night for something else entirely, but he's a professional mechanic and has been for 20 years. So since he's here, why not come into the garage and tell me what you think about this....

He agrees with me that the Harbor Freight leak down tester is complete garbage. The difference is that he uses Snap-On leak down testers all the time and I have no idea. He can't figure out how it is supposed to work. We read the Harbor Freight directions again. They just don't make sense, the tool doesn't make sense. So if you're considering adding a leak down tester to your collection of tools, go ahead and shop elsewhere.

But we pressurize the cylinders so he can hear the valve leakage. It sounded bad to me, but I don't have anything to compare it to. His professional ear says - yeah, that's a problem. But he pokes around all the stuff and goes over my symptom list. And he agrees with Brian. He thinks there is crud in the intake valve seat more than likely. For one, if it was like this before I took it all apart he thinks I would have had major symptoms like popping through the intake which I never detected. And I think we found the source of the crud. The fuel distributor airway is full of black crud from (I assume) the PCV path. And he dryer hose has some also. The dryer hose got lots of flexing getting it on and off so I probably loosened some of it up and sucked it in. But the major culprit was probably - again?!? - me. Trying to get the engine started from dry I sloshed a little fuel on top of the CIS plate to make sure I had fuel because I wasn't having any luck starting it. Hey, works with carbs on lawn mowers! We're sure that the liquid fuel cleaned off some of that crud and pulled it into the intake. My super clean intake plenum (I had it professionally cleaned inside) has a light coating of crud inside. That's pretty damning. That's probably what was in the spark plug gap causing #6 to misfire. So don't do that!

So he agrees with Brian - try to clean the seat before going further. We decided the best path forward is to pressurize the cylinder through the spark plug hole, open the valve probably by reinstalling the cam and run a brush around the valve sealing area as best I can. Any crud I remove should get blown back out of the port by the pressurized air instead of falling back into the cylinder. I was thinking also of taking a sample of the crud from the plenum and seeing what dissolves it. Kerosene, Sea Foam, Techron, ATF, stuff like that and maybe trying a little solvent on it.

So I'm not taking the head off, at least not yet.

 

I am like that too. I enjoy wrenching and driving. But I haven't done any driving for a long time. I was looking forward to driving this summer!

 

Since I mentioned the intake dryer hose above, when I got home today there was a package containing A Hudson's polished aluminum intake tube. So I won't be putting that old thing back on anyway! It is cruddy and ugly and this polished pipe is much prettier

 

We will see!

I ordered the parts to put it all back together and somehow managed to not order the cam cover gasket, probably the biggest item on the short list. Back at it after Concorso.

 

Once you remove the harmonic balancer I think there's nothing holding it on, it just slides right off. I'd remove it or secure it so that it doesn't fall off unexpectedly.

 

So it's been a while, time for an update. I re-timed both of the cam shafts. I need to get the correct valve cover gasket - I managed to order a 2V gasket?! - and the engine is ready to go back in. I cleaned the chassis a bit more today with the pressure washer hooked up to the water heater set on high - no one take a shower! - with engine degreaser and scrubbed a bit. It is far from perfect, but I think the remaining grime is little enough that I can't justify a trailer ride to a steam clean place. I need to touch up the chassis paint in a few places and it will be good. This isn't going to be a platinum award car by any means, it just needs to clean enough for me.
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Hey, here's a little heads-up about gaskets. I ordered a couple of 111481 from Allferrariparts.com along with a bunch of other stuff when I first put the engine back together. This is the gasket that goes between the water Y-pipe and the heads. These gaskets have been exposed to coolant at mostly room temperature for a month or two. On disassembly this gasket was damp around the port. You can see the halo of dampness in the photo. With time I have no doubt this would wet the studs and cause corrosion. And with more time seep a small amount of coolant around its edges. The gasket is simply not waterproof. WTF?

The replacement gaskets I got from a different suplier feel like a different material. I hope they are less permeable.
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Here's a little project I finished up while waiting for my gasket and chassis paint to arrive.

The headlights are just pathetic at night. For one new projection lights are pretty darn good, and have 1980's sealed beams beat by a mile. But even then these lights were weak. First Let's get some nice Hella H4 lights in there with some nice halogen bulbs. That's a good start. No funny looking LEDs or projectors, just good quality incandescent lights.
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But this is the real problem. With the battery charged up and the headlights on I have 12.12V at the battery. But after those electrons go through all of the small wiring of the harness all through the car and the switch stalk and connectors and such - 8.64V at the back of the headlight. That's inadequate.
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My solution is to install some relays and big wire and minimize the voltage drop. I got fuse block from West Marine to both protect and distribute. West Marine sells nice low voltage parts and wire. Auto parts store stuff is junk and the selection is terrible. West Marine has nice stuff and is priced like Ferrari parts so you'll feel right at home.

I mounted the fuse block next to the battery using a couple of hose clamps so as to not drill any extra holes in the car. I used a bunch of nice flexible #10 wire in braided wire loom to run from the block to relays mounted right on the headlight lifter assembly. Four relays in total, one for high and low beam on each light. I disassembled the existing headlight plug and used the factory connectors on the relay spades. No cutting of the factory harness and if some future owner prefers dim yellow lights then the spades can be plugged back into the plastic connector housing and no one would know this was here. Te relays are visible through the louvers. I think I'll get some big black heat shrink and cover the junction of wires and relays and it would be better for weather and dirt protection as well.

The only parts of the wiring I wish was different is the headlight connectors I bought. These are high-temp ceramic connectors but they have #14 wire. I thought I could replace the spades in them and wire all the way with #10 but the spades are special for this connector. I couldn't put #10 in these spades because it wouldn't clear the connector body. And the connector body is ceramic so I'm not just going to use a file or Dremel to make some clearance. So the last few inches at the light have both a splice and then lighter gauge wire. It is fine, but I was aiming for massive over-kill.
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