project 1980 Austin Princess

[barefoot]

You have the koolest attitude to dismal failure that i have ever encountered.

 

Oooops fucked.

Well I was going to have a look at that at some point anyway.......

[phil_lihp]

It's a shame but at least some good will come out of it, I've enjoyed seeing this car gradually getting better and better (the Lotus wheels, just to add to the general consensus, are perfect for it).  'tis but a scratch!

 

Incidentally, I'm assuming the AA lorry isn't responsible for taking out the concrete barrier!  Kind of looks like he was so excited to get his hands on some genuine BL chod that he took a wild shortcut off the entrance ramp.

[vulgalour]

The AA wagon was not responsible but if anyone asks I'm telling them your version of events.

[Asimo]

That's a bummer.

Hope the job goes well. There can't be an easier OHC engine to do a head gasket job on than an O series in a Princess.

[fordperv]

What a bummer, I hate working outside in shitty weather, a couple of years back I did father in laws headgasket on his mk3 ashtray in the snow it wasn't too bad though was a 1.4 ohc so was a quick enough job

[Grundig]

.... I think the cigar lighter may be in some way to blame 

[vulgalour]

I'm actually laying the blame squarely on Mike's shoulders for pointing and laughing at a broken down new-ish Golf when I told him not to.

[Des]

Every HGF ever has been accompanied by a misaligned fag lighter, it's a Feng Shite thing. No help now, but I've had head gaskets pop on me 3 times over the years, each time I've loosened the rad cap and carried on, kept an eye on the water level and usually found only the odd top up needed and have enjoyed ample opportunity to replace the gasket at my leisure. Last time I drove around for a year on a slipped liner. I wouldn't try this on anything modern, old proper cars had a bit of 'reserve' in the cooling systems.

[wackywacerwill]

CRAK A EGG INIT M8!!!

[jbz2079]

What a shame, but looking on the bright side, they are not a difficult fix, no new headbolts needed, just hopefully a new gasket and a clean up.

I see you are going to do the stem seals too, go canny if you lap the valves in as these motors have shim valve adjustment and tight valve clearances are no good for them.

 

I have ran a few "O" series in Marina's and Itals and with regular oil changes they have all been good engines.

The one I had in my 1.7 Ital was a great motor, I thrashed it hard regularly and it kept comming back for more and when the Ital died it ran for years in my mates Marina Estate.

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

Yeah, nasty setback but I'd still rather replace a head gasket than do all that work with the rusty axle and spheres. 

 

Of course that's not much comfort as you've got to do both, sorry

[vulgalour]

I may not be able to sort this out tomorrow as the torque wrench has disappeared and that's a pretty integral tool for getting the head back on properly.  I'll have a good hunt for it tomorrow and hope it turns up, if not that's going to hold up proceedings considerably as I presently have £7 to my name of which £5 is going to go on engine flush.

[stuboy]

what a shitter

[vulgalour]

I found the torque wrench!  YAY.

[stuboy]

I found the torque wrench!  YAY.

u couldve borrowed mine but tn23 postcode lil far

[plasticvandan]

engine flush is a bad thing in my opinion,your much better off just putting the cheapest happy shopper oil in you can find,run it for a bit then drop it and change for the good stuff. last time i used engine flush my enine rattled like hell afterwards,it had dislodged all the carbon sealing the pistons as well

[jbz2079]

Agreed, two quick oil changes will do it far more good than engine flush.

You can do without anything getting dislodged and ending up in the cam bearings, which are directly machined inti the cylinder head and cam cover.

 

We once flushed a very gungy V4 transit engine and it literally fell apart shortly after.

[RichardMoss]

I'd agree with using cheap oil as a flush, too.

[vulgalour]

Having done some more reading on the suitability of engine flush following the comments above, I've decided to flush through with cheap oil rather than a specific treatment.  Given that I don't know the service history of the engine over the last decade or so and the poor attention previous owners have already treated the car to, I'm going to take the softly-softly approach and do regular oil changes to get everything good again.

 

This brings me to my next issue.  Earlier tonight I was checking what I needed to get things sorted and thought the 4 litres of oil would be enough.  It's not.  Because of the gearbox sharing the engine oil it's actually 6 litres for an oil change with 10w40 being optimum and 15w40 being okay.  Normally this wouldn't be an issue and I'd just buy the oil but my bank account is completely empty until I get paid so I'm presently chasing customers to see if anyone can pay a little earlier so I can get this moving.  As soon as I can afford another 8 litres of oil (already have 4, need 12 to do a flush and then a refill) I can do the work.

 

Due to the unique circumstance of working space here I can't even make a partial start by stripping the engine as the car needs to be driven several hundred yards uphill to the work space at my brother's place.  I wasn't too annoyed about doing this job at first, but it just seems to be getting to be progressively more of a ball ache than it needs to be.

[twosmoke300]

Don't know where you are based but if you want cheap oil go to your nearest agricultural dealer and get 20l of tractor unversal oil. 10w30 but fine for flushing etc

[vulgalour]

Progress, of a sort.  I've got what I hope is the correct valve spring compressor in the post to me, a suitable quantity of oil, a full gasket set, antifreeze, de-ionised water, torque wrench and all manner of other tools and stuff to sort the engine out.  Thankfully, I don't need to use the car this week so I can wait for all my various things to get to me to do all the engine jobs at once.

 

Entirely by chance we found the source of my minor oil leak on the engine.  As my brother came on the drive tonight his headlights swept the front of my car which now sits higher after the suspension pump up and is facing the opposite side to usual.  This highlighted the fresh oil on the gearbox end plate and it looks like a couple of nuts are looser than they should be and that the gasket is leaking.  What's annoying about that is that I've been under the car and cleaned bits to try and locate the oil leak and consistently failed to find anything conclusive before now.

 

We'll get the head off, change the valve stem seals and reseal the rocker cover thus eliminating the very minor weep from there.  We'll then do the head gasket and after we've drained the first lot of oil we'll get the end plate resealed.  Then we'll fix the inevitable exhaust blow at least twice and threaten to set fire to it before calling the job finished.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Yo Vulg, I've got a set of new boxed rear shoes for a wedge lying about, do you want em? If so i'll fetch em from my dads garage next time i visit him. I bought em for my land crab but of course they are no good for that as they are for a wedge. Could come in useful* with your busted cylinder head..... er... hang on

[Des]

Just a thought but if you use the engine oil for diesels then it will hopefully do some cleaning and hold the crap in suspension, that's if the stuff still has detergents rather than some polymer nano technology modern horror. And your hgf should be considered a bit of a blessing, it will be a nice comfort to face summer with a fresh gasket in there rather than every drive being a potential cooked engine gamble.

[vulgalour]

@Mr Boll: The HL has new shoes, but the HLS needs new shoes so... yes please!

 

@Des: Agreed, blessing in disguise. I'm just using regular oil for the initial flush since I've got it now. Once I've got a few hundred/thousand miles under the wheels I'll do a more thorough flush and put some posh oil in. Might try the diesel oil flush on the HLS since both my cars have OMGHGF.

[KruJoe]

Not sleeping eh?

Stick with it lad. She looks ace on those Lotus wheels. Bet you can't wait to unwrap your nuts!

[Split_Pin]

I do like your PMA on this one. Looks like plenty room in the engine bay to get in amongst things. Hat doffed.

 

When I'm faced with epic failures my mind usually goes into 'sell everything I own in a fit of rage' mode.

[vulgalour]

@Kru: got to bed at 6am, couldn't sleep until at least 7am... insomnia is bloody annoying. Still, I get to browse Autoshite when nobody else is awake, it's like being in a Kwiksave after hours.

@Iain: I can get my whole self in the engine bay with the engine still in there, it's great for working in. I did have a little sell everything moment but it's going to be pretty much impossible to find/afford a replacement Princess.

[KruJoe]

It was noon here in Siam when I posted that, I now have a belly full of Leo beer and it's my bedtime

[vulgalour]

Today we fixed the head gasket. I found out that the weird 'Coalite-y' smell I'd get through the vents occasionally was coming from the engine, it was pretty pungent once the head was split from the block and after some thinking about it, Dad reckons it's the same smell as a product called Seal-It (may be spelled differently). So that's another bodge uncovered and rectified. The entire block face was covered in a strange black goop but the head face was lovely and clean and flat as I'd expected it to be.

 

Speaking of bodges, I'm not sure what monkey had been at the engine before but the rocker cover bolts are dogged up so tight they can't be undone so I couldn't do the valve stem seals without risk of shearing bolts. The headbolts were no better with 9 of the 10 far too tight and one far too loose.

 

The head gasket had blown between cylinders three and four but also showed signs of blowing across compression. It looks like it blew in a minor way some time ago and it was only recently that it properly failed. This might explain the peculiar cutting out issue I would randomly get and why now some of the strange little noises and driving sensations that I could never pin down have now gone away.

 

 

 

 

 

We made sure to clear all the water out of the bores and headbolt threads before bolting the engine back together. Casualties of the work were one sheared manifold bolt, one shattered sparkplug and quite a few skinned knuckles. Eventually I'll need to get the bolts for teh manifold replaced as two of them are not in great shape and one seems to have partially stripped the thread in the block. This does mean that the small blow on one corner of the manifold gasket is still there but it's so minor that it doesn't really effect anything. We're probably going to gum things up short term to try and resolve it properly.

 

After some cleaning and checking of surfaces we had no reason to believe things couldn't just be bolted together so that's what we did. Bit of confusion over the firing order since I had nothing to mark the spark leads with and apart from a comedy backfire-with-flames through the exhaust we got the firing order correct and the car now burbles away quite happily.

 

Took the car for a quick drive and the first thing was how much more torque was available low down where there was nothing before. I didn't have to go up and down the gearbox as much and the temperature gauge barely got to quarter when normally the run we did would have pushed it to half. Things are quieter and less smelly in the cabin too so I reckon we've cured quite a few niggles that I could never pin down to one thing by doing this job.

 

Happily, my Lotus wheel nuts arrived today too so I can get the alloys on properly and make sure the rear suspension arms are set correctly as they may be the cause of the strangeness with the rear end settling lower when the car isn't being used.

[stuboy]

fingers crossed