Well for the first time since 1992, and the first time since I have owned
it, my Spitfire has fire breathing through its lungs!!! Despite a saga
that was beginning to have more parts than Star Trek sequels it finally has
an operating engine. However not without it tails of trials.
As everyone knows I have fought with the worlds worst machine shop, before
finding what I believe to be the best. I have gone through two cracked main
bearing caps, broken bolts in the flywheel, and countless other problems.
So on Sunday as all seemed ready to go I tried to start the engine and got
nothing. I replaced the fuel pump and with a syringe force fed the fuel
lines with gas to get them going. I tryed again and got absolutely nothing,
not even a try, but I did get some nice puffs of gas upwards out of the
weber (can anyone in the class guess what this means?). Well I fought and I
figured and finally noticed that my timing was about 90 deg out. My intake
valve was wide open at TDC. Not good. well time to pull the timing cover
off and redo this.
I used permatex weatherstrip adhesive to seal all my gaskets, this stuff is
the best gasket sealant there is, however I pity the soul that has to remove
the gaskets with this stuff on them. Well I was sure I had lined up the
crank and the cam togethor and sure enough I had, at least I thought I had.
What after some great trials and assistance of a friend who actually wanted
to read the manual to solve the problem, I came to the realization that the
cam has a mark on it and the cam sprocket has two marks on it. The mark on
the cam is to match up with the center one on the sprocket this places the
outer mark on the sprocket in the correct position. Well, I had ignored
the two sprocket marks and lined up the cam itself to the crank, which was
about 45 degrees out.
Once I had fixed this debacle, I lined up everything and for the first time
the engine started right up on the first try and runs beautifully. High
compression pistons, Teds 275-4 cam and a turbo muffler and it sounds like
porshes and ferraris had better get out of the way. Hopefully by the end of
the week it will be driving around a little.
The journey goes on
Patrick Bowen
Stand by for the next issue of things to do (read NOT TO DO) while
rebuilding an engine.
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