What Wicked_Sludge has been up to:

yeah, im still alive. as some of you know, i no longer have internet access at my house, so i only get to check TRS when i drag my butt down to the library to steal wifi.

things are still going pretty good. the ranger has been running and driving great since the safeway fuel incident. had some misfortune with the boat trailer not too long ago, my axle snapped. ive since rolled a new axle under it and we're back in business (just waiting on weather now).

unfortunatly, my blue escort has recently run into some unforseen problems. i blew a head gasket (its actually been blown for a while, but it just recently let go and dumped all my coolant into the oil pan), and i have either stuck or broken rings in the 2 middle cylinders (excessive leakdown into the crank). the head work is all done and i just got my rings in today, the cylinder walls look good, so im going to just stick with a good honing of the cylinders and slap the new rings in. some pics of the work so far:



notice how clean the piston in #1 is...thats the cylinder thats been burning coolant...so it stayed quite clean.



mild carbon build up which will be removed after the pistons come out.



lots of room to work after the head and intake is out.



the head fresh from the machine shop. all new valves and valve seals, cam checks out OK, valve seats ground, decked and hot tanked.



oh yeah, its a hemi alright



small crack in one of the coolant passages....lots of meat in the head at this point...so im just going to make sure the cooling system is up to snuff and it should last a while.



hopefully the bottom end comes apart tomorrow and i hope to fire the car up by the end of the week.

and if it breaks again im selling the damn thing

Is that ANOTHER crack in the 3rd-to-last photo?

Coolant passage to exhaust valve, upper right.

Sorry.

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this one?

theres a mar in the surface of the head by the intake valve.....no cracks

how do you like those e3 plugs?

they take very well to oil and coolant in the cylinders

i only got to run them about a week before the head gasket went, so i really havnt had time to form an opinion. horsepower TV sold me with their back-to-back dyno's though...they lowered BSFC and increased power with just a plug change...and they werent any more expensive than a good platinum plug.

Looks like fun!

My co-worker use to own an Escort. Had the same problem with the head gasket blown. Every time he started it, great pillows of white smoke would fill the air. And thats only if it started after cranking hard on the battery.

Short end, it finally kicked the bucket and he sold it where it stopped running.

I had a medium mileage 91 Escort 1.9L that had a head gasket blow. I fortunately caught it before anything else happened, so I was able to just slap a new head cylinder on it. Seems to be a common thing on the 1.9s, they tend to run really hot.

Hope all goes well!

That sucks, at least some good came out of it, Now I know what an Escort motor looks like when it tore down lol.

Post more pics of the rest of the tear down if you can.

more excellent news from the front lines:



that explains the excessive blow-by in #3. a stuck compression ring explains excessive blow by on #2. so now im in for a new piston too. but at least i have solid explanations for all my symptoms.

as if that werent enough, rod bearings are down to copper....so i might as well get that out of the way as well this project is getting very expensive very fast.

the only good news from today is that the cylinder honing went well and the block is in great shape. left the camera at home, however, so no pics of that.

Might be easy just to swap in an Duratech 20.

Wicked_Sludge said:

more excellent news from the front lines:

that explains the excessive blow-by in #3. a stuck compression ring explains excessive blow by on #2. so now im in for a new piston too. but at least i have solid explanations for all my symptoms.

as if that werent enough, rod bearings are down to copper....so i might as well get that out of the way as well this project is getting very expensive very fast.

the only good news from today is that the cylinder honing went well and the block is in great shape. left the camera at home, however, so no pics of that.

Click to expand...

you'll be glad you replaced those bearings. how much do you have in it so far?

How much to you have in it now? Mine was overheated by the PO and cracked the head. I swapped in a junkyard motor for $200+ intake and exhaust manifold gaskets. If you're spending enough for a full rebuild (which is what it's turning into), you might want to consider cutting your losses on that head and getting another one. That crack in the second to last photo probably already extends into the fire deck.

Either way, good luck!

the only local junkyard that had a running engine would have yanked it from its car and dropped it into the bed of the ranger for $300. this was the route i was originally going to go after the head gasket blew before i compression tested the "new" engine and found it to have lower numbers than my engine with the blown head gasket. even with all that was wrong with my motor, it was still squeezing 155/145/145/165....so it should be fine after rebuild.

total cost after im done should be below $400....which is less than you'd pay for a new beater ecobox, so to me the cost is still justifiable....though just barely. at least this way i know most of the motor is fresh inside. and im not too worried about that crack...its in a meaty part of the casting and it should stay like it is as long as i keep the engine cool (hence im adding a mechanical temp. gauge while everything is apart).

learjet, you dont know how tempted i was to swap in a 3.0 vulcan while i was looking for junkyard 1.9's. ive seen the swap done, its 90% bolt in with the only fab work involving welding the forward most motor mount for the v6. you guys know how much i love the 3.0....plus i would only need to make up 20 HP in order to keep up with stock mustang GT's. 20hp is an easy n/a build . i kept telling myself "you wouldnt even need to open the bottom end. a good P&P, exhaust, and TB work would do it". the guy that did the swap was still getting 30 MPG too...

but anyway...unaffordable daydreams aside, heres my latest news: im way behind. i had planned on plopping my 3 good pistons in friday evening...but my oil rings didnt fit properly. it took me until the middle of the day saturday to figure out what the problem was, my engines an '86...and of coarse theres a year split in '87. according to my haynes manual specs sheet, they changed 3 things: the rod bearings, the pistons, and the rings...the 3 things i was trying to replace. if it werent for bad luck...

anyway, so the piston i ordered last week (which showed up today) isnt right. i have all motorcraft stuff coming from ohio, should be here thursday.

until then heres some more pics:



this was the worst of the 4 cylinders. those vertical marks dont even show up without the flash of the camera, so we're going to roll with it.



awaiting pistons



the other 3 holes look more like this one



mechanical oil pressure...



and water temp. gauges. the factory water temp sender was ditched for the mechanical sender....so im going to ground the factory gauge through a resistor to achieve a half-scale reading on the factory gauge. it'll still be 100% useless, but at least it wont hang there like a limp dick.



rod bearings.your right whitebronco....im glad i decided to replace them



close-up of the gouging....all 4 top halves looked like this. surprisingly the bottom end never made any noise on this car



the only prime real-estate for gauges is occupied by the CB, so i'm fabbing up some rice-style gauge pods for the dash (i have a lot of time to fill before my piston and crap shows up ). the finished product will be painted fiberglass and will feature a "fan on" LED on the temp gauge.



passenger view



while i had the dash apart to route the gauge plumbing, i discovered the USB connector for my power supply for my hard drive was broken...so im going to hardwire it in.



removed the guts



gave it power and located the 5V output



soldered on 12v input leads...



and 5v output leads



applied copious amounts of electrical tape and ta-da



gotta pick up a jack at radio shack tomorrow that'll plug into that.

You work like me. Start one thing, then move to another and another and another...... Severe ADD child.