Today was a productive day all things considering. First I started off with removing the heads. It was a fairly simple process, nothing really all that major to report there. Upon first inspection I didn’t see any signs of a head gasket leak, nor did I see anything that would indicate detonation. Just a whole lot of carbon buildup for 18,000 miles, well at least in my opinion.
Here is the LH side Heads along with a close up of the piston heads.
Here is the RH side heads along with a close up of each pistons.
After I pulled the heads off it was time to go ahead and take out the pistons. I turned the engine upside down and started getting to work on the pistons. Upon removing the 1st piston the bearings sort of stayed on the crankshaft. By the end of it 5 out of 8 pistons had the bearings stay on the crankshaft while the others came out with the pistons caps. Now, I am not 100% certain if that is indicative of spun bearing but I figured I would at least mention it in case that would be a sign of a spun bearing. All of the piston caps had some scoring marks on them with what looks like a hot spot while some of the piston bearings had some marks on them. Anyway, onto the pictures. There are a lot of them so my apologies in advanced.
#1
#2
#3
#4
The bearings on number 4 looked like it had the little tabs worn down a little bit and the stamped part numbers on the bearings seemed to be a little bit worn down.
#5
#6
You can sort of see it in the picture but it looks like some of the metal found in the engine came from #6 due to the fresh scoring on the lower part of it
#7
The bearings on #7 were completely destroyed! It was out of round, the edges were ground down to an point basically. The little tabs were worn down to almost nothing and the stamped markings on the back were completely worn away. It is sort of hard to see in the last picture but you can almost see where those tabs are on the bearing and they are almost completely gone.
#8
Outside of that I looked at the cylinder bores and they looked like they were in fairly good condition. Just some light marks on 2 of the bores along with one bore that had vertical marks along with some sort of cross hashing marks.
After that I went to go and take out the Main caps out and the first one came out super easy. The 2nd and 3rd ones I pulled out with my hands. If someone has an easier way of taking them out please let me know. It takes only 3 minutes to pull them out but still there has to be some better way. In my infinite wisdom I bolted up the block to the engine stand without removing the rear main seal and crankshaft rear seal plate thingie. I believe I have to remove the rear main seal in order to take that off but if someone knows otherwise I am all ears. I couldn’t finish taking off the last main cap because the 2 15mm bolts in the center are being impeded by the plate so I put the other 4 back on so that I didn’t lose anything.
- Boss 302 Head Bolts – 10 (20 each side) x 15mm
- Boss 302 Oil Cooler – 3 x 10mm / 1 fitting 14mm or 9/16
- Piston Rod Bolts – 16 x 12mm
- Main Caps – 20 x 13mm / 10 x 15mm
Any color on the corresponding crank journal (which would indicate heat)?
To be honest, I never really looked when I was taking off the main caps to look at the crank journals. That is assuming that I am understanding what it is you are talking about.
