Slowly going thru parts for the "new" motor for the old convertible. I finished polishing up the journals and they don't look half bad so I moved on to the main seal journal - it wasn't very impressive. It had been stored unprotected and was covered in rust - eeks!!! Last thing I want it a leaky rear main so I figured I had better do something so...
I trued it up in the lathe indicating the rear main as best I could - there was no discernible movement on my "good" indicator so I called that good. I then took off about .009" - and have it nearly pit free. A little more polishing and it should be fine. I double checked the "newly" finished surface - it runs out maybe a tenth (.0001") so I'm extremely happy with that! It might even get better as I polish it a little more - we'll see.
Since it's a rope seal - I wonder if I even need to worry about the removed material - I'm inclined to think it's fine as is.
I'm taking my sweet old time puttin' this motor together so it'll be quite a while before I know if this was truly successful.
Mom never said being this cheap was gonna be easy...
Last edited by Racin'Jacin on Mon Feb 11, 2013 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Paul, Actually that's for my little straight 6 for the convertible. I am slowly SLOWLY rebuilding my spare motor. I polished the crank - looks good enough to run again, but that seal surface just did NOT clean up very nice - I was afraid to let it go fearing it'd just leak like a sieve.
I have had a 392 hemi crank on that lathe before - I had to polish journals once for the digger crank as well as true up the pilot in the rear flange. They are only rough drilled from the factory and have a LOT of runout if left alone. The factory only precision machined a very small percentage of them. My trans adapter kit INCORRECTLY piloted on that off center hole - I remade the pilot parts and bored the hole larger to true it up correctly. Been fine ever since - so I think I got it pretty close. Here's a pic of the hemi crank on there:
On this crank after polishing that surface I figure I will have removed about .010" total (.005" a side) at this range I figure that the rope seal will be fine - nothing extra to do - time will tell if that was a good idea or not.
Paul, actually it's not a slant - it's a conventional (well sorta) straight 6 - exception is the intake is sort of a trough cast into the head - the manifold is a flat plate - be real easy to go multi carb, but strangely enough the factory intake works exceptionally well. I would like to make a header for it - maybe that'll be my next project for it.
