Its amazing what some people can do in 40,000 miles! Nothing is awful, but its definitely in worse condition than I had hoped. Thankfully I decided to get an aftermarket clutch before I separated the engine and trans. I was close to planning on reusing the stock one. $900 surprises are not fun when they aren't planned.
The clutch disk was almost fully worn, and the flywheel was extremely warped. The pressure plate looked anodized it was so blue. It had been extremely hot many times.
It was pretty dirty. I stripped it of everything loose and got it ready to be washed. Nothing out of the ordinary...except there was a pretty large amount of cat hair under the fuel rails. wtf
It cleaned up real nice
It soaked for a day and a half in orange clean, and then I blasted it with soapy water. Its much nicer to work on clean parts.
At this point I started tearing the engine down while my dad worked on the cylinder heads. I'd stop to grab pictures when interesting things were happening.
It was suggested to me to get the LSA cylinder head. For those who don't know, the LSA is the detuend LS9 that goes in the new supercharged cadillac cts-v. The LSA head is the same as the LS9 head, but does not use titanium valves. They are very similar to the LS3 head, but have slight revisions.
There is very little information out there about these heads. I haven't found a single person who has run them.
I knew that the chambers were a lot bigger on these heads than the LS2 heads. I want the compression ratio to be brought back to stock, which is 11:1. To do this, you have to cut the heads. To know how much to cut the heads, you have to CC the chambers. The stock head has a 64.5 CC chamber. You want to match that with the new head.
To CC the chamber my dad has this plexiglass plate with a hole in it. You want the hole to be where the air bubble will float to (think of a level). You want seal the plate to the head, and the valves to the seats using some kind of grease. The fancy tube is a beret. It has graduations from 0-100 CC. You fill it with liquid to 100cc, and then fill the chamber without spilling. Once the chamber is full you know the volume of the chamber. These chambers were 70cc exactly. The machine shop will need to figure out how many thousandths cut off is equal to 1 CC so they can clip the appropriate amount of material.
Next up is flowbench testing. Not tryin to brag (ok maybe a little
), but how many homes have a flowbench in them?
The setup is like this. The piece of clay is molded to make a smooth entry into the port. There are two checking springs holding the valves in. The head is clamped to the plexiglass with a gasket in between them. The plexiglass has a 4 inch bore, the same as the LS2. A dial indicator is resting on top of a bolt that is screwed down to open the valve. The dial indicator lets you know what lift number you're at.
I'm taking a head off, and he's playing with a giant vacuum cleaner.
Both heads are off. Yuck.
Keep the valvetrain organized. You'll want to know what went where when you find something wrong. Also, if you're reusing valvetrain you generally want it to go back where it was.
Just the dampener, front cover, and cam left to go.
This picture came out terrible. Its a short block now.
And all done for the night. I need a bigger table.
Honestly the engine isn't in too bad of shape. The oil has been changed a few times between 0 and 40,000 miles...so it could have been worse. It may have been naive to expect the engine to be less carboned up, but really its only 40,000 miles! I had cleaned out the bores quite a bit. There was a lot more carbon in there. Thankfully all the cylinder walls look ok. So far there aren't any signs of detonation. Tomorrow night we will pull a piston and see what the rings and bearings look like.
Another thing I didn't like is there was quite a bit of oil in the intake and everything seemed pretty moist beyond that point. Like I said, nothing shows signs of detonation, but its never good to be misting oil in there. I know oil in the intake is fairly normal with these engines, but it seems a little excessive. I wonder if it was overfilled?
