Engine À la carte

We disassembled the top half of the engine on Saturday.

What was once this:

Is now this:

Four containers of this:

And a growing collection of parts on a shelf that look like this:

As more and more pieces of the engine come off though, the terror of what we’re doing is starting to subside. Engines have always been a terrifying “black box” to me. These black boxes take in gas, oil and money and perform their duties of zoom zooming the car from point A to point B. I kinda sorta knew what made them work, but the most I’ve ever done to “fix” one was a tune up on my old Mustang. I’ve always felt totally out of my league and have never attempted anything more.

I’m still out of my league – but I think I’ve graduated from T-Ball to coach pitch and I feel as though I’m moving up fast. Yeah, there’s lots of parts – but as we take them off the logic of how the engine is put together is getting clear. I actually believe I’ll be able to put the thing back together again. It might even work after I do…

I’ve wanted to be able to do this my entire life.

So, what’d we find when we took the thing apart? To start with, standing anti-freeze in a couple of the cylinders:

When I bought the Mustang, I was told it had a blown head gasket, so we were pretty much expecting this.

What we weren’t expecting was this:

Those itty-bitty tiny little pits I’ve highlighted in the picture above were probably caused when the engine overheated after the head gasket blew. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to futz around with the bottom half of the engine – but these little buggers had other plans.

These “other plans” involve pulling the cylinders, crankshaft and associated bottom-of-the-engine parts so we can take the block in to a machine shop to be bored or honed.