Engine Rebuild
How to fit your camshaft, crankshaft, pistons and timing gears
How to assemble your Essex V6.
We can finally wave goodbye to messing about with worn out parts, bits of broken metal and general filth. This is what engine rebuilding is all about and what we’ve been waiting for: putting our shiny bits back together. So far, we’ve stripped the engine, assessed all parts for wear, machined or replaced parts accordingly, checked that everything fits together and cleaned it all thoroughly.
There are three things to remember when assembling an engine: cleanliness, building up a rhythm… and cleanliness. If any dirt is allowed to sully the soft underbelly of your rebuild, it’ll score bearing surfaces, scratch piston skirts and promote wear or damage wherever two components make contact. We’ve avoided this scenario as much as possible by confining all the dirty jobs to one area and carrying out all grinding, threadchasing and mating surface flatting well before any assembly will begin.
Get all your parts clean and collated prior to assembly. This will allow you to focus solely on the job of assembly and thereby get into a rhythm. This is important if you’re not to lose concentration and forget where you’re at. We’ll show you how to incorporate aide-memoires along the way, so you don’t wake up in the middle of the night fretting about loose big end bolts.
Although everything will be clean already, it’s good to get into the habit of wiping each part with brake cleaner, or similar, and blowing it off with compressed air immediately before lubricating and fitting. Clean all gasket surfaces, too, and smear them with a non-hardening gasket compound, such as Wellseal. This won’t clog oilways, it’s impervious to oil and most other things and it won’t prevent the parts from being disassembled at a later date.