With the fan shroud in place:





It was an excellent opportunity to put the new TDC mark on the fan. The old mark was substantially off! I painted the old mark over with black and "sliced" a new one in with a Dremel tool:





How the mark looks inside the fan shroud:





I also got around to measuring my cylinders - using the dial indicator as a height gauge, I discovered the height of all cylinder are within 0.001" of each other. This, hopefully, will ensure that the heads sit square on the cylinders.





And the final work for the weekend was to disassemble my mockup and package up all of the rotating components. They will be sent off to Jake Raby for balancing. (Did you know that's 70 lbs of rotating mass!)

 

Clearance case for connecting rods

While I did my dry assembly, I found that the connecting rods bolts hit the inside of the case when I tried to spin the crankshaft all the way around (due to the "stroker" crank, there is a greater distance between the center line of the main crank journals and the center line of the connecting rod journals).

The point of contact was this stiffening gusset cast into the top of the case (if you look very closely, you can see two little shiny marks where the rod bolt contacted the gusset):





With a file type bit on a die grinder, I ground some of that material away:





And then did the other side. Now the case halves are ready for final washing/cleaning.

 

Camshaft assembly

I had a few minutes to spare, so I decided it was time to put the camshaft gear onto the camshaft. The alignment procedure is: with the timing mark on the cam gear pointed up, the lobe farthest away should point down. (The timing mark is a little dot at the base of a tooth just past the 12:00 position.)





Because I'm going to run an oil pump that's a little larger than stock, the bolt holes in the cam gear need to be recessed a little bit. This, in conjunction with the heads of the bolts being machined down a little bit, should provide adequate clearance between the bolt heads and the oil pump. I used a little thread locker on the bolts, too:





Place the cam in the engine and put the oil pump in place. The oil pump is a gear displacement pump - as the two meshing gears turn, oil is trapped in the space between the teeth and the outside wall. In this picture, the cam rotates counter-clockwise and the oil pump gear on the left has a shaft with a flat tab that goes into the slot on the end of the camshaft. The hole that is visible on the side of the pump is the pickup or suction side - the oil goes into the pump here (it can't get through the center of the pump, because of tight tolerances where the two gear mesh there is no room for the oil to get through), is transported in the space between the gear teeth along the perimeter of the pump, and to the other side where it gets pushed (now under pressure) to the oil filter:





And, good news, the heads of the bolts do clear the pump:





But, bad news... the other side of the bolts don't clear the case!





A little careful grinding is needed to "shorten" the bolts and then some good deburring with a wire wheel to make sure there are no little metal shards that will eventually fall off and make their way though the engine.





Success! The bolts are now short enough for the camshaft to spin in the engine case:

 

That special "tool" in the corner of your shop is nice. I want one now.

 

I actually think it's lonly... perhaps it wants a lathe to keep company.

Seriously though, it has made so many tasks of this project possible.