Happy New...Not Yet!

On the last day, with only a few hours left of 2014, I get to announce some good news:

The engine is fully installed, all bits and pieces aligned and the Rocky Mountain Westy carrier bar fully installed as well. The engine is now entirely self supporting and all of the lifts, jacks, cherry-pickers, etc. have returned to their regular storage spaces, e.g. not in the garage where space is limited and they are badly underfoot.

The fully installed transmission, adapter, engine and engine carrier assembly. Sorry for the Soviet era picture: my camera was slightly on the fritz.

You can see how the whole affair bolts together, and I've included this second picture of how the main carrier bar not only bolts to the body of the bus, but also how it connects to trailing outriggers which extend to the rear of the engine compartment to bolt through the frame hole intended for the original carrier bar:

As per usual, I worked diligently to do everything the hard way. I previously mentioned replacing the the throw-out bearing before mating the engine and adapter to the transmission. I replaced the TO bearing with whistle-while-you-work unconcern, then spent an atrocious amount of time getting the engine mated up to the trans. Don't let anyone kid you: an EJ engine does not appreciate being supported from the bottom, and even if you have a cherry-picker style engine hoist, the center of mass of the EJ engine makes hanging it a challenge.

You'll just have to do what I did: Try, try again-- and don't ever give up.

Having got it all the way together, I bolted up the carrier bar and hung the engine from it. Some jiggling and the use of some 3mm aluminum shims from Rocky Mountain Westy to correct engines that were not aligning with the body and I looked all set.

Read over my Bentley manual that night which I had left open to the section on replacing the TO bearing just before I did the work. I reviewed it again....and discovered I'd really humped myself.

There is a sleeve that the TO bearing rides on: inside the sleeve is the transmission input shaft. This sleeve is bolted onto the transmission. There should be a light coating of new lubricant on the outside surface of the sleeve for the Inside Diameter of the TO bearing to ride on.

That sleeve was dry as a bone. Clean! But dry.

There's nothing that improves your speed of performing a procedure than practice. To my credit, it only took me 4 hours to take the whole thing apart completely (engine, carrier, transmission adapter) lightly lube the outside of that throw-out bearing sleeve and put the whole mess back together again. Along the way, I discovered that the transmission hanger bolts (at the top of the bell-housing) were installed incorrectly as well. I fixed that, too.

So the engine is in, complete.

Next up will be installation of the throttle valve reverser.

Once the TVR is in, that will put the throttle valve assembly within reach so I'll be grafting the stock throttle cable end together with the cable end that came out of the donor 97 Impreza. I've seen an installation trick I've wanted to try...

Ok...now. HAPPY NEW YEAR! (Because I intend to run this engine in 2015!)

The Cool Fool

I've been saving up posts to this blog for the holidays. (Actually, I've been run off my feet at home, at work, with parents and in-laws and at church. I've just slowed to sub-lightspeed approaching the holiday, so this has been the first chance since Thanksgiving to write this all down.)

Having taken Thanksgiving delivery of the Champion Cooling EC281 Radiator (Originally for a 1965 Chevrolet Bel-Air) as the radiator of choice for the Bus, I decided to get it out there immediately and confirm that all of my measuring and fretting and waiting hadn't been in vain. (5 weeks is a long time to wait for something that is supposed to be a stock item. I'm lookin' at you, JEGS.) Having assured myself that the the product was in good condition when it arrived, the first thing I did was to armor it.

I put on the armor because I had this unfortunate encounter with the Scirocco radiators that my Father-in-law had bought me for Christmas last year, and which I spent much of this year preparing to install: When parts are within reach of children who do not understand their importance and fragility, bad thing happen. In this case, it was my son who used his thumbnail to 'draw' on all of the cooling vanes of the radiator. When I discovered it, you could hear the scream from the next continent.

Not kicking my son over the horizon was a herculean effort. He survived, and I learned that if I wanted something safe, keeping it out of the house was the first step, and if it was especially delicate (as radiator fins are) I'd better have a buffer over it to keep me from dropping it on my head and denting it. (The radiator, not my head. The radiator's worth more.)

Thanksgiving weekend, I found that the 1/2 inch styrofoam sheeting that the radiator was packed was perfectly suited to the job of armor, so I cut pieces to protect the fins and taped them in place. Then I went out and, biting my nails down to the knuckles, (this had BETTER fit!) slid under the bus and raised the radiator into the gap between the frame rails.

WAS...BEAUTIFUL. I grabbed a pair of clamps to hold it in place so I could marvel at it and take pictures. It fit like a stinking glove, almost as if I knew what I was doing.

Note the styrofoam face to the bottom. The top is likewise protected. The wide flanges with pre-drilled holes conveniently located puts the unit within easy reach of a drill to drill up through the frame rail and permanently suspend the radiator.

So the radiator is in place and only awaits a call to a TIG weldor to perform the input/output pipe modifications needed. There will also need to be some clearancing work done above the radiator to ensure puller fan clearance. I might not get to use dual 12" fans (which would provide me with 226² inches of active area air movement, but a single 16 inch will likely do enough at 201² inches of active area.

Heck, the whole rectangular area is only 404.25 inch. A single 16 inch fan is only an 11% reduction in active cooling over a pair of 12 inch units. I think we should be able to handle that, right? Other than the 11% improvement in cooling, it feels like the only win for the dual fans is redundancy, and you'd have to wire your fan controller circuits to make them truly redundant: Two of something on the same switch doesn't automagically make them redundant. It has to be redundant end-to-end.

With the radiator sized and sorted, our next adventure will be final coupling of the engine to the transmission, and the addition of the Rocky Mountain Westy Carrier Bar.