Starting Dana's Engine rebuild

Well dana hasn't been firing on all 6 so i decided to tear down the motor. Well I found out why #1 and #6 cylinders werent liting off 1 bent pushrod and 1 2 peice pushrod in the valvetrain. Probably happened when I was messin with the carb awhile back. I kept rebuilding it and it run fine for a short time and then clog up. Unfortunately I got impatient and revved it up a bit maybe just bit to much and well thats what happened. So during the teardown I'm trying to get the water pump of and one of the long bolts goin through the pump and timing chain cover is frozen and snaps off. Oh well those things happen right, so now the pump is also frozen in place on this broken bolt so I get me a hammer and a long titanium rod I use as a driver and start trying to persuade this thing to come loose with a tap tap here and tap tap there. No real movement so of course what should we do in this situation but get out a bigger hammer Well that didn't even help move it but to make matters worse I now have a hole in my timing chain cover :evil: So I go to break out my oxy acetylene set and no gas my son the desert racer used it up and hasn't replaced it yet, so next best thing a little map gas torch is used to heat it up and get it removed. The rest of the teardown went pretty smooth the pistons were standard as well as the crank. The blocks in the shop being bored .030 over and the crank was ground .010 .010. The cam was ground to a rv grind. Im working on the heads this weekend with a die grinder trying to clean them up a bit and waiting for the block to come back from the shop. AND YES there are pic's of the teardown in webshots. And here's one of the bent pushrod still stuck in the valvetrain

 

Well I finally got all the parts back from the machine shop.I started out by checking the clearances on crank with good old plastigage seem to be within tolerance then checked the end gap on the rings that was good also at least .015 on all. I got the crank in and torqued it to 100, boy that rope rear main seal is a real pain in the behind just hope I got it right, and then the piston and rods in and torqued them and that about as far as I care to go for today but progress at last I had everything balanced and am working on gettin the money for a holley #8007 carb to add a little something to her The rest of the pics are in my webshots album

 

Sounds like you off to a great start. I'm sure you will have it up and running in no time.

 

Well the engine is together and the paint (Detroit diesel Alpine green) is on need to put some oil in her and prelube oil system. Now on to mounting the fenders on Dana and do some body work on them so they don't rattle and a little rattle can paint job of the engine compartment is next

 

good work