Engine Teardown
Thursday afternoon, Sandi and I hit the road for Tulsa with the engine in back. We were headed for Barrett Performance Engines. The plan is to get in Thursday night and tear down the engine Friday morning and head home Friday afternoon.
Arrived around 4:30pm and checked into our hotel. Shortly after that, Allen called and asked where we were. After hearing we were already in town, he suggested I bring the engine down to the shop since it was going to rain all night. I dropped the engine off and got a quick tour of the shop and we made dinner plans for the evening.
Friday morning.. arrived at the shop around 7:30am. Mike, the tech I am going to work with, already had the engine on on a stand and was waiting for me. Mike is an A&P and is building an RV-6. All the other shop guys were standing around as well, guess they were all intersted in watching some yahoo from up north tear down his engine. :-)
The accessory case has already been removed, so we started out by taking off the intake tubes and oil drain lines. Next I took off the valve covers. Next came the oil sump. All of this so far being straight forward. Next up were the cylinders. Contrary to normal procedures, I loosened and removed the cylinder base nuts. Mike slide off the first one as a whole unit, push tubes and all. (Normally I think you remove the valve train components and slide out the push tubes/rods) With the first cylinder off, I took the remaining three cylinders off. Only one nut was really hard to remove, the rest were pretty easy. Initial visual inspection of cylinders didn't show any major problems... a lot of carbon build-up on the pistons and top of cylinder. They'll get de-carbonized and inspected closer. We followed that up by removing the crank gear bolt and the nut under the cam shaft gear and a few other bolts in the accessory area. Next I removed all of the perimeter bolts holding the case halves together. (Note, all of the hardware on the outside of the case went into one bucket and all the hardware on the inside of the case went into another bucket.) We knocked out the case thru-bolts with a brass bar. Mike tapped on the two thru bolts that you can't remove (they are screwed in to one half of the case.), this tapping was enough to break the seal between the two case halves. He tapped with a plastic mallet in a couple of other places to get the case broke loose entirely. While I held one half of the case, he held the other along with the cam shaft we just pulled the two halves apart. Pretty simple! I've read that splitting case halves can be a real challenge. Mike said that most 320 cases split pretty easy but when you get up to the 540's, they can be a challenge.
At this point, the engine is pretty much apart. The case looks good and only has a very tiny amount of fretting. The cam shaft lobes look good but the gear has some wear on it. Allen thinks it will probably get rejected. The crank also looked good visually with a very small area of corrosion on the front end (thumb sized). Allen put it in a little jig and checked for run-out. It passed! (Thank goodnes!!)
The teardown took maybe 2.5 hours at most with me doing most of the work. The good news is that the engine appears to be in very good shape. Everything was standard sized... so essentially a first run engine. (2,500 hrs TT)
At this point we got a bit distracted since they had a 540 engine on the dyno that was getting started up. I think this is for an RV-10 and they are also testing a new exhaust system for the RV-10 and their cold air induction system.
Since the whole point of this tear-down is going to be an engine rebuild seminar, we started talking about dates and costs. Here is the point where things we a bit sour. Last night at dinner we talked about the labor costs and the discount they were going to give me as part of the whole seminar. So now I asked him about the overall cost... ohh. about $16,000. HOLY SHYT! I think my knee's buckled! I basically told him that was WAY more than we were expecting and that was going to be a problem. We went to his office and started talking a bit. I was literally catatonic for a couple of minutes. He said that price would come down since I already had some of the parts that would normally be included in that price. At the end of that conversation he said it would be closer to maybe $11,000 or so. That is still WAY more than what I was expecting. (I had $5,000 in my head.) I think I under-estimated the cost of the parts.
Needless to say, Sandi and I are a bit dazed by all of this.
Photo tour of engine tear-down.
Arrived around 4:30pm and checked into our hotel. Shortly after that, Allen called and asked where we were. After hearing we were already in town, he suggested I bring the engine down to the shop since it was going to rain all night. I dropped the engine off and got a quick tour of the shop and we made dinner plans for the evening.
Friday morning.. arrived at the shop around 7:30am. Mike, the tech I am going to work with, already had the engine on on a stand and was waiting for me. Mike is an A&P and is building an RV-6. All the other shop guys were standing around as well, guess they were all intersted in watching some yahoo from up north tear down his engine. :-)
The accessory case has already been removed, so we started out by taking off the intake tubes and oil drain lines. Next I took off the valve covers. Next came the oil sump. All of this so far being straight forward. Next up were the cylinders. Contrary to normal procedures, I loosened and removed the cylinder base nuts. Mike slide off the first one as a whole unit, push tubes and all. (Normally I think you remove the valve train components and slide out the push tubes/rods) With the first cylinder off, I took the remaining three cylinders off. Only one nut was really hard to remove, the rest were pretty easy. Initial visual inspection of cylinders didn't show any major problems... a lot of carbon build-up on the pistons and top of cylinder. They'll get de-carbonized and inspected closer. We followed that up by removing the crank gear bolt and the nut under the cam shaft gear and a few other bolts in the accessory area. Next I removed all of the perimeter bolts holding the case halves together. (Note, all of the hardware on the outside of the case went into one bucket and all the hardware on the inside of the case went into another bucket.) We knocked out the case thru-bolts with a brass bar. Mike tapped on the two thru bolts that you can't remove (they are screwed in to one half of the case.), this tapping was enough to break the seal between the two case halves. He tapped with a plastic mallet in a couple of other places to get the case broke loose entirely. While I held one half of the case, he held the other along with the cam shaft we just pulled the two halves apart. Pretty simple! I've read that splitting case halves can be a real challenge. Mike said that most 320 cases split pretty easy but when you get up to the 540's, they can be a challenge.
At this point, the engine is pretty much apart. The case looks good and only has a very tiny amount of fretting. The cam shaft lobes look good but the gear has some wear on it. Allen thinks it will probably get rejected. The crank also looked good visually with a very small area of corrosion on the front end (thumb sized). Allen put it in a little jig and checked for run-out. It passed! (Thank goodnes!!)
The teardown took maybe 2.5 hours at most with me doing most of the work. The good news is that the engine appears to be in very good shape. Everything was standard sized... so essentially a first run engine. (2,500 hrs TT)
At this point we got a bit distracted since they had a 540 engine on the dyno that was getting started up. I think this is for an RV-10 and they are also testing a new exhaust system for the RV-10 and their cold air induction system.
Since the whole point of this tear-down is going to be an engine rebuild seminar, we started talking about dates and costs. Here is the point where things we a bit sour. Last night at dinner we talked about the labor costs and the discount they were going to give me as part of the whole seminar. So now I asked him about the overall cost... ohh. about $16,000. HOLY SHYT! I think my knee's buckled! I basically told him that was WAY more than we were expecting and that was going to be a problem. We went to his office and started talking a bit. I was literally catatonic for a couple of minutes. He said that price would come down since I already had some of the parts that would normally be included in that price. At the end of that conversation he said it would be closer to maybe $11,000 or so. That is still WAY more than what I was expecting. (I had $5,000 in my head.) I think I under-estimated the cost of the parts.
Needless to say, Sandi and I are a bit dazed by all of this.
Photo tour of engine tear-down.
