During these last few months I have been able to finish my first engine build, build a engine test run stand, and I fired up the engine for it's initial break in run. I also made a time lapse video of the final assembly of the engine. The time lapse can be seen in my previous post. The video is a combination of over 12, 000 photos that I took during the assembly. I had setup our camera on a tripod with a timer and had it take a picture every 3 seconds. I then took all those photos and using a program they were put together to make a video.
When I finished the engine build I decided I wanted to build a engine run stand for two reasons. First reason is I wanted to be able to break the motor in with easy access to the engine in case anything needed repair before putting into the Chevelle. The second reason I wanted a stand was because I don't think this will be my last engine build, and it would be nice to have one if I ever decided to do another engine.
I made the stand out of wood because my carpentry skills are a lot better than my welding skills and I also had a lot of lumber lying around the garage.
I mounted the old rad that I had from the Chevelle. This is when I ran into my first problem. After I had everything hooked up and ready. I started filling the rad with coolant. The rad had been sitting out in my shed for a few years through some pretty nasty winters so it must have cracked the coil somewhere inside, because coolant started pouring out the bottom of the rad. It was junk. So I decided this was my opportunity to get the rad setup I will be using for the Chevelle and get a chance to test it out on the stand also.
I ended up going with a Griffin aluminum rad with dual 12" Spal fans. I went with this setup because of a few reasons. They had great reviews, their customer service with me was excellent and the setup was significantly lower in cost compared to similar big name setups.
It was a big box, so I needed some moving help as can be seen below.
She also runs my quality control inspection department seen below inspecting the fins.
Dual Spal Fans, The setup came with all wiring and controls needed for easy install.
Installed on the run stand
Here are a couple pictures of the complete stand with the engine wired and ready to run.
Before I started the engine for the first time I made sure to set up the engine to fire as soon as I started cranking it over. There were a few things I did to ensure this. First I set the #1 cylinder at approx. 12 degrees before top dead centre on the compression stroke. I had the spark plug removed from the #1 Cylinder. I rotated the engine over and at the same time had a finger over the spark plug hole. When the piston is on its way up on the compression stroke the compression can be felt on your finger, blowing air out the hole. I then brought the crankshaft up to the 12 degree before top dead centre mark on the harmonic damper.
The next thing I did was setup the distributor so that it was as close to firing the #1 cylinder spark plug at the same moment. To do this I wired the distributor cap up in the correct firing order (I triple checked that I had the wires routed correctly). I then lifted the rotor cap off, and set the distributor body so that the rotor was lined up to where the #1 wire was on the cap. By doing these first steps I was ensuring that the initial timing was close enough to get the engine running quickly.
One other thing I did was fill the carb up with fuel. To do this for me was easy because I am using an electric fuel pump. All I had to do was hook my fuel lines up, turn power on to the pump and ran if for about 5-10 seconds. What this did was fill the carb fuel bowls up with fresh fuel so that when the engine was turned over it got fuel going in right away.
The last thing I did was pre-oil the engine. I have a tool that is modeled after the bottom section of a distributor so you can hook it up to the oil pump drive in the block. I slid it into the block onto the oil pump drive and then using my battery drill spun it for about 5 minutes making sure I was getting some pressure reading on the oil pressure gauge I had hooked up.
I was now ready to fire this engine up. I must have set the engine up correctly because it fired right up. I was actually surprised at how fast it did fire up, I was expecting a bit of cranking before it happened.
The video below is the 1st start.
Here is the 2nd attempt
The above videos you can see it is running pretty rough. It wasn't firing on all cylinders and I traced it back to a bad battery. I was able to get my hands on a battery booster and once it was hooked up to the battery the engine ran great and I was able to set the timing. The video below is with the booster hooked up. You can hear it running alot better.
After I had run the motor a couple times and gave it a good run in, I let the engine cool down and drained the oil and took the oil filter off. This is done so I can look at the oil and make sure no metal was found in it. I even used a strainer and filtered the oil and the only material I found in the oil was a little bit of fuzzy lint material, I think that this was probably a bit of lint from the shop towels I used during assembly.
At this time I also took the tappet covers off to inspect the valve train and re-tourque the head bolts. When I had the tappet covers off, I found an issue. I was looking at the rocker arms and I noticed that some of the roller tips weren't centered on the valve stems. The rocker arm tips are supposed to be centered on the valve tips and this is accomplished with the push rod guide plates. After some research I found that there have been some issues with the guide plates that come on the Edelbrock cylinder heads.
To fix this issue I ordered some Comp Cams guide plates and installed them. This fixed the problem and the tips were centered properly in the valve stems.
Below is a picture of the new guide plates installed.
Below is a picture of the edelbrock guide plates
I am extremely happy with how everything turned out with my first engine build, I've learned so much already about engine building and would like to do another engine (maybe after the Chevelle is done). This has been my favorite part of my Chevelle build so far.
