thebeerbaron

I picked up the new heads on Saturday morning and had a nice chat with the owner of a Subaru recycling yard that's only about half an hour from my garage. Got back to the shop, had enough time to putz around a little bit, then had a family lunch (Happy 70th mom!). Given the shortened afternoon, I didn't get much accomplished Saturday - just the oil baffle, pickup tube, and pan on, then the new oil pump. Also the oil cooler.

I guess this is par for the course, but I was frustrated that the Subaru "complete engine gasket kit" doesn't come with a manifest, or any labeling of parts. Hope I guessed right!

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I found a manifest for the gasket kit online (and saved it to my computer for future reference!), I'll link it here eventually. The manifest says that the kit includes two gaskets for the oil cooler, which only requires one, as far as I can see. The most logical pair of O-rings that should go on the cooler did not fit and did not look like an exact match for the existing gasket, so I had to reuse the old one. Sigh.

Here's the short block after Saturday.

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The photos I take on my cell phone never quite look as good as I think they do. But it's so convenient! I've been clicking a photo and if I have data service (which is spotty at the garage), I can just shoot it off to Posterous. Very easy to share stuff with you! So if you want an "as it happens" log, shoot over to my [url=http://thebeerbaron.posterous.com/]Posterous[/url] site to see the action "live".

Sunday started off with a minor heart attack. I glanced at the new short block when I got it (uh oh), but didn't examine it too carefully. When I flipped the motor over to install the first head, I noticed a small nick on the outside of one of the cylinder sleeves. I called my buddy Dean, who restores and maintains all the cars around me in the garage, to see if he was going to stop by today. Thankfully he was already enroute and allayed my fears quite quickly. The nick is small and on the water jacket edge of the cylinder casting. There is a lot of good, flat sealing surface between it and the bore. I'll get a photo up if I can, but for now I'm OK with it.

After calming down, I set about attaching the heads. I've never torqued things quite as fiddly as an aluminum head before, so this was an experience. Also, the service manual procedure for installing the head bolts calls for turning the bolts a certain number of degrees at different stages. Example: Torque to N ft-lbs. Back off X degrees. Back off X degrees again. Never had to do that before! I bought [url=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002STSW6]this Torque Angle Meter[/url] to help me along, and it performed admirably.

Call me anal, but I've been marking each bolt with a paint pen as I go along to indicate that I have torqued it to the proper value. I'm not marking it to see if it slips, though I plan to do that for suspension bolts on the actual kit, but just as a visual guide. Here's the long block, as I left it at the end of the day today.

[img]http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/thebeerbaron/ayuhtzEBhxygqlokzaAHyCtDAztlFsyjwzwBfmqqnndFkxlJtfmffaoInuee/1229649185.jpg.scaled1000.jpg[/img]
(actually, it's not, I just realized I uploaded the wrong picture. The real one has the water pump attached)

See if you can see any blue dots! In addition to the heads, all I added today was the water pump. I put the crank pulley for the timing belt on so I could line the motor up for the head assembly. I put some orange paint in the alignment notch on both the oil pump and the crank pulley. Much more visible. An interesting note is that Subaru motors are not timed at TDC. With the marks lined up as shown, the pistons are mid-travel in all four cylinders and thus unlikely to hit any wayward valves as you assemble and align the cams. Whew.

Next weekend I'm off to a wedding in Vermont, so no updates for a while.