Summary:
Dennis came over again tonight and after a couple of hours, we had the engine purring right along. Still has some noises and knocks, but Dennis thinks this is from the loose wrist pins and possibly piston slap. I'm a happy camper!
The details:
Over the past few days, I'd tightened up the connecting rods and cleaned up the oil pan. However, the tightened connecting rods prevented the engine from turning. I really wanted the engine to turn, so I had taken the car off of the jack stands and tried to push it a bit with it in gear and could only get the engine to turn about 1/4 revolution, then it stopped. So Dennis brought over his hand crank to see if we could break it loose. Well, it helps if the guide bracket lines up with the crank shaft... We had to loosen up the bracket so the crank could access the crank shaft. But it still wouldn't turn...
When I was tightening up the rods, I had noticed that only having #4 tight prevented the engine from turning, so we loosened the cap on #4 and sure enough, we were able to turn the engine even with the other 3 tight. I had kept a couple of shims we had removed from the other rods, so we found the best one and inserted it on one side of the #4 cap. Once that was in place and tightened up, the engine would turn. The next step was to hook up the battery and see if the starter would turn over. It struggled a little, but it worked!
We were on a roll, so it was time to put on the oil pan gasket. I had ordered a couple of those new oil pan gasket sets from Snyder's and they looked pretty nice. So we put in the square gasket which goes into the groove in the rear main seal. It was a rubberized gasket, it stayed in place and was easy to cut to size. I had forgotten to soak the small asbestos gasket overnight, so when Dennis arrived, I threw it in some oil to at least get it a little soaked. We inserted the cloth gasket into the oil pan and trimmed it to the right length. Instead of attaching the two gasket strips to the block, we sprayed some adhesive to the pan edges and attached gaskets to the pan. This should hopefully allow the gaskets to stay with the pan when it is next removed. It took a little bit of work to get the pan onto the block because the oil pump with it's spring was putting pressure on the pan, and also the holes didn't want to line up nicely.
Oh wait, the oil pump, can't forget about that. I had also ordered one of those special oil pump holders from Snyder's and it worked quite well. We lined up the slot in the oil pump shaft, slid in the pump and hand tightened the special bolt to hold the pump in place. No mess, no fuss.
Once the oil pan was in place I removed the special oil pump holder and put back in the original plug. I also tightened up the front bracket with the crank in place so the next time, I won't have to loosen it up just to turn the engine.
We tried to remove the distributor so we could pour some oil down the shaft to make sure there was oil to the rear main, but the cable to the distributor was attached to the head and we didn't want to take that head bolt loose. So it stayed on. We put the spark plugs back in and I poured 5 quarts of oil into the engine.
At this point, we were ready to try to start the engine.
The starter really had to work to turn the engine, it took a few tries, but the engine finally started. What a relief! There seemed to be fewer noises from the engine, but after it warmed up a bit, some of the noises returned. However, because we knew there was a lot of slop in the wrist pins, Dennis believes that and some piston slap are the cause of most of the engine noise. We let the engine run for a few minutes to make sure everything was in order and that no oil was pouring out anywhere.
I'm really looking forward to motoring down the road soon, weather permitting.
Kudos to Dennis for all of his help and support during this exciting connecting rod replacement endeavor.
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