Hot Rods Sometimes a person shouldn’t work on an engine

Picked up a FE engine that seized. I assume the owner did his own distributor swap and dislodged the oil pump rod, the keepers were not on the rod. 1 and 5 rods got hot.

 

I have seen those twisted like a barber pole.

 

This one was just laying in the pan lol.

 

Just below the oil pump I see a spun main bearing as well. Block is likely hurt too. That's a shame.

 

Yep. Line hone needed for sure, rods resized, and what ever needed. Deciding if it’ll be worth it.

 

Yikes! Yea, it amazes me some of the things people do to cars.

 

Lol, You should have seen me when I was young ! hacking stuff up !

 

Yep. I’ve a got 361 FE I’ll probably use for my wagon. Keep it period correct anyways. This motor was free, so i don’t have anything in it

 

That is when a piece of valve stem seal got in the oil pump and locked it up. Lol. I have fixed a many of them.

 

Well, yea, I could resemble that remark as well.

 

Years ago My neighbor was fixing up an old Mustang put in a rebuilt engine . The car had no working gauges he test drove it 6 miles and called me. He said the engine was making noise and would hardly run I checked no oil pump drive. To my surprise the rebuilder stood the loss. The old adage applies not enough time to do it right but enough to do it over.

 

That’s a good quote. Havnt heard that one before. I try to teach my son, do it once, do it right. It gets old doing things twice.

 

Back in my high school days, I had a friend that his family ran a small automotive shop. One day he asked me if I'd help him with a problem. He didn't want his dad to know..!
We headed to his shop. Building an FE, Ford, he couldn't figure out why the crank had frozen as he was installing rods/pistons. We messed around. We put the block on the ground, he put a giant "Crescent" wrench on the crank snout, and stood on it. The crank didn't move.

We started removing rod caps, to find that he'd put two connecting rod caps...on backward !
That's all it took to bind the crank solid.

The engine, eventually, actually ran pretty good.

Mike

 

Sometimes I think there oughta be some kind of test/license/certification to be able to buy tools!

 

The tool industry would disappear!

 

Tools using tools.

 

I was probably 13-14 and working with “the big guys” on a ‘56 Chevy trying to start a really tight newly rebuilt 301. We pushed it all around the neighborhood, popping the clutch until it spun over. Never did run. Turns out the pop-up pistons were on the rods backwards locking up the crank. Three teen age guys, none of us questioned why we couldn’t turn the engine over with a wrench!! We all learned from that one.

 

Love that. I heard it as, "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, where are you going to find time to do it a second time."

 

SOMETIMES A PERSON SHOULDN’T WORK ON AN ENGINE

Yep, completely agree. The last time I was in the market for a race engine, I had Spot (my pet) build it for me ... after the rebuild the engine was a real dog

 

Things can always be worse. I purchased my latest car, and this is what the seller didn't tell me.

 

What the heck is going on there? Welded up and ground down?

 

Truthfully, I got no idea what was going on, I just repurposed them into door stops. The guy also welded the studs to one of the brake drums also.

 

I pretzeled one on a 65 Galaxy 500 289 in 1970 or so. Cold start on a -20 degree day and bits of valve stem umbrella in the pickup screen and pump.

I drove it home (gingerly) maybe two miles with no oil pressure. New pump and shaft and the engine lived on.

 

We had a total dumbshit do the exact same thing to a Ford 370 truck engine. The shop got to rebuild the engine for free and the amazing thing is the stupid f$&k didn’t lose his job over it.

 

There are times we learn by experience. Sometimes we don't know what we should have or should not have done until after it fails.

The more time and/or money it takes to fix that failure, the better we will remember it. Good book learning might be remembered, expensive failures are usually not forgotten. Sometimes, experience can be a brutal teacher.

 

The only people who don't make mistakes are the ones who don't do anything, and that is the biggest mistake of all. It's when you repeat mistakes that you should be scared as hell.

 

Exactly. This is what I tell new engineers that work for me to be honest. Being too scared to make a mistake keeps them from doing anything great. The other side of this is that we should all ask questions as well when we don’t know what the heck we are doing.

 

Sometime you just need to realize the limit of your cababilities....Or not.

 

The only people who know where their limit is are the ones who have attempted something beyond that limit.