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Some diesel engine oils designed for older non-euro engines have higher zinc levels, which are good for flat tappet engines. They also have high detergent levels for better cleaning. If you see dirty black oil when draining, you should be happy. It's doing its job. I'd use a 15W40 on an engine that young, maybe even a 10W30, but mineral oil in that grade I'm not sure about. I'd never use synthetic until completely bedded in. 60 grade is way too thick i my opinion, and will work the oil pump hard. Tight new engines run small clearances and thicker oil is actually worse as there is less flow and more heat involved. Less flow: less splash lube onto the cam, wiped lobes. Even after break-in this can happen.

I've inherited this P--C--- dizzy with the motor, and already a couple of things have gone wrong. One of them was The vac advance can, which blew a diaphragm... No big deal, the points one slipped right in its place (thanks Mr Bosch). Now, if I advance it up to cruise nice (with vac advance connected to manifold, not ported) it rattles it's head off under load at around 2500-4000 (where the meat of torque is made). But then when I retard base timing back to stop it pinging, it's doughy and unresponsive down low and cruises crap. It feels like it's getting way too much mechanical advance. This is on E10 by the way. Premium doesn't seem to bother it. I've read on one other forum that these dizzys are set up with weak springs and give too much total timing. Is there a way of limiting the total advance without having to take the dizzy somewhere and pay for a recurve? If I have to do that, that's already halfway to buying an MSD 6A programmable, which is what you really want anyway.

The tip is removable from the Karcher attachment, and I'm pretty sure it's a standard pressure washer fitting

Ok last post. Complete before and after:

Yeah freaky! Nah yours is nice and short... I tend to crap on a bit. Explaining this shit is like therapy for me

Hydraulic: street Solid: race There's an overlap between the two where you could have a racy hydraulic cam or a street solid, but the general rule is that solids are for higher rpm levels that hydraulics won't handle. Conversely, hydraulics are used on street engines because they are zero maintenance, quiet and are gentle on the valvetrain, sort of like a shock absorber. They normally last the life of an engine if used in mild applications. If you want to know the reasons for either then you'll have to go right back to the start. The valvetrain needs clearance between the rocker and the valve to allow for its expansion due to heat. If it was set up at zero cold, under heat the valve (especially the exhaust) would actually hold itself open, allowing gases to escape and you'd eventually burn out valves and seats. So to allow for the expansion, the clearances are often set when cold (some may be hot-set) and almost always the exhaust is looser than the inlet. An example might be 0.008" inlet and 0.014" exhaust. This is on a mechanical or "solid" valvetrain. This has to be checked and adjusted at regular intervals to allow for wear in all of the valvetrain components, eg every 20,000 km. A hydraulic setup gives effectively zero clearance as the gap is taken up by oil pressure feeding into the lifter and filling a tiny cylinder inside. It also allows for wear on the valvetrain. As the cam comes onto lobe, a tiny valve inside the lifter shuts off and oil is trapped inside, and the lifter becomes pretty much solid. You might ask why the valves don't stick open when hot, due to the zero clearance... Well the litters have a very small amount of leakage so that they're always constantly pumping up and leaking back down to maintain the zero clearance. Which brings us to why they don't like big rpm. At high speed, the lifter can actually start to leave the back of the cam lobe due to the valve spring not being able to push back enough and keep them in contact. The hydraulic lifter now sees that split second of no load as a clearance, and oil is pumped in to take it up. Then you have negative clearance.... And valves stuck open. That's what you call lifter pump-up. Ever thrashed your hydraulic-cammed engine for a while and noticed it running like a hairy goat afterwards, then come good again? That's the symptom right there. Pumping up and slowly bleeding back down again. So then you install heavier valvesprings to cope with the rpm but there's a point where the internals of the hydraulic lifter can't cope with both the higher spring pressure and the high rpm loads. Enter the solid lifter... It solves all those problems at the price of higher maintenance and (slight) noise. Hydraulic cams can have a more aggressive ramp because the lifters have a fluid cushioning effect. Solid cams need a more gentle ramp because there is no cushion. What you give at one end, you get at the other. For this reason, neither type can interchange, unless a very particular application requires it. Hope it all makes sense after all that.

Remember 188/221-onwards had 7- bearing crank, able to support more horsepower. Early shitty 4-bearing crank with a 2V head that supported 170 hp standard is a ticking time bomb. I'd do the mods and never look back.

144/170/200 blocks were yank designs, XT & XW had the taller Aussie block starting with the 188/221 engines, then with XY they went out to 250, but also offered a 200 in that same block, destroked. The later 200 has no relation to the earlier one other than bore and stroke, and maybe cylinder head. I'm not sure of the changeover, but I think they went to 7- bearing cranks from 188/221 onwards. The Aussie sixes stayed this way till the crossflow came out in 76. They then went metric with sizes: 3.3 & 4.1.

The attachment:

Yeah I thought about that but I'm polishing the rim part anyway and painting the spokes gold, ESP style.

One down, three to go...

It seems to struggle a bit with getting paint out of little nooks, and snowies have plenty of them. I'd take a guess and say it has about 2/3 the power of a good air blasting setup. I think you just have to take your time, and bank on about an hour per wheel. Simpler designs may well take less. I'm painting these gold so I'm not too concerned about surface finish, just wanted flaky paint and brake dust gone. The machined surface wasn't that affected by it, but it will need a polish regardless. It would mostly depend on what media you use: garnet would definitely knock it around more.

I'll take some pics of it when I get home today. I was running out of light yesterday. You have to use dry sand, as it won't pull clumps through the hose. There's nothing stopping you drying out the sand and re-using it, in fact I'd say it's safer than re-using air blaster sand because the smaller dust particles get washed away but the larger ones remain. I asked the bloke what happens when the tip wears out and he said he didn't think it was replaceable, but looking at the design, it works differently from an air blaster tip in that the outlet is quite wide, and I don't think the sand actually touches it once it hits the water stream. I reckon garnet will work better, but I only used river sand. I looked pretty silly digging around my little bloke's tractors and trucks in his sandpit trying to find a decent amount of dry sand.... Things we do for our hobby!

Rule of thumb with determining wear on anything that's meant to be precision-machined: if your fingernail can grab on a score mark, it's rooted. Just looking at the pics, it doesn't look good. Sleeving may be the only option on this block. 0.040" is too far already in my opinion, and generally 0.030" is the limit most people stick to on Clevos. Not sure about cost these days but 10 years ago it was around $100 a pot to sleeve an engine.

Or source an AOD from the states. As the name implies, it has an overdrive gear and lockup converter. Can be made tough and shift points/line pressure adjustable through valve body mods. Just an option anyway.

Check for rust where the rear lower control arms attach to the chassis. The pressing in the chassis rails overlaps and collects dirt/sand and rusts from the inside out, and is a critical structural point. Sills can rot out, as do the tops of the front guards about 6" forward of the windscreen. They don't stop or steer too well, particularly the sixes. They need stiff front springs and sway bar, and shocks to match. Go with nolathane (or similar) radius rod bushes. They take a European 4-stud wheel pattern, same as Escort. Some Audi and SAAB wheels will definitely fit. Mine had 15" SAAB steelies. If you plan to go manual, the shifter sits further forward than on a Falcon. They had a single rail that had a unique shift rail and extension housing. Crossflow engines after '81 had no provision for the Cortina dipstick (near coil) so must be drilled to suit. They obviously use different sumps and oil pickups. The heater box protrudes into the engine bay and comes close to the standard inlet manifold, limiting the choice of aftermarket ones you can fit in there. They chew up starter motors as the solenoid sits right under the exhaust manifold, and the plastic solenoid cap cracks, and then no start. You can use a later starter with the solenoid mounted 90 degrees down but it hits on the firewall. I "clearanced" my firewall with a ball pein hammer. TFs use completely different glass and doors all round, as the turret is actually 2" taller. Only the door skins are the same. The diffs are different too: TEs use 78 series, TFs used pissy 65 series, like a Sigma. Being a 4-link rear, like a Torana or HQ, the top rear arms are angled so they move through opposing arcs and fight each other, chopping out the bushes in the diff housing, which are press-in jobbies. A shit design and an even shitter job to change them. A limo diff is advisable, but will need an engineer's cert as they never came factory with them. They are quite difficult, but not entirely impossible to have sex in. I lost my virginity on the front seat of mine. Yes it's important. Overall, they're a pretty strong, well-built car that can take a flogging. They have plenty of character and put a big smile on your face. I miss my TF dearly to this day, and it's been 7 years.

Funny, many engineers will tell you that for the same comp ratio, closed chamber is more efficient and able to resist detonation than open chamber. The difference is in the quench design, which keeps the mixture swirling and moving around the chamber instead of stagnating in one spot: bad for detonation. Open chamber heads were a cheap and easy way of dropping compression in early unleaded engines. Going up in comp will either need shaving the head or lumpy top pistons (or both): neither are really ideal. They're not the first choice but if you have to stick with them they'll do.

I can back that up to some degree. My mild 302 pings its tits off on E10 but loves 98. It's only a skimmed closed chamber so it would be 9.5:1 max. Backing off the timing enough to stop it rattling makes part-throttle too doughy, even with vac advance hooked up to manifold vac. MSD programmable for Christmas please? The clincher is the cam; it's only a Crow 270/280 (or 206/214 @ 0.050") so at peak torque, at around 2500 rpm, it rattles something chronic. A bigger cam could help but iron heads are considered old fashioned for a reason.

If you open up the head ports at all, there will be less gain if the manifold doesn't match it. They can't make manifolds any bigger than stock because if they did and someone bolted one to standard port heads, there would be a lip that the air/fuel smacks into, and would be a nasty restriction. Instead, they leave plenty of meat there for you to carve away to suit your own ports. The process is called "match-porting".

Blown piston seal on top gear? Stuck valve in valve body? Autos are never an easy fix so I'd take it to an auto place. As the saying goes: if the job was easy, there wouldn't be a trade for it.

Yeah sure why not? 465 would be ample for a crossy so stepping down a fraction in flow would be no drama. Aren't 465s a vac sec carby? If so, you'd be wasting your time converting the secondaries to annular, as they only come on when you're nailing it and atomization isn't a problem then. If you only put annulars in the primaries, I reckon it would drop to say 450 cfm. At either flow rate, I think 300 horse is too much to ask for. 250 is more realistic with that carby. If you want 300 hp you need a 600 Holley, and pretty stout internals to handle it.

Yep agreed, great street cam that you could live with every day. Perfect lift for a 2v head too... just a smidge over 0.500"

The Annulars are on the choke (primary) side. As you'll notice, they are much chunkier, but lack the little air hood down the middle that the standard boosters have. I got them from Hume performance for around $45 delivered, that's 2 x banjos and 2 x 8-hole inserts. Alternatively, you could send your carby away and get them professionally installed.

Sorry Ando I should have explained them better. Annulars are actually a replacement for the standard booster and are in fact slightly more restrictive, but not by much. A 570 Truck Avenger is actually a 600 with annulars. The carby you're describing has an annular body, with no boosters. I think they were popular with alcohol speedway engines, and flow decent amounts of fuel and air due to the surrounding body itself being the discharge point for the fuel into the Venturi. Quite rare and obscure these days. Yes any Holley carby can be fitted with annular boosters. Your 350 is basically half of a 4-barrel, so the same mods apply. Again, annulars are more chunky so are more restrictive, therefore if you're limited to a 2-barrel, go with a 500 if annulars are what you want. I've got a post already with pics of my carby. I'll find it and link to it later.

Nice, just down in Wolongong... Might have to make a little trip soon!