I've decided to maintain this thread with the Kettle build. It should be easy to remember - anything regarding the K series will be starting on page 300. Simple delineation, I think.
Sooooo . . .
Tuesday, I took some Hack-and-Snore Oktoberfest down to my Chicago Bear Backing Buddy, and we ripped into the head. He needed a distraction . . .
We got the valves out and I'll be dropping the casting off at C&S for a cleaning and Zyglo®, along with the block. I want to get this back to Mark soon, because he's flowing another head in the next few weeks, and I want to piggyback on that time and establish a baseline for this engine.
It's an interesting engine, this Kettle . . .
Plastic oil pickup - held in place with 2 cap screws and an O-ring . . . looks like an optional attachment for a Shop-Vac . . .
This is the oiling ladder - bolts to the bottom of the main girdle . . . no gasket, seal or silicone, which is all fine and well if the block doesn't twist and the machining is flat. Even the oil pan - a cast aluminum piece - had no seal. Is Rover so damned cheap that they can't afford a
very thin piece of paper? This is the girdle itself, and you can see where the oil was leaking between the ladder and the girdle,
because it had NO SEAL. There are 10 bolts that attach it to the bottom of the cylinder case around the perimeter. The 10 head bolts - quite long, I might add - draw up on the girdle through the cylinder case. ARP makes an upgraded replacement for them - the originals are a torque-to-yield arrangement which can't be reused -
Nice sized crank seal on the rear - finally, a British engine that doesn't spit lubricant all over its clutch . . .
Seeing as I need to have a custom crank made anyway, we'll be utilizing the Midget transmission, and we'll have the rear of the crank cut to fit the Midget flywheel. The Grenade has a 1/4 inch plate on the rear of the engine - so will this one, when it's done . . .
At some point in time, this engine either dropped a valve, broke a timing belt, or wound up with something noncombustible passing through it. The head looks okay, so I dare say it was replaced - and judging that the car it came out of only had 60,000 miles, the timing belt looked really fresh. The cylinders pass the fingernail test, but if I had torn this engine down to fix it, I'd have gone the extra mile and replaced the pistons . . .
And looking at the main bearings and the crank, it's clear that the crank took some foreign substance on a merry-go-round ride . . .
I need to get some 12 point metric sockets to remove the rods and pistons, so that's going to be it for this evening.