Three out of Four

Yesterday I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of engine work. I set about the cylinders with my rubber mallet. The first to yield to my combination of hammering, heating and hernia inducing pulling was good old cylinder number 1. I then moved onto number 3, which looked the worst, but it slipped off with surprising ease (which is why I flew across the garage in a slapstick manner). Here's a picture of me working on cylinder number 4:

This cylinder turned out to be quite sticky. Initially the piston lifted with the cylinder which means the engine has officially turned for the first time in 27 years! A nice side effect of this was that number 2 cylinder also lifted itself out of the case (as pistons 2 & 4 mirror each others movement). Finally, after about 40 mins (careful) hammering number 3 popped off. I spent a short while trying to move cylinder number 2 but it wouldn't shift and my hands were too tired for a concerted effort. So I sprayed loads of penetrant into the cylinder and called it a day. Here is how I left things:

Off With Her Heads!

The weather was appalling on Saturday so I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours continuing the engine strip down. I started by moving the right hand side cylinder head (as John Muir would say "right is right" - it's all relative to when you're sitting in the driving seat). All that this entails is slowly loosening eight nuts in a defined order to prevent distorting the head. Once the nuts are off the cylinder head just slides off leaving the cylinders in place. Here's the cylinder head covering cylinders 2 & 1.

And the same cylinder head from the other side - showing the combustion chambers for cylinders 2 & 1. On initial inspection this head appears crack free which should mean that the addition of hardened exhaust seats and new valves/springs is all that will be needed.

This next picture shows cylinders  2 & 1 after the removal of the head. As you can see there is a lot of carbon in there, but the bores feel quite smooth with no noticable lip. However the state of these is academic and I'll be replacing all the cylinders and pistons during the rebuild.

I then proceeded to remove the other cylinder head. This time some encouragement was needed from a rubber faced mallet before the head started to move. Note: that you shouldn't hit the fins as they are fragile and may simply break off. I directed my blows to the point where the exhaust manifolds attached and also where the pushrod tubes meet the head. Here is a picture of cylinders 3 & 4.

Here is a close up of combustion chamber number 4 - complete with the spark plug I have so far failed to remove.

And finally here is a shot of combustion chamber number 3.

Next time I'll be removing the cylinders/pistons and perhaps even splitting the case...