There’s something to be said about a “Crate” motor. You see them being used on car and motorcycle shows shown on cable TV all the time. They eliminate a lot of the potential pitfalls in doing a car restoration or a custom motorcycle build as well. You simply order up the engine you want, specify the horsepower you want, plunk down your coinage and the engine is shipped to you in a crate all broken in and dyno tuned. Easy Peasy.
This works well for a ‘57 Chevy. They build the engines by the dozens and if you really, really wanted one, they can pull it off the shelf and ship it to you overnight. It just takes money. Lotus Twin Cams on the shelf are not quite as plentiful. There are specialist engine builders around the US that can take your engine and rebuild it or they can build another engine up for you. It just takes a bit more time and often a lot more money. You can spend a lot more money on a Lotus Twin Cam than it would cost you for a 350 Chevy crate motor with 3 times the horsepower. But that Chevy engine would not fit very well in your Elan. I’m sure Paul Quiniff could make it fit.
I happen to like the challenge of putting an engine together myself. It is quite satisfying to hear something that you put together yourself come to life for the first time. Picture the scene from Young Frankenstein when Gene Wilder yells out “It’s alive, it’s alive!” I have reenacted that scene in my garage many times over the years that I have been building Elans. And Sue kind of looks like Teri Garr doesn’t she? No remarks about me looking like Igor (pronounced Eye Gore) please!
I also save a lot of money by getting just the machine shop work done by some real pros. Bill Truesdale, his son Will and Dave over at Apex in Bensenville are great! I drop off a disassembled Lotus Twin Cam engine there and they clean, machine and rebuild all the parts for a very reasonable price. Generally between $1400 to $2000, not including gaskets, rings and other parts. Not bad at all. Although you can get a mild 350 Chevy crate motor for less than $2000, a Lotus Twin Cam engine rebuilt and dyno’d can cost 10 times that amount. I save a lot of money on my Elan restorations by putting the engine together myself and by doing all the body work myself.
But… Even though I have built many Lotus T/C engines, I still have to take my time, scratch my head a lot and think about each step so I don’t forget to put something in place before I put the next part on. Like the crankshaft oil slinger and the timing chain go in place BEFORE you put the front cover and water pump in place. Been there, done that. I had to take everything apart and buy new gaskets. Frustrating!
So I got all the pretty machined parts back from Apex and I’m putting together the engine for the Indy Elan. Taking my time, stopping after each step to lay out the next few steps. I had a lot of trouble with the piston rings. First off I ordered the wrong ones. Found that out on a Friday morning and had to wait a few days for the new ones to arrive. Then I had a lot of trouble with the oil ring set up on the DeVes brand rings. It’s a 4 piece oil ring setup plus the 2 compression rings. The 4 piece oil ring had so much spring in it that it would not stay in the piston grooves by itself. You had to be an octopus to wrestle all the rings into place, hold them there and then try to get the ring compressor over the rings to squeeze them down into the right place without squeezing your fingers and then try and get them all to fit into the cylinder. After two hours I was on the phone looking for another brand of oil ring. Luckily I was able to “borrow” some oil rings off a pending engine project for the Cape Cod car that Jerry Lofthouse bought from me. Thanks Jerry! The other brand of rings (AE I think) went together without a problem.
The head went on without any drama. I had to call Sue out to assist as I dropped the head smoothly into place. Making sure the head drops over the two guide studs. Making sure the breather tube aligns with the hole in the block, and the timing chain tensioner doesn’t get hung up, and the front gasket stays in place. It all went into place with a nice “Plunk” and no fingers were sacrificed. Sue gave me her usual comment that she stole from an old TV “Shake and Bake” commercial many years ago: “And I helped” as she went back into the house.
I looped the timing chain over the two timing chain sprockets, aligned the cams and went to turn the engine over by hand. You have to crank everything over slowly to make sure the cam timing marks come back into alignment when the timing marks come back around and all the slack is taken up in the timing chain. It’s also a good time to “feel” if everything is moving nice and smoothly and there are no hang ups, binds, clicks or scratchy noises. Well, about halfway through the first turn I felt something bind up. I backed the crank pulley back a bit and sat down to think. I really did not want to take the engine apart. I looked at the clock – quarter to 4 – I gave Paul Quiniff a call at his shop so that he could bring home a Bore Scope. A Bore Scope is basically a very small camera on the end of a flexible cable. I knew he had one and although I had never used it before, I was thinking that I could maybe use the scope to peer down through the spark plug holes, intake and exhaust ports to see if the valves were either hitting the pistons or hanging up on each other. Paul would bring the scope home and leave it on the “Horizontal Surface” in has garage. Paul lives down the street from me. I have a key to his garage and he has a key to mine. I borrow stuff from him and he (rarely) borrows stuff from me. I would pick up the scope there in the morning. I covered up the engine and went in the house to harass Sue. That’s what I do when I’m not working on Elans. I harass her, she punches me, she hurts her hand and we both laugh. It’s a good life.
The next day I went and got the scope. It comes in a nice carrying case. It is a little hand held electronic device with a couple screw on cables with a little light and a camera on the end. You hook up one of the cables, turn it on and insert it into something. Of course the first thing you do is put it in your mouth and look around in there. Ugh! Time to call the Dentist to get my teeth cleaned. And maybe I should go scrape that coffee residue off my tongue – yuck! After playing around, I inserted the scope into the spark plug hole. Now, have you ever seen on TV one of those shows where there is a team of “Scientists” going into spooky houses looking for ghosts? I’m not talking about the more credible Scoobie Doo or the Ghost Busters movies. This is a show that is filmed in the dark where you can barely make out what they are looking at and they are always whispering like they are going to sneak up on a ghost and they are always surprised and scared and say “Did you see that? That was definitely a shadow!” Wow, what a bunch of crap. But anyways, that’s about what I was seeing with this bore scope. A bunch of shadows and a bunch of nothing. I really couldn’t get the heavy flex steel cable to bend into the corners to see if there was a clearance problem or something was stuck. So I put the scope back in the box and scratched my head some more.
I decided to leave all the sealed up parts on the engine but segregate the moving pieces to see what in particular was binding. I took off the cam sprockets and laid the timing chain off to the side to separate the top end stuff that moves from the bottom end stuff that moves. I then loosened up the cam bearing caps so the cams rose up from the valve springs which would in turn bring all the valves all the way back up into their seats. I then turned the engine over by hand. It went all the way around nice and smooth – good! That means everything is OK in the bottom end and I don’t have to pull the oil pan! I left the crank in a position where all the pistons were at the middle of their stroke. This would leave room for me to turn the cams around up on top without fear of them hitting a piston. I then tightened the cam caps back down on just the intake cam. I took a wrench and turned the cam. It rotated fine, opening and closing each intake valve all the way around. So far, so good. I loosened the cam caps on the intake cam back up and tightened the exhaust cam caps back down. I didn’t want the valves hitting each other. I went to turn over the exhaust cam and as the cam went to open the #1 exhaust valve it started to bind. Aha! I backed it off a little, put on my glasses and got out the big drop light. I gave the head a real close inspection and decided to pull that cam and look at the valve assembly. I then noted that the #1 valve tappet that fits over the valve assembly was sitting a bit proud compared to the other tappets – hmmmmmm. I took my little magnet thingy and pulled off the valve tappet and found that the valve shim had become dislodged from it’s little valley on top of the valve stem head and was causing the valve springs to bind when the cam lobe tried to open the valve.
I put the valve shim back in place. I reassembled the cams, sprockets and timing chain, lined up the timing marks and this time I got several nice smooth revolutions of the crank with no noises or hang ups. Good deal.
Time to cover up the engine, turn out the lights and go harass Sue – ouch! She is starting to hit harder in her old age – ouch!
