Ferrari 330 GTC engine

Here is a late production GTC engine that was recently overhauled at another shop. The owner never liked the way the thing ran and the major clacking noises coming from the engine was a sign to stop driving it. I took it for a quick spin, it was low on power but ran smoothly. There was a racket coming from the timing chest and just off idle you could hear piston slap.

With the engine running, I removed the oil filler cap and watched in horror as the camshaft chain wheel wobbled excessively. We performed a compression and leak down test and observed 30-40% leak down in 3 cylinders and about 20% in the rest of the cylinders.

We removed the cam covers to see that a few of the bolts that hold the chain wheels were missing and the remaining ones were loose! Upon further disassembling the engine we found that the missing bolts were rattling around in the water pump area, just chewing up the chain and casting.

The piston slap was because the cylinders were honed excessively and the pistons has .08″ clearance, this also cleared up the fact that the engine has low power and high leak down numbers. Good thing that the shop who did this work polished the distributors, carburetors, chain tensioner and oil filter housing!

Bolts missing in Ferrari engine

Ferrari 330 engine ready for overhaul