A very good customer showed up last fall with one of my favorite cars, an early Porsche 911 Coupe. While the car did run and propel itself down the road, it needed lots of mechanical attention to remedy oil leaks, weak compression on a few cylinders and a huge list of other things. We decided that in order to enjoy the car in the future, we needed to go through the engine, transmission, brakes, clutch and other less dramatic things such as the heat and vent controls and … windshield wiper blades!

Here is a video of the engine running on the test stand to check for leaks and the adjustment of the ignition system and carburetors. This engine has German made Solex/Zenith carburetors, an Italian produced Magnetti Marelli distributor in combination with a French S.E.V Marchal Alternator.

Here’s a youtube link to see the engine running on the tabletop

Rebuilt 911 engine

People frequently ask me if we have to make lots of parts to keep old cars operating like new. We end up making things here and there but it’s amazing how much is available from very organized parts suppliers and places that make reproduction items. This is a part that we just couldn’t find, it’s a oil pump pick-up to a front wheel drive V-8 Cord 810. The original part was bashed up, the screen was missing and the little elbow pipe was kinked so we made an entire new part. The copper screen came from a local art store, I guess they use it for making sculptures that are covered with clay or paper mache.
This part is identical to the original with silver solder attaching the tubing and screen.

Oil Pump Pickup for Cord 810

Oil Pump Pickup Copper Screen

Cord V-8 oil pump screen

Head gasket and oil leaks

Since the late 80′s or early 90′s we have been servicing the car that goes with this engine and it has always been one of the best running examples we know of. I remember riding in the truck with my father to get the car on a cold and foggy night, probably around this time of the year, no, it had to have been early November. It was a brutal trip through that pea soup thick fog as we went over some of the mountains in the Berkshires on route 22.

The current owner of the car drives the wheels off of it and we have overhauled a number of components like the brakes, transmission, and fuel pump but now it’s time to address the engine. It runs great, starts instantly and doesn’t smoke but there are so many oil leaks that we have to break it down to clean it off in order to remedy them. We were blown away because as well as it ran, the compression and leak down numbers were bad displaying 30% loss in some cylinders where there should be no more than 5-10%.

So, apart it goes – it’ll run through our “process” that includes getting the rear main bearing cap cut and grind the crankshaft for a conventional lip seal, new forged pistons and a needle bearing roller follower set among thousands of other things. The motor mounts are blown out and the water pipes will likely have holes in them and will need to be replaced so we will be busy this winter getting all these 250′s back together for the spring.

As much as I hate to mention it for superstitious reasons, we’ve had great success with Ferrari engine overhauls over the last half a dozen years. A few times a week other shops call me asking how to get head gaskets to seal and how to make water pumps turn without leaking or how to make mechanical fuel pumps to work as intended. Their shops are struggling to find the exact formula, and we seem to have it locked down lately. Nate has assembled so many of these engines, he seems to have a real formula on setting the clearances, knowing the tricks to seal them up and making sure every detail is nailed down too.

Clutch housing on 250 engine

Cylinder heads 911 Porsche

Porsche 911 Crank Case

Inside view of the 911 engine

Over the last few years we have overhauled a bunch of Porsche 911 engines that have the same description as this one, it runs OK but smokes and leaks a bunch of oil. Once we get inside and check things out we find a whole host of issues from collapsed chain tensioners, broken piston rings and wiped out bearings. This engine has a few severely scratched piston skirts and hosed thrust bearings and intermediate shaft bearings.

It’ll be great to get all these parts cleaned up, freshened up and dialed in so the customer can have the car rocking and rolling for the spring. The engine is equipped with Weber Carburetors which seem good but are they better than the Bosch Mechanical Fuel Injection?

Wool felt front wheel seal

Today Peter created new bearing seals for the 1934 Lagonda M45 Rapide. The seals of the day did much the same job as today’s plastic over steel equivalent. The main sealing surface is wool felt that, soaked in oil, does a good job holding most of the oil and grease in place. The tools of the trade are pretty simple ones: a spoon, a ball-peen hammer, scissors and a razor blade. The thick wool felt is traced and cut via razor blade.

To make the wool a bit “proud” – to stick out like the chin of a duke – paper gasket material can be cut and built up behind the wool. A spoon and a ball-peen hammer are all that is needed to make an imprint to cut out.

This twenties automotive seal technology was used in agricultural equipment for decades such as wheel seals on an Oliver or Cockshut tractor.

Using the ball-peen hammer to trace the inner lip on the gasket

A spoon has a nice radius for tracing the outer edge of the seal

Lagonda M45 Rapide front brake shoes and axle with hub removed

Here is a cool engine, a Meadows truck engine that was “massaged” by W.O. Bentley to be in a 1934 Lagonda M45 Rapide Racing car. We have it in the shop to check all kinds of things such as the valve lash, fix a few oil leaks and make sure the oil pressure is high enough. It’s amazing how well this engine ran with valve lash everywhere from .004 to .024″! These pre-war English cars are similar to the American cars I described in the previous post, so overbuilt and rugged that if things go out of spec they still drive well. Or maybe it’s because the cars drive so poorly that if something is out of spec, you don’t really notice..

Meadows engine

Ferrari 330

The power of the internet and the reason I do these blog posts became apparent on this particular project.

Similar to almost all of the other Ferrari shops in the country, we were having a hard time getting the head gaskets to seal on the V-12 engines. The gaskets that come in the gasket kits are ELRING brand that are very fancy looking and fit nicely but are too hard and do not compress and seal like they should. I am sure they work well on a BMW with a cast iron block and head bolts that torque to probably 100 lb/ft, but on a Ferrari engine you only go to 65 lb/ft and are working with a very flexible cast aluminum block.

The leaks we had experienced was not water getting into the combustion chamber but it allowed water to leak between the block and head and often times leaked water into the oil. Considering that replacing the head gaskets on one of these engines is a $4-5000 job, we had to come up with a solution which we now have.

2 years ago a man called me to talk about head gasket leaks on his 330, I explained that we had the same problems and that he should get the car to me to be repaired. The car was tied up at another shop and I didn’t hear from him again. Fast forward to February 2010, the mystery man rings me again and asks me to help him sell the car! He told me that the shop fixed the leaking gaskets again and the car is sorted and ready to go.

I had 3-4 immediate buyers for the car but upon close inspection I found that the gaskets were still leaking! We could have been the shop to repair the gsakets, get them right, and get on with it, but it turned out fine when I sold the car to a local man who asked that we overhaul the engine and set things right.

The car was described as having an overhauled engine and in need of nothing, but we found that wasn’t the case. With the wrist pin bushings wiped out, the pistons worn and overall sloppiness in workmanship from the multiple attempts at remedying the head gasket leaks, we were disappointed in the prior repair, but will set things straight. These photos show the water mixed with oil inside the cam covers.

330 head gasket leak V-12 Ferrari

V-12 Ferrari head gasket and overhaul

An often missed detail when shops overhaul engines is drilling the plugs on the crankshaft to clean out the oil passages. When the crankshaft is being fabricated it is drilled to allow pressurized oil to be directed at the bearings but because of the shape of the shaft, many of the holes have to be plugged after the drilling process so the oil only comes out where you want it to.

When the crank comes out of the engine and sits on a shelf while waiting for re-assembly, the residual oil in these passages dries out and gets crusty which could plug the passages and starve the bearing of oil. Also, when if you have to grind or polish the crank, the grit will get into the passages and quickly wipe out those brand new bearings.  One more thing, if you are going through the process of overhauling an engine, it makes sense to clean it and inspect as thoroughly as possible.

Repairing a crankshaft

330 Crankshaft billet

everything

Last month we removed the transmission on a 250 GTE to have the overdrive that was inoperative inspected and rebuilt. When our friend John returned it to us, he mentioned that the filter on the overdrive was packed with metallic fragments that must have come from the transmission since nothing metallic matching this debris came from the overdrive. He told me that without removing, inspecting and super cleaning the transmission, there is no way the overdrive would last more than a few thousand miles.

I could not imagine what could have been a problem since it shifted well and was quiet when I drove the car prior to the tear down.

Yesterday I began to take the transmission apart and found that the Boccola ingranaggio, or 1st, 2nd and

250 Transmission gear

Bushing for 2nd gear

3rd, gear bushing style bearings are all torn up and the lead/tin coating has been wiped off the surface, probably from a low oil condition. I bet there was a pound of metallic sludge in that overdrive brass screen filter.

Termometro gauges, olio and acqua, in Celsius. New beveled glass jewels,  newly machined bezels and restored movements. Now I have to replace the protective housing with nickel plated ultra-flex material and recharge the capillary tube. Originally the tube was filled with freon but now we have to use purified argon since freon is hard to purchase since it is banned due to the terrible impact it has on the atmosphere.

Termometro

Temperature Termometro