Saving a S54 From Parting Out.

[tlow98]

Wow, that engine was abused. My HG failure and subsequent block pitting was far less. .005” and it cleared up.

question, will you have to remove material from the timing cover as it will be sticking up a bit proud of the block now?

I though about that with mine, but .005” didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

love this rebuild! Thanks for posting.

are the bores in good shape?

[Anri]

Moving towards cleaning the block from nasty unwanted foregin objects...

The first thing I noticed inside the block/water area is 3 composite
broken pieces from the OEM pump impeller were floating all over the
place.

Under operation the water is being pushed up toward the head so
do these pieces and absolutely they would get stuck and "block"
some of the water flow. That is certainly not desirable.

I had actually pretty hard time to removed them. The size of the broken
pieces was slightly larger and twisted shape and was very tricky to
remove from top/deck water jacket oval shape holes.

This proves that the water pump was driven till completely failed and
caused the engine to overheat ! This is nothing New to me since I have
seen this happen many years ago on 3 customers of mine...

Indeed the owner was hard on the principle "If aaaaaiiiin't broken don't fix it"....

When the impeller brakes in this way some of the water flow gets by
passed in and that is causing slowly the engine to run very hot toward the
back because the water flow is lost no longer pushed hard.

This gives me the indication and strong reason of this massive head
gasket failure. I have seen gasket fail in-between the bores but its more
from age and its on 1 may be on 2 cylinders, this particular one was damaged
on almost all 6

Regards,
Anri

[Kcalhoun27]

Very cool, thanks for sharing your journey

[Anri]

In the picture bellow one can see the very last deep pitting in-between the
bores. It was painful to make another pass and another one...removing
material from the entire deck height just for that little pin-hole. But in this
critical area were the cyl pressure is so close that can establish a potential
growing issue is something I don't want to see.

When the block was decked the profilometer showed in the ~35-45RA range
this covers the needed RA for the multi layer gasket surface finish.

Ones this was done I decided to "play" a bit with finish to see if I
can bring even better finish. I have the deck blocking tool and gave the surface
further finish towards even smoother results. I had very good success knocking
off the "Haze" and bringing shine, should I say similar to REM finish. So what its
in the picture is after I played with the surface finish. One would never be
able to bring it to absolute glass finish because the nature of the cast iron material.

Note- The entire decking surface area were it ends at the side of the block the
edge was also filed all around.

Moving forward.


Regards,
Anri

[cobra]

Nice work!

[Anri]

Attention to detail. After the block deck was cut,
every single hole had to be de-burred. The top edge of
the cylinder bore was slightly chamfered in order
to make the piston ring installation easy and free
of potential damage/s.


Regards,
Anri

[Anri]

Gents,

Thought of sharing what I am rebuilding currently for a customer.
(I am almost sure he is a member here)

The history of this S54 is unknown. Purchased from a junk yard "as is"
Before the engine was going get installed I decided to do a leak down test and
get information on the health/condition. Started at cyl#1 and ones I push
air I heard the air crossing the block deck to cyl#2 and that was the
beginning...

When removed the cyl head the gasket was burned at the typical place
on 4 cylinders. Now the big trouble is that the heat combined with flames were
crossing back and forth and it torched the block surface and it led to surface
pitting/damage.

Before I proceed further up with this engine the first thing I wanted to find out is
if the block can be cleaned in reasonable measurement.

I set the cutter directly at 0.005"/0.12mm as my first cut, after 1 pass it did clean
a bit but far away from disappearing... then another 5 and another 5 and
one few....so I ended with 0.021"/0.53mm.

The last 2 cuts the blade speed was extremely slow in order to get the surface
as smooth as possible to work with multi layer gasket. At 0.53mm the factory
reference stamp "0" on the block ear is long gone..

Now the deck heigh is 0.53mm shorter, this means the timing chain will change
its length but no by much (its not a big deal since the sprockets are slotted), the
pistons will show 0.53mm more above deck height etc..in single word, trouble.

Cylinder 2 the piston went thru hard detonation resulting broken ring land.

Here is a video with the head removed and the gasket damage can be seen.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cr3sL6SpXQd/

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cqws_XPgrp7/


Regards,
Anri.