WonderBart

I had an early day at work today so when I got home and I started back on the turbo build. I sprayed citrus degreaser on the block, valve cover, intake manifold, main cap and the cylinder head and then pressure washed them to get rid of the oil. Now I washed the cylinder head last night but today using the pressure washer it worked a lot better. I am going to hot tank all the parts after the machining, but it had to be cleaned before sandblasting anyways. Once everything was cleaned I air dried them and then started masking off the top of the block and the bottom journals so they wouldn't get damaged during the sandblasting. Now I know a sandblaster could rip of a piece of tape like butter if it's pointed right at it, but this is just for over spray protection not for direct spray. While sandblasting I will try to be as careful as possible and stay away from those critical areas.  I still have old gasket to take off from the intake manifold and the cylinder head but that can wait till next week when I have more time. I pulled off the valve seals using pliers and then took off the valve seats and put them in the appropriate valve zip lock bag ... Read More

Last night after work I disassembled the D16Z6 cylinder head with the help of my friend Tracey. I pulled everything off the head including the rocker assembly, VTEC Solenoid, valves and springs. I tried to pull off the valve seals but couldn’t do it by hand so I left those on for now. I later checked on the net and you can use pliers to take those off. While disassembling the cylinder head my friend Tracey labeled my zip lock bags so all my parts were all organized and kept my valves and their related pieces separated. Being organized while taking it apart will be very useful when I start putting it back together as I will know where each part if from and don’t mix any screws or parts up. Down below you can see how I labeled my zip lock bags to separate the individual valve parts, I did this also with the engine block parts. After the head was completely bare of any parts I used some degreaser spray and a plastic brush and cleaned the head of any remaining oil. I was careful when cleaning the area where the camshaft makes contact not to damage this surface. ... Read More

The most common cause of Honda engines getting rebuilt is the infamous timing belt breaking. When your engine is running, the bottom half (block, crankshaft, and pistons) and top half (cylinder head, Valves, springs and retainers) are synchronized to make sure that the valves don't hit the pistons. When the timing belt breaks the top half (valve train) stops working and some valves maybe left in such a position that when the pistons comes back up to TDC (TOP DEAD CENTER) they make contact. The piston is much stronger then the valves so usually what happens is that the valves get bent in the valve guides and you may have a good mark left in the top of the piston from the valve head. If you would like to know more about this subject I found a great post at D-Series forums today that describes everything in detail. Click Here for link. ... Read More

I went out for a luncheon today in Richmond with my brother and a friend to meet some fellow bloggers. I met a bunch of interesting people including famous blogger John Chow and Yaro Starak. Once I came back home it was only 4pm and the weather wasn't to bad so I had a friend come over and help me out on the '95 civic project. Last week I found out that I had oil in the spark plug holes so today I decided I was going to clean them out. I pulled the spark plug wires out and used a syringe with a fish air hose at the end to suck out all the oil, then used bounty paper towels to soak up any excess oil at the bottom. You can see in the left picture the oil is almost covering the spark plug and in the middle picutre it shows one of the bad seals that caused this whole issue. The last picture shows the spark plug soaked with oil on the threads. Once I pulled the spark plugs out I let the small amount of excess oil at the botttom drip into the cylinder. I ... Read More

Well it was a cold but sunny day today so I decided to do my valve adjustment as i've heard it's suppose to snow for the next few days. I pulled out the spark plugs, wires and the distributor cap first, then pulled the valve cover off and finally pulled off the timing belt cover. I set the engine to TOP DEAD CENTER (TDC) on #1 cylinder and adjusted both the intake and exhaust valves. While the cylinder was at TDC, I inserted a plastic rod down the spark plug hole and marked it. Then I rotated the cam 90 degree's and inserted the plastic rod down the #3 cylinder plug whole to make sure I was at TDC and adjusted the intake and exhaust valves. Then I rotated the cam another 90 degree's and did cyclinder #4 and finally did the same thing for #2. Once it was all done I double checked all valves for each cyclinder at the proper cam position. One thing I forgot to mention is that while turning the cam 90 degree's I checked to make sure I was on the right cylinder by looking at the distributor rotor postion with the distributor cap. ... Read More

If your gonna build a full race engine and want to start with brand new parts to get the job done I found a great site that sells blocks, cams, rods and pistons to suit your B and D series engines. RS Machine ... Read More