Cylinder Head Archive

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D16Z6 Pressure Washing the Main Parts

By
Bart Piotrowski
– December 3, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

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 to keep things organized.

 
D16Z6 block degreased and pressure washed.

 

D16Z6 Cylinder head degreased and pressure washed, still needing old gasket cleanup.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Cylinder Head, D16Z6, D16Z6 Turbo Build, Engine Block, Engine Rebuild
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D16Z6 Cylinder Head Disassembly and Initial Cleaning

By
Bart Piotrowski
– December 2, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

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. This was just an initial cleaning so I wasn’t too picky how clean it got, as you can see the head still has some old gasket material on it and carbon build up on the bottom. But for now it will be easier to move around or handle as it will not be greasy anymore.

After the head was clean I took the intake manifold and stripped it of any parts to get ready for sandblasting. I ran out of time last night to clean the inside of it so I will have to do this in the next day or so.


Top and left side of the D16Z6 cylinder head with valve cover on.

D16Z6 cylinder head and VTEC solenoid and spool valve still on.

D16Z6 rockers and valve assembly


D16Z6 Camshaft exposed after rockers were pulled off

D16Z6 Cylinder head after initial cleaning to get the oil off, and a picture of the valve seals

Bottom side of D16Z6 head after initial cleaning and also an image of the VTEC spool valve pulled off

D16Z6 intake manifold all stipped down for cleaning and sandblasting

D16Z6 Cylinder head and intake manifold and zip locked valve train parts.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Cylinder Head, D16Z6, D16Z6 Turbo Build, Engine Rebuild
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Timing Gears, Belts and more

By
Bart Piotrowski
– May 15, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

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.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, cam gear, Cylinder Head, Engine, timing belt, timing gear, valve train
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Oil Extraction And Compression Test

By
Bart Piotrowski
– May 10, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

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 then inserted the spark plugs back into the engine and started the car up to burn off any of the oil that got into the cylinders.

I pulled the spark plugs out again and did a compression test on all 4 cylinders and they were very consistant at around 175 to 180 PSI. Back in January when I did my engine swap I had about the same compression 170 to 180PSI. You can also see that the seals from this engine were totally toast and started to burn into the cylinder head.

I cleaned the cylinder head spark plug seats and used my old D15B7 valve cover to replace this one because my seals were in better shape. My old D15B7 valve cover was a bit dirty on the inside so I clean it up and mounted it back on the car. The black colored valve cover looks way better then just straight aluminum, so this was a good choice.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Compression Test, Cylinder Head, Engine
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Did My Valve Adjustment Today

By
Bart Piotrowski
– January 28, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

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. Doing the valve adjustment today was the perfect day as I did not run the engine today so it was totally cold. Below are pictures of the valve adjustment.

Picture 1 shows finding TDC on my Crank, and picture 2 shows my marked plastic rod

Checking valve lash with a feeler gauge, and using a flat screw driver to set the adjustment

Picture of middle VTEC cam lobe between the 2 valves, and my plugs after 800km’s after swap.

Tags: 1993 Honda Civic Project, 92-95 Honda Civic, Cylinder Head, Engine, valve lash, valve train
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Building From The Ground Up

By
Bart Piotrowski
– January 23, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

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

Tags: B Series Engine, Cylinder Head, Engine Block
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Doing A Valve Clearance Or Valve Lash Adjustment

By
Bart Piotrowski
– January 21, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

My car has been running rather rich lately and was told by a mechanic friend of mine to check my valve clearance. So I did some searching around today and found these 2 posts on how to do a valve clearance adjustment. And when doing one use the specs below for the D16Z6 engine

Intake: 0.007 – 0.009 inch

or 0.18 – 0.22 mm

Exhaust: 0.009 – 0.011 inch

or 0.23 – 0.27 mm

Valve adjustment post 1

Valve adjustment post 2

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Cylinder Head, Do it Yourself, Engine, valve train