Tag Archives: cylinder head

Tuesday 4th August 2015 – AS YOU MIGHT HAVE GUESSED …

… seeing as how we have been working on this Hyundai today, we’ve had 29.5mm of rain today.

Luckily most of it fell during the night but there was still sufficient falling down to postpone our start until 11:00.

So Rob came round and brought back the cylinder head and I finished dismantling it – using a hammer and chisel on the reluctant nuts. Luckily, it’s all standard metric threads so I soon found all of the bolts that we needed.

But the cylinder head is as bad as the bores, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impact damage, maybe a broken piston ring and that would explain the slack in the bore. It’s not a broken timing belt because there’s little damage to the valves and stems, which is what you exepct in that case. But whatever way you look at this, it’s ruined.

With the cylinder head being dismantled, it went on comparatively easily and the manifold was much less of a struggle than I was expecting. I got 9 of the 10 bolts onto the manifold at the cylinder head, but everything else is properly bolted up, which is a surprise. The bracket that caused us all of our problems the other day – that was a 2-minute job to reattach it. New nuts made all of the difference. The old ones were cheap and nasty, clearly not made to be taken off once they’ve been fitted. I could tighten up to infinity the new nuts using the open end of a spanner. With the previous nuts, even a 6-sided socket would just round them off.

Rob had to leave early so we called it a day. Tomorrow we need to fit the timing and fan belt, refit the turbo controls, torque down the head refit the water pipes and bleed the diesel system.

I had to shave my head too – I’ve been lying for three hours in a pool of oil and my hair (such as it was) was ruined. At least I can wash it easily now.

And Rosemary was on the phone for a good hour or so for a chat, so I missed my tea. But I don’t care.

Having crashed out this evening, I’m off to bed now.

See you in the morning.

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Monday 27th July 2015 – I HATE CARS

Especially mass-produced monsters made in Korea.

I had to take the cylinder head off one today , a job that normally takes about two or three hours at the very most. And so we started at 10:00 and finished by … errr … 19:30. And that with no break, no stopping for lunch, no stopping for a drink, anything. Working non-stop.

timing cover bolts grounding out on bodywork hyundai trajet diesel les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe issue with these cars is that the engines are all assembled and mounted onto a subframe, and the body is lowered on top. And this leads to all kinds of complications – the most astonishing of which was that in order to adjust (or slacken in order to remove) the cam belt, which you need to do in order to take off the cylinder head, you need to take off the belt cover. But the bolts of the belt cover ground out on the inner wing of the car so you can’t do that.

And take the exhaust manifold. It can be removed in about four different ways, each one of which involves the removal of a pile of nuts and bolts. And in every case, you can take out all but one, and then you are stuck.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

We finally removed it and the horrible thing about it all is that we have to put it all back together again in a couple of days time. I’m as black as the Ace of Spades, just as I used to be when I was pulling Ford Cortinas to bits all those years ago, and I’m never going to get myself clean.

And, of course, it was raining this morning while we were doing it, after all these weeks of glorious weather. Isn’t that typical?

But I was worn out before I started, having been awake since 05:00. I’d been on my travels, back to school in fact. And I had no shoes – I’d left them downstairs in the main hall but there, when I went down to retrieve them, was a three-piece rock band playing, right by where I had left my shoes. I chatted to the guitarist/singer in the interval to ask him that if he knew of anyone looking for a bassist, to let me know. “But I have a bassist” he said, indicating a young boy playing with him. “And I can sing” I said – “but my sister sings with me if I need a singer”. “But I don’t mean you – I mean anybody” but he was so negative that I quickly picked up the hint – that it was too much trouble for him and that he was not going to do it

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Tuesday 24th July 2012 – CALIBURN DIDN’T FLY …

… home as quickly as he normally does from Liz and Terry’s this evening.

Hardly surprising – there’s half a tonne of stones in the back.

You know how I’m rebuilding the wall of the lean to and how I’m running out of stones – it just so happens that Terry has a barn-full that need moving

So having had an early start at … gulp … 06:40 this morning I was round at Liz and Terry’s for shortly after 09:00 and we set to work to dismantle the engine on the FIAT.

And while it was comparatively straightforward, it took absolutely ages because there are all kinds of complications – cables and wires and plastic housings in the way and to take one thing off you need to remove two other things and to remove those two other things you need to move four other things, and so on. 

Highlight had to be taking off the plastic shroud that covers the timing belt cover.

Undo all of the screws and still the blasted thing won’t move.
Jack up the car and take off the wheel to see why …. ahhh, screw actually holds on the plastic mudguard.
After much manoeuvring, off comes the plastic mudguard, to find that the screw we are looking for is just half an inch away from the mudguard screw, but the mudguard is covering it so you can’t see it until you take off the mudguard. Why they couldn’t put the screw through the plastic mudguard from the outside to save us half an hour’s work I really don’t know.

So guess what I’ll be doing with an electric drill when I come to reassemble it

Yes, not reassembled yet. But everything is cleaned and smoothed down and ready.

What’s holding us up is that for doing many things, such as taking the plugs out with the cylinder head in situ, it’s near-on impossible and so seeing as we have the cylinder head off, we’ve ordered a full service kit and we’ll change everything before we reassemble it.

That way, it’s all done and dusted, and ready for the road. 

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Monday 23rd July 2012 -171.4 AND 160.1 AMP-HOURS …

… of solar energy in bank 1 and bank 2 respectively might not be a new record (although it isn’t far off), but 154 amp-hours of that being surplus and hence being diverted into the dump load (the hot water tank) – now, that definitely is.

And having emptied out the hot water from the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load, which was still at an indecent temperature and filled up the tank this morning with cold water, that brought the water temperature down to just a mere 39°C.

And by the time that this 154 amp-hours of solar energy had finished, it was enough to push the temperature of the water off the scale – ie over 70°C.

Now that is impressive.

The temperature of the water in the solar shower tank may well only have been 30°C, but 5 litres of water out of the dump load took it right up to 38.5°C and I had yet another lovely shower.

And I’m all clean now, just for a change.

Mind you, I wasn’t half dirty earlier on.

This morning, after my 07:00 start (despite only going to bed at 02:30), a leisurely breakfast and an hour or so on the laptop, I went round to Marianne’s to move the International Library from her friend’s garage to an empty room at François’ at Barrot.

That was enough to make anyone filthy

From there it was off to LIz and Terry’s to pick up Liz and then off to Gerzat to record the Radio Anglais programmes for Radio Arverne.

And as well as the 5 that we had planned, we needed to do a 6th as Bernard had somehow managed to lose the one for this week. And it’s not very pleasant in the heat up there in their attic.

That’s it, really. Quite busy but nothing much to show for it.

I’m off to bed now, another ridiculously early night as it’s another early start tomorrow.

I’m changing the cylinder head gasket on Liz’s car.

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