I had decided to get back to work on the Dodge once again. Previously, we managed to pick up a short block from an individual that had supposedly rebuilt the unit with fresh rings and bearings. We got the unit pretty cheap so I figured why not. Of course after getting the engine back and giving it some checks, I found that the damned thing wouldn't turn over. It wasn't because the engine was seized up, the thing was bound up after it was reassembled. I did go ahead and loosen the main bearing caps and rod bearing caps and managed to be able to turn the crank over. I did pull the pistons and cover them with trans oil and reassembled everything with the slicker thinner oil to see if that would help. They used what almost seemed like bearing grease when they put the engine together so I figured maybe this was interfering with the free movement of the crank. When I tried to torque down the bearings, the damned thing seized up again. The only conclusion I could come up with is that the bearings used in this engine are of a thicker variety, perhaps used on turned cranks where the tolerances have been opened up. The next course of action then was to pull the heads from the 318 in the Dodge and just replace the head gaskets. This of course meant taking apart a bunch of shit to get the heads removed. The first area was pulling the exhaust manifolds from the heads. I pulled the bolts freeing the exhaust manifolds free. I then turned my attention to the intake manifold. From here I had to disconnect the hoses and wires from everything including plug wires. They were marked prior and the distributor was marked so everything can go back together as it was. After getting everything disconnected and bolts removed I was able to get the intake pulled free, of course with the start of making a mess with coolant spilling on the ground. In order to get to the lower head bolts the exhaust manifolds needed to come completely out. A couple of rounds under the car allowed me to pull the two bolts from each flange for each exhaust pipe in order to free the exhaust manifolds for their removal. With this I was able to get to work removing the heads. Of course these hefty tight bolts needed a breaker bar on them to get them out and after putting in that work I managed to get the left head off since this was the side that had the problems with the smoking and blow by. When I did pull the head I was horribly surprised to see just how fucked up things were on this side of the engine. First the head gasket. This thing looked like pure shit. Of course I figured there was a break at the #1 cylinder due to the blow by I got when the engine was running. With the incomplete sealing of the exhaust gasket, when the cylinder exhausted its gases, coolant steam came out as well as liquid. Along with the break at #1 cylinder, the overall condition of the gasket was piss poor. It was just brittle and broken looking all over the gasket. The next thing I saw was what really fucked me up. The #5 piston looked like it rotted inside the engine. A portion of the edge of the piston was just gone, broken out in apparently large shards. The overall surface of the piston was not level due to the degradation of the metal at the top of the piston, like this thing was burning away metal over its lifetime. There was a large crack that was present around the middle of the piston top. While it didn't look like it was broken all the way through, this piston had to go. If I did try to reuse this thing it wouldn't be long before the thing did break through that crack and allow fiery combustion gases into the crankcase, further destroying the engine. Even if this didn't happen the fragments would surely destroy the cylinder walls, which surprisingly were intact. This is why I figured that the engine was probably running lean enough to burn the aluminum away slowly through its time. From here I pulled the right cylinder head with little fanfare. At least this one wasn't hiding a shit show underneath. Other than the worn head gasket everything else was in pretty good shape. The gasket wasn't broken but it was surely degraded. Unfortunately with the bad piston on the left side, this meant that the engine would have to come out in order to remove the bad piston. At this rate I got the engine crane out and got it staged over the short block. Using a couple of head bolts and a short piece of large chain, I got the crane hooked up and everything disconnected from the transmission and frame. The short block was ready to come out. Removing the engine was pretty fast after getting everything hooked up and disconnected where applicable. I got the engine on the ground and disconnected from the crane, then tipped it over to get it upside down to remove the oil pan, but not before draining the oil pan. With the engine on the ground the oil pan came off quickly. I did take time to carefully cut the gasket glue around the gasket to try and remove the pan without damaging the pan gasket so I can reuse the gaskets upon reassembly. Everything came apart intact. I was lucky enough for the crank to be in a position where all I had to do was remove the connecting rod nuts and cap and knock the piston straight out. With the bad piston out, the question was now what. Of course I "borrowed" a piston from that spare engine that I couldn't get to spin due to the thing being seized up when things were torqued to spec. I pulled a piston free from the other engine and checked the bearings to compare. Surprisingly the bearings on the bad piston were still in good shape, not showing copper or scoring that would be common with a well worn engine. When I compared the bearings my suspicions were apparently correct. The bearings on the "rebuilt" engine were almost 2x as thick as the bearings on the bad piston. With proper torqueing there was no bloody way anything would be able to spin freely with these extra thick bearings all through the engine. I ended up reusing the old bearings with the new piston and reassembled that piston/rod set to the crank. I spun the engine over just for shits and giggles and found that the engine turned just fine so all is good.
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