At this point I got the parts that I needed I began the reassembly of the 318 after fixing the issue with the fried piston. First thing was of course putting the head gaskets back on and reinstalling the heads. The main thing though was the old heads had a couple of things going on with them that I didn't like. The first thing was one of the heads had studs on either end of the unit that were used for helping in mounting the exhaust manifolds and their gaskets. Now while this was a good idea, when there is a small amount of space from the ends of the heads to the shock towers, having to pull the exhaust manifold a couple of inches away from the head in order to remove them can be problematic. The 2nd problem was the other head has two broken bolts in the unit, on the ends, where there would've been studs. While I did have the exhaust manifold mounted, it did not fully seal like it needed to. To fix this I had an extra set of heads that I picked up with the other 318 that I was going to use. These heads didn't have any broken bolts or anything wrong like that. Only thing was I had to swap out the rocker arm assemblies from the old heads to these. Of course the installation of the head is pretty straightforward. There are studs on the top of the block that act as guides for lining up the gasket prior to setting down the head. After setting down the gaskets I carefully set down the heads on top, making sure to get them lined up before releasing my grip on the units. These things are pretty heavy so I can't just drop them on top of the gaskets without risking damage to the units. After setting down the head there is putting the bolts in. Of course the bolts don't get torqued down right away, nor are they fully tightened. It may be necessary to move the head, ever so slightly, to help the holes line up for the bolts to pass through the head into the block. Only after getting all the bolts screwed down do I snug them up then go through a torque sequence involving torqueing the bolts in the center and working my way out, going back and forth until I'm at the outer bolts. I torque the bolts to half the amount determined then come back with a final torqueing to the factory specs. With the right side cylinder head secured and torqued down I moved on to the left side, repeating everything. Once that head was down, it was time to install the rocker arm assembly and the push rods. Unlike other brands, Chrysler engines have the rocker arms secured on a tube that is bolted down as one whole unit. The push rods must be installed and the torqueing down of the bolts holding the rocker assembly must be done gradually so there isn't unnecessary bending tension of the tube/rod that holds the rocker arms, possibly causing it to snap. I don't know the tensile strength of this rod so I'm not going to take a chance with these otherwise hard to replace components.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2023
|