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ssjonizuka posted:You mean it hasn't been already? There's bad, and there's Bad, and there's screaming into the desert because the Green Place is an uninhabitable swampland instead of the idyllic paradise you remember from your childhood and everything you thought you knew about life is wrong. This is the third one.
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Mar 18, 2016 03:51
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I saw this little buddy in Tokyo when I was visiting earlier last year. Beep beep! I hope seeing it will fill your heart with joy and your future stories with better luck. Plus it's got a fancy little hard top.
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Mar 18, 2016 03:54
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Seat Safety Switch posted:I saw this little buddy in Tokyo when I was visiting earlier last year. Beep!  What always gets me is how small they are, even compared to modern kei cars and normal Japanese subcompacts. I'm actually leaving on Saturday for a trip to Japan. I've had to promise the people I'm going with that I'm not going to drag the group to too many "car things". Going to see if I can get into one of the motor museums I haven't been to, though.
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Mar 18, 2016 05:41
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Okay, here we go again. Determining Root Fuckage When starting at zero on an engine problem, my goto has always been to read the plugs.  These seemed fine. Whatever fuckage had transpired, it seemed unlikely that I could pin it on fueling or spark. At this point, I have to explain something: I've developed this pavlovian response. Now, every time something breaks, I buy a new tool. Not necessarily related to the thing that broke, but something that makes me feel more prepared for the future. Something I can look at and think "Yeah, I'm prepared for that problem". Sometimes, it means that I just buy a laser thermometer and use it to tell my friend what temperature his beard is.  Lucky for me, one of these past purchases was a little USB camera on a bendy stick. I jimmered the camera down into the number one cylinder and looked for clues.  ...Jinkies. What you're looking at there is a pretty deep gash in the number one piston crown. The R16 is an interference design, and the stock domed pistons give plenty of meat to interfere with. My guess at this point was that the timing chain was stretched or the tensioner was kaput, and something had caused the sprocket to jump a tooth and ram the intake valve into the piston crown at 3000rpm. I was predictably disgusted, and decided to think about my next course of action before taking it. In which family becomes cursed also Now, I don't know about you fine folks. From some of the responses in this thread, it's clear that any sane person would encounter a car like mine and develop a strategy involving an old priest and a young priest. For whatever fuckin' reason, my dad watched everything happen, and decided that he also needed a Roadster. So, in the face of a crippling, insane, ill-advised addiction of the mind and body, I did what any good family member would do, and enabled him. My girlfriend and I hopped in the truck and drove up to Washington by way of Oregon, setting my personal best record for "longest distance traveled for a craigslist deal". We had found a guy in Washington selling a U20 (the 2L motor from the 2000 version of the Roadster) for peanuts, and someone else in Oregon who was selling the better tidbits from 2-3 cars, and clearly had no idea what he had. First stop was the U20, in Washington.  It turned over well, seemed to have pretty reasonable compression, and generally had a lot of the stuff it left the factory with. When shopping for vintage cars, poo poo like "does this still have the electric fan that blew air on the injectors" is a guiding light for "was there a DPO involved at any point", even if you yourself are going to become the DPO that throws that stuff out like the trash it is. The guy we were picking it up from was sort of... ill prepared. He had gotten the motor, on the stand... somehow... and had no hoist with which to get it into the truck. As Datsun Jesus as my witness, I single-handedly bear hugged that thing the last foot or two onto the tailgate of our Dodge 3500. I didn't know I had it in me. The guy in Oregon seemed completely bewildered by what we were doing, and was even more bewildered by the parts stash that he had. We had a bit of an Easter egg hunt for the bearing caps and connecting rods that went with the engine, but eventually we filled the truck with everything you see here:  It might look like junk, but we paid maybe 10% of the market value for this stuff, even though it meant accepting ANOTHER four speed. Returning to base I didn't have a lot of pictures from that trip, and truthfully it was just 16 hours of driving.  The time did give me a chance to think, and I decided I'd lose nothing from stripping down the crappy R16 to see what secrets it held. Since we've already seen the engines come in and out a fair bit, let's speed this along and get to the goooooood stuff.      I threw it on the stand, and began tearing it apart. I gathered my girlfriend and my dad to watch, since neither one had ever torn an engine down. That, and since I just knew (  ) I was gonna find a jumped tooth, my plan was to act like a magician and reveal the problem to them both, right before their eyes.I removed a bunch of the easy poo poo that was clearly of no consequence.  I revealed the gashes in the pistons, which weren't as deep as the camera had made them look, but were easily perceptible to the touch.    Then, I got to the oil pan.  ...The gently caress...?  This was more than I had bargained for. I had been thinking about a cheapo rebuild using the forklift master kit, but that was out the window. I dug deeper  IS THAT IS THAT A LEAF   YEP. More to the point, it's from a kind of tree that doesn't grow anywhere near our family ranch. From the look of it, it had been sitting in the oil pan a looooong time. I eventually found more leaves, which I was too heartbroken to take a picture of. I flipped the engine over and prepared for bad news.  Sure enough...  I got it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0gSpvkxSao The strainer showed some obvious grit.  At that point, I didn't even want to do my big reveal. I pulled the timing cover off.   As expected, the cam sprocket had jumped a tooth. That might have been a fixable problem, but the rest of the engine was hosed. It hadn't starved on oil, or overheated, or over revved, or suffered any kind of mistreatment in my ownership. Even if I had taken the pan off to clean it out, I'm not sure that it would have changed fate. I think this engine was pretty hosed the whole time, and came completely unglued as soon as any amount of load was put on it. At least, that's what I tell myself to get to sleep at night. "Wherever the wind takes me" So, what to do next? There was no quick rebuild option on the crappy R16, and I knew the machine shop was going to take for-ev-er to get my Super Stroker done. Well... My engine bay was empty... I had just picked up an engine in Washington... My dad didn't have a car to put it in yet... Hmm... 
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Mar 18, 2016 07:43
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Your dad is gonna be pretty mad when you blow up the U20 before he even got a chance to kill it himself.
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Mar 18, 2016 08:06
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Who do you think suggested it to me in the first place?
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Mar 18, 2016 08:35
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P sure an engine with no oil cap on it is gonna have poo poo in it. But that's none of my business...
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Mar 18, 2016 15:16
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BloodBag posted:P sure an engine with no oil cap on it is gonna have poo poo in it. But that's none of my business... Years back, I worked in a garage with a bunch of dudes, specializing in engine swaps. The donor motors would sit in a pile and get cannibalized for parts. So it was a mess, motors in the back of the shop without oil caps, or even valve covers. Someone came back with seized engine, teardown revealed a 10mm socket and cigarette butts in the oil pan.
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Mar 18, 2016 15:39
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This is one heckuva ride. You may have mentioned this earlier, but are you planning on using the motorcycle carbs on the new engine? I love the look of ITBs (if that's what these would be considered).
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Mar 18, 2016 16:00
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ironblock posted:... code for the free Roadster frame (no body) I got... There is a pretty ratty body and frame from a 1600 here in WI for sale on Craigslist. :pusherman:
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Mar 18, 2016 16:36
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Someone forgot to take the bay leaf out 
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Mar 18, 2016 20:14
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Finished reading this all the way through, have to say, was not disappointed. Looking forwards to more.
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Mar 18, 2016 21:18
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BloodBag posted:P sure an engine with no oil cap on it is gonna have poo poo in it. But that's none of my business... Nitrox posted:Years back, I worked in a garage with a bunch of dudes, specializing in engine swaps. The donor motors would sit in a pile and get cannibalized for parts. So it was a mess, motors in the back of the shop without oil caps, or even valve covers. Someone came back with seized engine, teardown revealed a 10mm socket and cigarette butts in the oil pan. This is one of those things. Since it's small OHV engine, the oil drain from the head is basically the pushrod holes (on the far side in this picture)  If it were an OHC engine with a chain in front, there would be a large enough hole to drop that leaf down. The only other open holes are tiny - distributor drive pinion, oil filter mount, oil pressure sender. The only way I can think of for that leaf to have gotten in there... was if it was already in the pan when the pan was installed. 
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Mar 19, 2016 03:19
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Oil pump would be my guess.
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Mar 19, 2016 04:17
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mekilljoydammit posted:Finished reading this all the way through, have to say, was not disappointed. Looking forwards to more.
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Mar 19, 2016 05:04
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ironblock posted:The only way I can think of for that leaf to have gotten in there... was if it was already in the pan when the pan was installed. That's why I'm suspicious of the distributor opening, pictured open, rusty, dirty, and rather mouse sized. in every OHV inline engine I have seen, if you pull the distributor you can basically stuff your pan with quarters through the hole. They bounce off the cam gear and fall down. kastein fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Mar 19, 2016 |
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Mar 19, 2016 13:22
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Slugworth posted:There are several points where you should have been disappointed. You're not doing this right! I directly related to the impulses behind everything. It was kind of a nostalgia trip that made me smile because it could have been me with 1st gen RX-7s.
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Mar 19, 2016 15:20
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mekilljoydammit posted:It was kind of a nostalgia trip that made me smile because it could have been me with 1st gen RX-7s. I have one of those too  Anyways. I was busy and I didn't post at all in April and that's bad. I'm a little ashamed, but it's okay because I'm doing my very own startup. Hint it involves car stuff and it's on the internet and it's gonna be famous some day because I build a company like I build a Datsun and that means making In which yet another untested engine is blindly installed with no regard for potential consequences When we left the action, I had just blown up my "good used" loaner R16, and at this point, the family's harmonious co-working garage space contained a total of five Roadster engines: * IronBlock's stroker engine, in pieces, needing rebuild * IronBlock's used engine... used. * Parts engine, in pieces which were sitting outdoors in the mud * Running R16, in the red car (which drives okay) * Dad's U20, sitting on a tire Looking at that lineup, and having just used the "buy used engine" plan to provide fantastic testament to the boundless heights of human folly, I could be forgiven for thinking that "use engine I already have on a tire" was a pretty good plan:  It wasn't, and we shall now explore the reasons why not. Maybe this will help someone else recognize their own flawed thinking and desperate rationalizations. We all want certain things to be true, and we want things to work when they obviously should. I'll start by reminding you that I teased this image before:  This image becomes relevant now. I started the way that I always start. I cleared the workspace.  Then I took a look at the engine. Right away, there were some problems that needed to be addressed.   The header should have a pretty standard three-bolt flange, and had been bodged horribly at some point in the past. The valve cover was repaired in a very telling location: namely, the U20 engine has a known and well documented fault with the design of the timing chain that has a lot to do with hiring engineers from another company to design an OHC version of your OHV engine on a budget. The upper chain (yes, there are two!) fails, and the chain violently exits through the top of the valve cover. Lucky for me, new chain! This was especially welcome since the timing set is about a kerjillion dollars from Nissan, and it would have killed any "get Datsun quick" plans involving this engine.  I didn't take pictures, but at this point I also rammed my flexible USB camera down into the spark plug holes to check for damage. The piston crowns all looked nice and clean, and none of the valves were bent. Of course, in a freewheeling scenario (eg. with no chain), the cam wants to rest in a position where each of the rockers is as "up" as possible. It also could be a valve cover from a different car or engine. The odds seemed good, so I continued. The carbs were pretty sticky, and didn't look all that great.  Since the exhaust manifold had to come off anyways, I was going to have to pull the carbs. And it just so happened that ol' Dad had ordered some reconditioned carbs and a new header to put on this engine...   So I cued the music.   Many of the studs were exceptionally fucky, so I did what I could to clean the mating surface and replace the easily extracted studs with nicer ones.   Non-crossflow designs are the worst, and Nissan was an especially vicious mistress in those early days.  The G/H/R/U series, A series, and L series are some of the most irritating manifold designs I've ever encountered, to the point that it's sometimes easier to pull the engine in a 280ZX Turbo to change the manifold gasket than it is to do it in the car. On the L28ET, for instance, they made the runners 17% longer to try and get anything approximating torque out of a 2.8L L6 with 7.4:1 compression and the same Garrett T3 that Ford used on the 2.3L turbo Fox Mustang. Nissan had (of course) already long since webbed in between the intake runners (for heat reduction!)  These Roadster engines aren't that bad, but you need an army of correctly stacked hardware to make sure that the right tabs are covered by yoke washers with the right pressure, otherwise bad things happen.  But do it right, and all is well.   The carbs are pretty, and I'm a little jealous of how they bolt on, fit properly, and have a working linkage out of the box - unlike my quad HSR setup. Not jealous enough to switch to DCOE-style carbs, of course   Next, I wanted to remove the water pulley and its spacer to fit the engine into the car more easily. Since I had already converted to an electric fan, and the U20 is an inch longer to accommodate the second timing chain, I knew I was going to be tight on clearance. Of course, I failed to properly account for the insidious methodology of drat Previous Owners.  Do you see it? Yes, DPO-san had learned that Nissan built a completely bullshit, unworkable fan clutch (when it inevitably failed). But when Mr. DPO went down to his local Datsun Dealer™ to get a new one, he was told that there was a Technical Service Bulletin. Yes, all fan clutches were to be replaced with this nylon spacer, a bargain at only seven dollars! "SEVEN WHOLE DOLLARYDOOS!", Señor DPO exclaimed, "I COULD BUY A WHOLE CAR FOR THAT MUCH MONEY" So he went down to his local back alley auto shop and had the fan clutch welded.  Thereby making it impossible to remove. So I gave up on that dream, and decided to just put the engine in the car.     Of course, the U20 flywheel (and therefore my awesome aluminum racing flywheel) uses 12 bolts, and the H20 and R16 use 6 bolts. Therefore, I only had six bolts that matched, so that's what I used    And in it went.     One of the nice side benefits of a car this old (that I would lose somewhat with an engine swap) is that there's pretty much sweet gently caress-all connected to it. You can get an engine in or out of the car in about 45-60 minutes either direction, and that's as a single person taking his time. Now it was time to check fitment.   Since the R16 and U20 distributors are the same, I used mine. Already set up for the Crane XR3000 that's in the car, and no need to figure out if the points and condenser on the U20 distributor were good.  We don't use cheapass oil filters around here anymore.  And new spark plugs, because none of the ones in the engine matched, and NGK coppers are still available near me.  Of course, being that the drat engine is an inch longer, my alternator mount was wrong. The U20s in the rare 67.5 2000s had the normal setup, but then in 1968, it was phased out. The old alternator location was used for a smog pump, and the left side motor mount was changed to be the new alternator mount. Even if I wanted to put my alternator in a bullshit location like right next to the exhaust header, my wiring harness is configured for the correct setup. That meant that I needed a spacer and longer bolt to get the alternator mounted up. So like the master fabricator I'd like to some day be, I tried my hand at making one.       The results were pretty good.     Then I made some fuel hookups out of leftover HSR project parts.  And then, with a moment of mental invective directed to the ol' DPOerino, I installed the terrible mechanical fan.  When suddenly, CRISIS. The R16's coolant fill cap is on the motor, in front of the valve cover. The U20 had a thicker radiator which also included the fill cap, and no coolant fill on the engine. I have a thicker, aluminum radiator in the style of the R16 unit. In short, I had no way to put coolant into the system. But, the family ranch is home to a few Dodge Dakotas, and I know a thing or three about how Chrysler manages their fill systems. So I decided I would stoop to their level.    If it looks to you like I looped the (pointless) pressure relief hose through the engine lift bracket, well spotted. I'm a rebel with dangerous ideas of right and wrong. But, because I'm also a repentant sinner and trying to learn from my mistakes, I decided that it was time to stop adding parts back and test the cooling system, just to make sure it could hold static water pressure. And what do you know?   It didn't!  Why even live? It turns out that waaaaay back at the top of this post, when I was talking about cleaning the gasket mating surface... Yeah, I got it clean, but I didn't fix any of the warping. And with that, it was time to pull the engine back out.
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Jun 1, 2016 08:06
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I seem to have been so incredibly lucky that my first engine remove/replace went off without a hitch, aren't I? Or is that just a product of not deviating from stock configuration? I had a couple small oil leaks due to a bad distributor seal and re-used crush washers, a coolant leak due to a corroded NLA water pipe, but otherwise my Corolla goes like the 2000lb mini-devil it is with pretty much no trouble. Then you have... The Datsun  (Never stop posting)
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Jun 1, 2016 08:35
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I understand why every one of those things I have ever seen have an L series fitted
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Jun 1, 2016 09:24
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Dammit! You have the patience and long suffering of Job.
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Jun 1, 2016 12:32
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This is reaching you just cant make it up stage.
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Jun 1, 2016 12:39
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The coolant leak sucks but 5 minutes with a die grinder should solve that fan clutch DPO problem. At least it's just one little half rear end weld instead of my FPO, who ran a fat MIG weld almost all the way around both pressed-in upper balljoints, which I didn't discover till the axle housing was swapped in and the balljoints unsurprisingly had 1/8" of play in their nylon bushings. Guess what nylon doesn't like? Being pressed against a piece of steel that has someone running a welder on it 3/4" away. Also holy poo poo you have bad luck. Goddamn.
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Jun 1, 2016 12:56
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Well at least you'll get some compression from decking the head, right? Right?
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Jun 1, 2016 15:47
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you sure you didn't get sneezed on by 14 inch dicktective Garbage?
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Jun 1, 2016 16:00
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this image is just unmitigated filth 
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Jun 1, 2016 16:29
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ironblock posted:Of course, I failed to properly account for the insidious methodology of drat Previous Owners. Oh, for gently caress's sake...
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Jun 1, 2016 16:36
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PhotoKirk posted:Oh, for gently caress's sake... Is there a reason why you're not swapping for an electric fan anyway?
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Jun 1, 2016 16:43
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So were you Hitler in a previous life? Has karma doomed you to a Sisyphean existence of making trying to make an old Japanese roadster run, only to take two steps back for every one forward? Did an old gypsy woman curse you in your cradle by drawing runewords with a NOS Nismo stroker crank?
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Jun 1, 2016 16:56
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Beach Bum posted:I seem to have been so incredibly lucky that my first engine remove/replace went off without a hitch, aren't I? Or is that just a product of not deviating from stock configuration? My honest expectation is that while yes, you can get lucky with these things, 99% of getting "lucky" with any kind of engineering work (which this barely qualifies as) is doing it right the first time. If you're installing untested parts and counting on them working, you're not doing anything right and you're inevitably going to be let down. The "good running" engines are in cars that get driven. If you see 32 sticks of ECC memory on a shelf, it's probably not because it's your birthday. They're probably dead  So in summary, why do I keep installing engines I know nothing about? If you buy something like this for $500 off craigslist, you should figure out how to positively test every single aspect of its intended functionality, and if you can't do that, you need to take it apart until you can or until it's all the way apart. Kaptainballistik posted:I understand why every one of those things I have ever seen have an L series fitted No they don't. It doesn't fit. That specific question is the memetic "noob asks for comfort swap advice" of the Roadster forums. That's not to say that it hasn't been done, but that if you want to swap something into this car, it's harder than almost anything else. The L series is reeeeally tall compared to the G/R/U, and the amount of frame cutting and other dumb crap you have to do means that the time and difficulty of swapping an L20B into this car is equivalent to almost any of the harder swaps - a VG30, or a Buick V6 of some sort, or an SR20DET (DE is a easier, but you still have to cut). The only swaps I can think of off the top of my head that are "drag and drop" easy are the 13B and the FJ20.  I like the idea of a Roadster with a 13B. Maybe with a supercharger. Hmm... kastein posted:The coolant leak sucks but 5 minutes with a die grinder should solve that fan clutch DPO problem. Panty Saluter posted:Is there a reason why you're not swapping for an electric fan anyway? If I recall correctly, there had been enough warning signs by then that I was looking to just get a test-run and leak test done before trying to solve quality of life issues. For once, that turned out to be the right instinct! These cars sound mega dumb spinning 7000rpm with a clutch-less fan. WRRROOOOOOOOOOM. Seat Safety Switch posted:Well at least you'll get some compression from decking the head, right? Right? Annoyingly, it's just the manifold mating surface that's warped. If I had done anything at all to straighten/flatten it when it was in front of me, things might have ended differently. I'm thinking now that it's for the best that it didn't happen, since I ended up moving on to better things. Everybody posted:Are you the unluckiest person ever Unlucky? Or dumb?  In any case, I haven't blown up a Datsun engine yet in 2016, and even though it seems like a low point (because it was), this U20 misstep was the final trial before my road to redemption. Everything goes well from that time (November 2015) until present day.
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Jun 1, 2016 18:47
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Well we are halfway into the loving year - get on with it already 
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Jun 1, 2016 20:43
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On a completely unrelated note, I'm back in the Cayman Islands for a few weeks for startup code sprint with my goony co-conspirator, so I happened to see my old FD drive past. I should have imported it, RHD be damned.
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Jun 1, 2016 20:57
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Every time I read your posts, I think back to that FD. The one that has proven to be more reliable then a Datsun. Ouch. Also, I feel the need to buy you a bottle of scotch, because holy gently caress would I have given up two engines back.
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Jun 1, 2016 21:03
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the spyder posted:Every time I read your posts, I think back to that FD. The one that has proven to be more reliable then a Datsun. Ouch. Maybe the morally correct compromise is for me to find a high windshield shell and put a Spyder Certified™ booster rocket in it. Even after all and everything, I'm not going to track this particular Roadster, but I would like to track/autocross one in general. It would piss off all my purist friends, too. To be fair to the FD, it's not like you really get to drive all that fast or all that far here. Can't overheat if you're only driving for 30 seconds!
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Jun 1, 2016 21:14
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ironblock posted:To be fair to the FD, it's not like you really get to drive all that fast or all that far here. Can't overheat if you're only driving for 30 seconds! You can't go far, the speed limits are low, the speeding fines are crushing, and there's going to jail that tends to put a damper on things. Yup, in some ways being here is a kindness for fussy cars that explode
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Jun 1, 2016 21:59
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Don't rotaries get super carboned up if you don't wind them out occasionally? I guess you could do it in first gear... or maybe I'm spreading lies, deceit, anti-rotary slander, and hearsay, I honestly don't know.
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Jun 2, 2016 00:18
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kastein posted:Don't rotaries get super carboned up if you don't wind them out occasionally? I guess you could do it in first gear... or maybe I'm spreading lies, deceit, anti-rotary slander, and hearsay, I honestly don't know. I know the rx8 needed to be ringed out and it ran well. I've seen this first hand and the rotary tech at the Mazda dealer I worked at swore that rotary love to be ridden hard.
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Jun 2, 2016 02:07
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RADL is ignoring you. Look, if you can fit a FJ why are are you even bothering with this pushrod stuff? The FJ is where it is at!
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Jun 2, 2016 03:14
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Kaptainballistik posted:Look, if you can fit a FJ why are are you even bothering with this pushrod stuff? The FJ is where it is at! Find me one for sale in or shipping to California for less than what it cost to build my car to this point and I'll consider it. It's a great fit, though. 
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Jun 2, 2016 04:43
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I'm waiting for the present day reveal where we see ironblock finally broke down and installed a single cylinder Kubota diesel just so he could get it moving under its own power.
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Jun 2, 2016 09:31
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