Huck's daily - 2005 Z71 crewcab

[TotalyHucked]

Try welding a washer to the stud first, then weld a nut on.

Then use a an air hammer to peen the nut you just welded on, then try to remove it

So one bolt is broken off just shy of being flush, the other broke off probably 3/8" down in the hole. So I was trying to build weld up on the bolt, then welded a washer to that, then the nut to the washer. It just broke the weld off of the bolt every time. And I had already drilled the bolt a bit so I had fresh, clean bolt to weld to. I'm gonna give it another shot today if the machine shop won't touch it and I'll turn up the heat some more. Had not thought about peening it, I'll also try that

 

[WFO]

That's a good thought. I'm gonna run down to the machine shop in town and see if they'd tackle it and for how much. If they won't bother, then I'll pick some of that Freeze-Off up (if the parts store has some) and give it a shot.

I'd imagine that machine shop can get'er done.

 

[TotalyHucked]

In the meantime last night, I got the other head disassembled (I'd already disassembled the head I was trying to get the bolts out of), inspected and lapped the valves and put it in our parts washer to clean all the oil out of the intake ports

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One thing I found was the intake valves and seats look like they've had a valve job done in the recent past. The guy didn't mention a top end rebuild and the valve stem seals looked gunky but these look awful clean for 187k miles

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Hard to tell on the exhaust valves but the seats looked better than I'd expect so who knows

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[TotalyHucked]

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So I just did a light lap on all of them, mainly just to clean up the exhaust valves

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The oil gunk was like an 1/8" thick in all the intake ports so they got thrown in the parts washer. A catch can was ordered last night lol

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[TotalyHucked]

Not perfect but good enough for the girls we date. It'll get one last scrub with some brake clean today before reassembly

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[TotalyHucked]

Dropped the head off at the machine shop, dude was super nice. He told me normally it's $30 per broken bolt but since I'd F'd with them, it may go up to $60/bolt depending on how bad they fight him. Said sure, no problem. Headed back to work, was in the Zaxby's drive through and he calls saying they're done. That was 11 min later lol.

So I went to work, ate lunch, waited for the incoming storm to pass and went to pick them up. He said they didn't fight much at all, so $70 out the door with tax, tag and title. From now on, I'm not messing with any stud if it's broken off down in the hole, it'll just go to him lol

 

[89Suburban]

That's great! Wonder what he did to get them out.

 

[TotalyHucked]

Same thing I did, just successfully lol. He told me "Not that I wanna take business away from me but if you do the welding trick and peen it with a hammer while working it back and forth, it'll usually come out". I pointed at my beard and told him "I tried everything my patience would allow me to, I'll bring them all to you from now on" and he laughed hard

 

[TotalyHucked]

Today I worked on getting all my pistons clean. Took 5hrs to clean 8 pistons, next time I’m buying pistons lol

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Pulled all the rings off

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Made a really stupid mistake. Didn’t keep track of time, got super focused on trying to get my process down on the first 2 pistons. Realized my hands were tingling and it’d been 2hrs…got a mild chemical burn. Whoops. Gloves were worn the rest of the day

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[TotalyHucked]

Got all 8 cleaned, honed the bores, then washed the block real well with degreaser and cleaned up all the gasket surfaces. Brought it in and got the cam bearings removed. I’m glad I decided to do this, it wouldn’t have been much longer and I would’ve had to anyway, they were rough.

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Smoked the first cam bearing. Using a tool I borrowed from a coworker and I’m less than impressed. Gonna try again tomorrow, if it doesn’t go well I’ll order a different tool I saw on YouTube that Summit sells. This has expandable mandrels, the Summit one has billet specific size mandrels.

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Called it a night at 8pm. I was frustrated and very tired. Decided it would be better to try again tomorrow

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[TotalyHucked]

Sit rep. Messed 2 cam bearings up during the process. Got all 5 in, #3 looked iffy. I dressed it down best I could and put the cam in, #1 and #2 felt good, cam wouldn't go in #3 at all. Knocked it out, test fit the cam without #3 and found #4 is very tight. It's difficult to spin the cam. So we're gonna attempt #3 and #4 again, then I'm out of bearings. I'm blaming the tool, I'll be ordering the LS specific billet one Summit sells before I do this on the next engine.

 

[TotalyHucked]

So here's why #4 was tight, it was nothing we did wrong. Thankfully, once we replaced #3 and #4 again, I was able to get the cam in and it spins nice. The problem with this universal tool is the expanding mandrel, it has inners and outers that have to line up perfectly or it'll **** the bearing weird or if you don't get it tight enough, it'll roll the lip of the bearing like above. So using a ratchet and holding the bar with a death grip, I was able to more reliably get it tight enough. I'll still be buying the LS specific one before doing these on anything else

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Yes, I know I should've honed the bottom of the bore more, but the piston doesn't go down there. Debating if I should hone a little more or leave it alone

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So then we moved on to checking piston rings. Used a piston upside down to push the rings down about 1" in the bore

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[TotalyHucked]

So these are Hastings "Drop In" rings for a 5.3, PN# 2M4978. They had great reviews and the coworker that let me borrow the cam bearing tool said Hastings is all he uses. He mainly does old Mopar small and big block stuff but also used them on his friend's LS they put together last year. The top compression ring was ok, measured .021" gap all around. Second ring measured tighter at .020" all around. The 2nd ring is supposed to be a larger gap from everything I read, I expected to see about .025-.026.

So then I fit them on the piston. The top ring fit as expected, 2nd ring doesn't seem right to me, my dad or a couple of my buddies. One of my buddies rebuilt his 6.2 with Hastings rings and it always smoked. He took it back apart and used Enginetech rings and didn't have an issue after that. So I ordered some Enginetech ones to compare as well as a ring filer.

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Also debating the piston skirts. I think I can just lightly sand the scuff marks to smooth them out and be ok, my dad is swearing I need pistons. This motor isn't intended to last forever, just a few more years, by then I should be ready to build the 408 I wanna do for it. Some are worse than others but they're just light grooves, nothing bad. The cylinders just barely had any wear from that and the hone cleaned it all up.

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