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24 Hours of Lemons cars

Car Preparation – Day 1

Now that we had the car at Dietsch Werks, we had to figure out what was wrong with. Day 1 would be all about stripping the car under Robs guidance. We started out by jacking it up and draining the coolant.

The next step was to remove the cylinder head. This was needed because the 325 is an interference engine and the broken timing belt guarantees that we have belt some valves. We disconnected all the hoses + wiring and used a forklift to lift the head out of the engine bay.

Lifting the head

Once we pulled the head off we made a surprising discovery – all the pistons had valve marks on them. This confused us for a bit until we looked at the timing belt and found that it was not only broken but was also missing several teeth. In a regular timing belt break you usually damage the valves in only one or two cylinders before the engine stops turning and prevents further damage. In this particular instance the engine had kept on running with bad timing (due to the missing belt teeth) and ALL the valves had made at least some contact with the pistons.

Marks from the valves hitting the pistons

While all this work was being done on the engine we got to work stripping the interior of the car and by the end of the day it was looking much more like a racecar.

Looking more like a race car

After this we called it quits for the day and felt quite pleased at having accomplished quite a lot on our first work day.

More photos in my Flickr set.

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