Matt Harwood

Yeah, the video was the reason he didn't bid...

Maybe it's off a tooth on the cam timing. That has to be it. I had a moment's hesitation when I was reassembling it after loosening the chain that maybe it had slipped a tooth. Then I looked at the way it is constructed and said, "Nah," because it looked highly unlikely. But now I guess anything is possible. If that cam is advanced a tooth, then the exhaust valve is opening up at the end of the combustion stroke instead of at the beginning of the exhaust stroke. That would explain the skyrocketing exhaust temperatures at least, right? With 12 cylinders on an engine stand, who would even notice it wasn't running as smoothly as possible? I'm also going to reinstall the oil cooler in the water pump--maybe that was the resistance the system needed to build pressure? There's also a regulator on one of the oil lines at the water pump. I took it apart and cleaned it and extended the spring a bit to raise spring pressure, but maybe it's malfunctioning somehow (it's just a spring and a plunger). I'm also going to remove the end plate on the water pump and make sure the pump is turning and the impeller is oriented properly. I don't think Jim would have made such a rookie mistake, but I'm not taking anything for granted right now. We'll take the radiator to be flow tested. I will have the oil pump rebuilt and check the internal regulator to make sure it's working properly. And after that, if it still shits the bed, well, that will well and truly be the end of the line. I will have exhausted all possibilities.

Head gaskets are symmetrical. Not possible to install them wrong. Clear hoses melted from the heat and were no longer transparent. Replaced with hydraulic hoses @ $50/foot. A large amount of coolant shoots out of the radiator neck if I gently rev the engine with the cap off. Water pump is definitely moving water. EVERYTHING is hot. Everywhere. Manifolds are so hot the heat gun can't even get a reading. Everything in the cooling system is 200+, from the blocks to the hoses to the radiator to the core at almost every point. Check it out: I had a thought that while I was dicking around with the timing chain and tensioner that it somehow jumped a tooth. No way to know without tearing it apart and resetting everything. Would it run as well as it does (heat notwithstanding) if it was off a tooth? Using the 2-minute windows I've had, I have the thing tuned and running rather well and idling smoothly (albeit without any oil pressure) at 400 RPM. It isn't acting like valve timing is way off, but who can tell? I suspect I've done some rather substantial damage to it at this point, between the heat and the low oil pressure. Who would ever trust this engine or this car again, even if I do get it running? Certainly not I.

What "something decent" might look like: What a "project car" might look like: What a "parts car" might look like: What "scrap" might look like: How do you tell the difference?

Tried some theories with no success. Used the combustion testing liquid to determine that the head gaskets are OK and there's no combustion gas in the cooling system. We're just letting the carburetor spray all over the place. Who cares anymore, right? All the work I've done over the past 4 months is undone anyway--heads are stained and cloudy, manifolds and blocks are flaking, crankcase is stained and peeling. Such a waste of time, energy, and money. Then at Ed's suggestion I disconnected the water pump to see if we could determine which side might be generating the heat. It simply boiled the water in the block in about a minute. Let it cool down and spent more than an hour reconnecting the rag joint on the water pump which was a total pain in the ass. It's flexed when it's installed and wedging it in there with the water pump connected to the generator was really a miserable job. Once it was back together, I advanced the timing and added some fuel to eliminate those variables. Roman, my mechanic, thinks my $1800 radiator might not be flowing properly, so maybe we'll take it to the radiator shop to be tested. Talked to AB-Buff about a few ideas, including the thought that there might be an air bubble in the water pump. At his suggestion, I drained the cooling system then disconnected the upper hoses and plugged the radiator inlets so that I could fill the radiator before the block and eliminate the bubble. Seven plus gallons through a small funnel with a hose leading into the radiator core. I heard it gurgling so I took that as a good sign. Fired it up and, well, it went supernova in 2 minutes 43 seconds (I timed it). Just the physics of this problem are mind-boggling--it's taking 7.5 gallons of water from room temperature to 220 degrees in a little over two and a half minutes. That's like nuclear reactor hot. The exhaust pipe gets so hot that the block of wood it's sitting on started to smolder. In less than THREE goddamned minutes! That kind of energy transfer is insane. I don't think I could boil that much water that quickly by setting the gasoline on fire underneath it. Where the hell is all this heat coming from? This engine doesn't make enough compression to generate that kind of heat, yet there's no disputing the evidence. It's starting to burn the paint off the cylinder blocks, never mind the manifolds. You can see the boiling brownish water literally SHOOTING out of the black overflow can: I dumped water on the exhaust because that block at the bottom of the photo was starting to smolder. Doesn't matter, I guess. Oil pressure is lower every time I fire it so if I haven't damaged it yet, I will if I keep trying. Does it even matter? Do I even care anymore? Can't tell. The irony of this situation isn't lost on me. I've come full circle and am right back where I started with this broken car making me absolutely miserable. I no longer believe I am the person who can fix this car. Is it finally time to cut my losses? This particular hole doesn't seem to have a bottom. Oh, and the A/C in that piece of crap Buick Tour-X has stopped working. That was a great ride home after sweating over a hot engine for a few hours. Thanks, GM. So, yeah.

Thanks, Bloo. Right now the carb is the least of my worries, however. The thing is just too damned hot. I'm going to check ignition timing again. I set it to the mark on the flywheel but maybe advancing it some more will help. Could being retarded create this much excess heat? I'll also add a lot more fuel to the mixture just to see if it cools things off. And the faulty oil pump may be key--the oil is the biggest source of cooling and if it's not getting to places where it needs to go, that could be a factor, right? And next time I fill it with coolant, I'll jack up the front of the rig to hopefully purge any air bubbles (even though I don't believe I have any). I'm just throwing darts. I can't shut my brain off and walk away, which is a big part of why I get so angry. I have trouble redirecting myself. So there's that, which sucks.

Not sure what to do next. Here are some videos. The first shows a start and run with a fuel pressure gauge installed and it seems to be hovering around 3PSI. Still leaking and spraying. I was cautiously optimistic watching the temperature gauge, which slowly climbed to 150 and seemed to stay there for a while, but then it blasted up to 220 and I shut it down. When it hit 200, I honestly expected it to magically cool off like it used to. No dice. The second video shows temperature readings all over the engine and cooling system and yep, it's scorching hot everywhere. It's cooking itself so I'm not going to run it anymore. If there's no oil pressure and it's getting that hot, I'm likely doing some serious damage. I don't know what the next steps should be. Should I take it off the stand and take it apart again? It's not like it'll magically heal itself. The cooling system should not be this hot and the exhaust is off-the-charts hot. Ed mentioned to me that perhaps I have a bad head or the stitching has failed, but I had the heads checked and decked and there were never any indications of damage in the past. I suppose it could be a head gasket and I have a tester for that, so maybe I'll do that before I disassemble it. No matter what I do, next time I put it back together, it's still going to overheat unless I figure out what's causing it. Too little oil and too much friction? Cracked block? Bad heads? Whatever it is, it will surely be massive and expensive because I've already done the cheap, easy stuff. Not sure I care anymore and I'm upside-down on this car by a factor of almost 100% at this point, having now burned through more than half of the money I got for selling my 1929 Cadillac with exactly nothing to show for it. My hatred of this car is returning and this post is me doing something other than kicking the stand over and walking away for good. Why was I dumb enough to get my hopes up that this would work?

This is my Lincoln: It just doesn't want to be fixed. It seems to prefer being inert. I spent the day trying to get it to run long enough to do some real tuning and troubleshooting yet it resolutely refused to cooperate. Task one was to replace the upper radiator hose that ruptured yesterday, so I pulled it off and examined the Grimy filter--a little gunk in each one, but not much. That's good, I suppose. Grimy filters are doing their job. The bad news is that my manifolds are ruined. Between the gas (more on that in a moment) and the spraying coolant, the high-temp paint I used has failed completely. I'll have to pull the manifolds again and have them refinished with some kind of high-temp ceramic like Jet-Hot. It won't be pretty, but it won't fall off, either. Between the coolant and the gasoline, my manifolds are worse than they were before. Feh. It also turns out that this car uses 1-3/8" upper radiator hoses. Anyone have those laying around? Plenty of 1-1/4 and 1-1/2, but 1-3/8 is like asking for a Whitworth crescent wrench. I drove all over town on a Saturday looking for replacements, eventually finding some at a shop that makes hydraulic hoses for heavy equipment. It was $50 a foot. I bought three feet, just to be safe. Hoses replaced, I refilled it with water. To answer @ericmac's theory, I'm pretty sure it's full. It holds 8 gallons of coolant and when I filled it, I poured almost 7.5 gallons in there. I'm using a 1-gallon overflow catch can and it overflowed a bit the last time it ran, so I figured it was down about a gallon. I also assume that I over-filled it a bit, so I added about 3/4 gallon. Hard to say when it's filled properly, since I can't see the core from the filler neck and don't know when it's full. A best guess. I also bought a fairly powerful electric fan and secured it to the front of the radiator. It moves A LOT of air and can easily be felt moving through the core. A discussion with Matt Hinson led me to think about installing the engine-driven fan, but that's a last resort. This fan should keep it cool pretty easily. This fan, which I secured about an inch away from the core should easily keep things cool. Then I changed the oil, upgrading to some 15W40, that's considerably thicker than the 5W30 I was using. I need more oil pressure. With all that done, we fired it up again. And once again, temperatures skyrocketed almost instantly, coolant started puking out the overflow, and it stopped running. Oil pressure hovered around 15-20 PSI, going up to 30 PSI when I revved it above 1500 RPM but dropping to 0 PSI as RPM went towards idle. I'm not terribly encouraged by that. So as we're sitting there watching it steam and hiss and bleed, I start brainstorming about next steps. I have a friend with a 5-gas analyzer and maybe it's running really lean. But until I can borrow that tool, I did the next best thing--pull the plugs. And they're a little black but mostly tan like they should be. The mixture is not too far off. I guess that's good, right? Plugs actually look pretty good. One from each side. Then Melanie reminds me that when we first got the car, it got really hot really fast. She asked how I solved that. "Well, I cleaned out the radiator, flushed the block, and... added restrictors!" The restrictors, while primitive, seemed to cure the car's temperature woes and were the suggestion of David Coco. It was the missing piece of that puzzle. "Why didn't you reinstall them on the engine?" she asked. "Because I am an idiot," I replied. Another trip to the store to buy some 3/4 to 1/2 galvanized black iron pipe reducing bushings and some 1/2" nipples, and voila! I had my restrictors. Are restrictors the missing piece of this puzzle? Again? So I pulled the hoses off again, stuffed the restrictors in there, and buttoned it all back up. And just in case it was combustion gasses causing it to boil, I put a torque wrench on the cylinder heads. Almost every single nut turned another 90 degrees before clicking off at 55 ft-lb. Maybe that'll help and it certainly can't hurt. Another gallon of coolant and it was ready to fire again. It fired up pretty easily, needing full throttle and lots of choke, but eventually it was humming along at about 1200 RPM without signs of trouble. Oil pressure wasn't great, but it wasn't 0. There was plenty of heat coming off the thing into my face, but the temperature gauge was staying at the bottom and not moving. One minute. Two minutes. Nothing. I tapped the temperature gauge to be sure it was still working. It started to creep up a little bit but... ...that's when I noticed that the carburetor was dumping fuel on the hot manifolds and shut it down. It was just spraying all over the place from the vent on top of the bowl. So that's broken, too. I sopped up the gas so it didn't catch on fire, and most of the paint from my manifolds came off with it, as well as some of the paint from the carburetor. We're not going to make the Lincoln Homecoming, that's definitely a no-go. The two things I didn't rebuild--the oil pump and the carburetor--are the two things that are now borked. I'm angry at the fact that I was actually holding the stupid oil pump in my hand and stupidly decided against rebuilding it at the time. The carburetor, of course, was freshly rebuilt right before the car came to me (or so I was told) so I figured it would be OK. I guess not. I don't know who rebuilds oil pumps and I don't trust myself to rebuild the carburetor properly--does anyone have any recommendations? I guess the next step is to pull the engine off the test stand and put it back on the work stand. I'll remove the oil pan and the oil pump and send it out to be rebuilt. I'll check the oil pressure regulator (which is, of course, inside the crankcase) and see if the spring has gotten soft. And I'll send the carburetor to someone who knows what they're doing. And as long as I'm tearing it all apart again, I may as well yank the manifolds and have them properly refinished.

Did a few more runs on the stand and they all ended the same way: the sucker runs SERIOUSLY hot. We changed to a different fan to try to get more air moving through the radiator core and while airflow was up, overheating was even more pronounced--it ran up to 220 degrees in about two minutes. When the engine was in the car, it would run up to 200 degrees at first, then it was like a thermostat opened and it would cool off instantly to 160 and stay there. What's worse, on the final run, one of the upper hoses was close enough to an exhaust manifold to melt and rupture, so there's boiling water spraying all over the place. That really sucked and made a HUGE mess of my beautiful engine. Solving the heat problem is puzzle #1. Puzzle #2 is whether I should worry about oil pressure. It registers low at idle and low RPM but picks up to about 35 PSI at 1500+ RPM (I remembered to hook up my tach for later runs). That's what the factory says it should have. After a few more pulls, we'll change the oil to some 20W50 and see if it improves at idle. I'm still not convinced that the gauges are doing a good job--lots of air bubbles in the line. Is this enough? I don't know. Puzzle #3 is figuring out why it needs some choke even when it's warm. Running a little lean might help explain the high temps, so some carb tuning is the obvious first step. I fattened up the carb quite a bit but it still wants full throttle to start and about half choke to stay running. My thoughts are a combination of relief that it's healthy (mostly) and dread that old issues might be resurfacing and it's still so far from being ready. I have about 2.5 weeks to turn it into a running, driving car. I was kind of kidding myself and thinking that since it ran perfectly before I took it apart, putting it back together with the same parts in the same positions with the same settings would result in an engine that still runs the same. Obviously that's not how it works but starting from scratch and figuring all this stuff out again is a bit demoralizing, especially since I'm clearly so far from where I was. Tomorrow I have a few tweaks to make to the engine stand itself (I need to raise it up a bit off the ground so I can change the oil), and then change the radiator hoses, refill the cooling system, and try to tune the carb so it will start and run properly and stay cool. We'll start there and just keep chipping away at it. I just hope the clock doesn't run out while I'm getting things dialed in.

After shut-down, it puked a bit and started bubbling through the upper hoses. I over-filled it a bit, so the puking doesn't worry me. It ran up to about 180 degrees pretty fast and started boiling at hot soak after shut down, so I'm not too concerned there, either. The fan we're using moves a lot of air, but not really pushing it through the radiator core very well so that's certainly a factor. Again, not time to worry yet, there's still lots of sorting to do. Also note that we blew through about a quart of gas in like 3 minutes of running. That's INSANE.

Not thrilled with the oil pressure here (and it drops to 0 on the gauge at idle), but there are several factors at play. One is that the gauge probably isn't great. Two is that I'm running 5W30 oil, which is very thin for one of these engines. And three, I may have to tweak the relief valve on the water pump a bit, it may not be making full pressure. But 20 PSI at what feels like 1500 RPM (I forgot to install my tach) is OK and the valvetrain is quiet. If it was really at 0 PSI, we'd hear it clattering. A few more runs and then we'll switch 20W50 oil and that should bolster oil pressure a bit. But it runs and it didn't explode!

Fire in the hole!

I'll go pick this one up tomorrow. Faster than finding a tank and building one:

Can you describe it? What do I need? I can connect it to the oil filter fitting and pressurize the system from there, I suppose. What do you use for the pot?

Sorry guys, no running engine today. Once again, the real world got in the way and didn't leave me much time to get things done. Roman went home before I was ready to fire it, and I don't want to do anything without him as a back-up. The last jobs were to finish installing the oil lines to the water pump, install the lower radiator hose, fill it with gas and water, and install that last bolt in the rag joint. The oil lines were a little challenging and that rag joint bolt really didn't want to go in, but everything else was easy. Oil cooler fittings were a bit challenging to install. The only thing left to do was crank it, which I did. I didn't turn on the ignition but I used the starter to turn it over just enough to install the fourth bolt on the rag joint. Once that was secure, I cranked it for a few seconds at a time to see if it would build oil pressure and pump fuel. I did find a fuel leak at the carburetor and discovered that gasoline destroys that lovely black high-temperature paint, so I fixed the leak by tightening the fitting a little more. Cunifer is wonderful stuff. I'll touch up the paint later. Gas eats the high-temp paint. Dang. But the thing that concerns me most is that it's not building any oil pressure. There's no oil creeping up the line to the oil pressure gauge. None. I cranked it for a total of about two minutes at 20-30 second intervals but it never built any oil pressure. Should I be worried? I didn't want to fire it until I knew for sure. In this video, you can see it turning over but there's no oil moving up the clear tubing to the oil pressure gauge. I have a few theories and I'm running with the idea that at cranking speeds, it's simply not moving enough oil to fill all the oil passages, which are massive. There are two 1/2-inch pipes running the length of the crankcase distributing oil to the main bearings and the oil cooler. They probably hold half a gallon of oil by themselves. Then there's the fact that I packed the oil pump with Vaseline--at 30 RPM it might not be moving fast enough to displace the Vaseline and start pumping oil. Finally, there's the very real possibility that I somehow installed something incorrectly and it's not actually moving any oil. Anyone care to chime in? I'm pretty stressed out over it...