Talon Progress *new pics page3*

[Mark Guthrie]

shiiiittttt!!! that sucks dude sorry to hear!

[Brett Haviland]

well i put my engine in.  wasn't sure if it was a good one or not.  Turns out there is coolent leaking into cylinder #1.  All the other cylinders look fine.  Im going to take the head off tomorrow and see what i can find out

now...  if the head was warped would it leak into cyl 2 and 3???     do you think it could be a cracked head??  Or just a faulty headgasket.  I used a brand new felpro permatourque gasket an torqued it to 90 ft lbs in the proper sequence.

im just sorta depressed about this.   I just spent 3 strait days putting this engine in and putting everything together and now the engine is blown.

The block should still be good tho right??  they dont usually crack or warp do they??

[Dave Ingraham]

That sucks.  I hope it just the head.  It would suck to have to pull the motor again.  If the head is NFG I did see some on E-bay.  You can check and see if your heads warped with a straight edge and feeler blade.  The block should be ok.

[John Hartman]

I agree, block is most likely ok.

if its not an obvious blown gasket, take the head to a good machine shop and have it both pressure checked and checked for flatness.

PS, when its all done, don't use Fel-Blow on Mitsu stuff.  They seem to be the choice of Turbo Ford stuff, but not on these.  A new OEM gasket it less than $50.

Also make sure the block is prepped well before you put the head back on.

[Brett Haviland]

really?? less then $50 for a HG from dodge?? NO WAY.. i paid $55 for the felpro permatorque from lordco with my discount!

im going to the dealership tomorrow to see if this is true.

Or do you mean a mitsu MLS from a different supplier?

[Brett Haviland]

Well heres the update on the car.  Some Nice completely assembled engine bay pics.. and a dirty exterior shot of her.  I took these right b4 I started to take the head off.





Got the head machined down today.  It was warped.  Thats why the HG blew.  He took off 12/1000th of a inch to get it back to strait.


Here is the head when I got all the cams/lifters/rockers out and organised for a easy re-install


Here is the Head after getting machined.  I had to powerwash it off to get all the metal filings out of it.



My own personal DSM/Colt/Civic/Isuzu Junkyard .  Missing from the pic is 1 complete 4g63, 2 awd 5-speed trannys (bad syncros, but good for shep builds), 1 90 T-case, and there is a talon block/head/intakemani/turbo in there if u look hard.


And here everything sits ready to be assembled and put back onto the block.  Wish me luck!  Hopefully the HG will seal now.


I have to wait till monday as i have ARP head studs coming then, and also i might be going with either a thicker HG or going to a OEM mitsu HG instead of the lordco felpro permatorque ones.  Im sure it wasn't felpros fault though that the gasket didn't seal.  Thats mine for not checking to see if the head was warped.  Oh well nothing got wrecked except the HG....  Learning experience.  And removing the head only took me a hour.. and taking the internals out of it another 20 minutes.

[Brett Haviland]

I figure I would add that I didn't remove the intake valves because I didn't want to go through the hassels of replacing the valve stem seams and fiddling with a spring compresser/removing the clips,retainers etc etc.
 
Theres just a tiny bit of the valve that got machined. Hopefully won't cause any problems with the seating of the valve.  Might crack or burn out the valve easier though over time.  Oh well,  the engine Im working on here was free and I have less then $1200 invested into the whole car.

Budget build FTW

I just wanna get this thing running half decent.

[Mike Schmid]

Intake valves generally don't burn out.  They don't see enough heat, and the only heat they do see is tempered by cool intake charge on the backide of the valve.  Its the exhaust valves out in the hot cylinders completely surrounded by hot exhaust gasses that burn up. 

The only thing I'd be worried about is if they would just clear now but end up rotating some under use and then don't. 

[Brett Haviland]

The only thing I'd be worried about is if they would just clear now but end up rotating some under use and then don't.

i understand the just clearing part... but not the last bit of that sentence.

thanks for your input mike.  Makes me feel better about the intake valves having the tiny bit ground off.

[Graeme H Burvill]

he means that after some use of the engine the valve might rotate, so the machined part of the valve is no longer where it was when you installed it. Then your valve would no longer clear the head gasket etc...

[Brett Haviland]

Oh okay, i understand now.  Yeah i assumed the grinded part of the valve will turn.  Im going to mock up with some putty and a old HG and put the t-belt on and see what i am dealing with as far as clearences.

[John Hartman]

the valves WILL rotate.

12thou off will give you more compression, so don't turn up the boost too much.

Don't buy OEM from the dealer, unless you have a good one.  Thats why we call em Satan.  Get ahold of someone Canadian, like Ziggy, Ron K, etc.

[Brett Haviland]

I have heard that the .0012 off the head should increase my C/R by around .1   So it should not really affect much i would imagine.  I will be running 13 - 15 psi max probably till i can afford some more mods for this.  The colt is getting engine mods first tho (next month), so this car just has to get running so i can enjoy its AWD and FMIC!

the talon has a big fmic, 2.5" piping, K&N, ball spring boost controller, walbro 255.  Eveything else is stock and will stay that way till the colt gets 400 HP supporting mods finished on it.  I can also swap parts back and forth considering i dont have the talon or colt on the road at the same time.  I would like to have two separtate cars, and two separate sets of mods tho.  Swapping parts back and forth when i switch cars back and forth would get tiresome pretty quickly i would imagine.

[Brett Haviland]

Well I figure I will add a update.  I am still waiting for my ARP head studs to come in from lordco. They should be in tomorrow hopefully, then I can finish this damn thing!

Today I checked my valve clearances to make sure that after machining my head down over the suggested limit that I would not have any problems.  I took some "special" putty and put it on all 4 areas of the pistons where the valves would hit.  I put on a old headgasket and put the head back on and timed it.  Surprizingly the timing marks still all lined up perfect.  Maybe a tiny bit off but not enough for me to notice.  I turned the engine over 6 times, checked the marks again, which all lined up good, and gave it another 6 turns untill the marks lined up once again.  I then took the timing belt off and all the head bolts and removed the head.  What do you know! There wasn't one indent in the putty from the valves.  Sounds good to me!

Oh I should also add that I ran into a problem when I installed the lifters/rockers/cams back into the head. After doing so all the valves were no where near coming close to seating properly. I thought something was messed up and I got nervous. Went searching around on dsmforums.com and found out that it is normal for the lifters to take a bit to bleed down after installing them. I waited 30 minutes or so and then all the valves seated themselfs down perfectly. I was happy!

Wish me luck tomorrow as I will be hopefully getting her running! 

[Fraser Cassells]

Every time I remove cams I bleed the lifters, without fail. I am using the original 1990 style lifters with no tap and no collapsed lifters.

btw- good call on the APR headstuds, I would suggest an EVO SS headgasket but not alot of people will, but mine has seen 30 psi in that combo with no issues for years.