How To Assemble an Engine Block with Upgrades!

all right let's put a vr6 together so an engine short block typically consists of the crankshaft the pistons the connecting rods all the associated bearings and hardware we're going to be using the factory crankshaft pistons and connecting rods the upgrades consist of main bearings connecting rod bearings and arp hardware for both i'm also going to be using a mix of some old gearwrench tools that i've had for a while and some new stuff that i'm pretty excited to check out now the process for assembly for this stuff is going to be basically the same there's a couple of little differences if you are going with upgraded hardware it's already went to the machine shop we had our cylinders honed we had our deck resurfaced which is where our head gasket and cylinder head bolt to on the bottom as you're looking at it here and i installed the little oil jets for the crankshaft the reason i did that is because i actually already started to put this together and didn't count my hardware before starting and realized i was four studs short on the arp hardware so we had to wait a couple of days for that for this kind of job we're going to need a handful of things we're going to need some lint-free towels we're going to need some acetone we're going to use some marvel mystery oil because it also works really good as a cleaner and a lubricant and something that's kind of weird cheap disposable coffee filters these work really well for cleaning and they're lint free and it's like a dollar for a hundred of them so super cheap all right now before we get started on our install process for this engine we got to talk about hardware if you're using factory hardware what i'm about to say probably does not apply if you're going with upgraded hardware from someone like arp you have to stop and evaluate your engine there is a note on the little sheet that comes with the arp hardware that if you're using that hardware it has increased clamping force you have to have the engine line honed which means that all the hardware is bolted up the mains are bolted up without bearings in them and a hone is ran through to make sure that you have a good bearing mating surface and that it's actually round what can happen with increased clamping force the opening here for the bearing can go from round to slightly oval and we don't want that that can give you uneven oil clearances and lead to problems down the road there is only one way you are going to know 100 for sure whether or not you need the journals honed and that is to take measurements we are going to bolt the main cap on we are going to torque it down to what arp says without a bearing inside of it then we're going to take a dial bore gauge and we're going to take measurements we're going to take a measurement up and down so think 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock from let's say 10 o'clock to 5 o'clock and i guess that would be like eight o'clock to two o'clock and see what the difference is now volkswagen doesn't list any kind of out of round spec for the main what i did was i torqued a main cap with the arp hardware i took some measurements i torqued a main cap with the factory hardware the original stuff at 30 newton meters plus 180 degrees and found that they were almost identical like there were a couple of ten thousands off very very minimal now in talking with some friends that have built way more of these than i have the consensus was uh they've never actually had to had to have it line honed i know there's a lot of people out there that had it done as a precaution i don't know if measurements were taken before and after so here's what it boils down to if you're installing arp hardware it's going to be worth the extra few minutes to take those measurements and see and know where you're at if you're using factory hardware you probably don't need to do that we're also going to be doing some oil clearance measurement with plasti-gauge we're going to start with a little acetone and get our journals where our bearings go all cleaned up this is going to be where our upper bearings go for our crankshaft we'll get those wiped out using a white towel is nice because if it's not clean you'll see it on the towel we can go back with our coffee filter and double check we got a tiny little bit of dirt we need to go back and clean it you really want to make sure we don't have any oil on this surface right here next you're going to grab one of your upper bearings it's going to be the bottom as we're looking at it but we have the engine upside down you're going to clean the back side of that bearing really really well we don't want any oil or any goop or anything on the back side of there if you notice there's a tiny little notch right here on our bearing that notch corresponds to a notch in the block right there so it makes these super easy to install we're gonna do that same thing for all of our main bearings next up we are going to install our studs now before you get these studs installed count them and make sure you have them all we also want to make sure that we clean with soapy water and blow dry the whole entire kit the studs the washers and the nuts next we're going to use some of the lubricant that came with your kit the torque written on your paper that came with your stuff is based on you using the appropriate lubricant i like to put it on with a paintbrush personally but do whatever you want we also are going to take a thread chaser in this case a 10 on 1.5 and we're going to chase all the threads this gets any junk debris yuck out of our threads might not be a bad idea actually to do this before you put your bearings in that way you can take an air gun and blow it out you don't have to worry about any yuck getting on your bearings i had already done that on this block before we put our bearings in so we have our stud what we need to do next is drop our washer on after that what we're going to do is we're going to thread the nut on just to the point where we have some threads poking through if you take the stud and you just thread it into the hole hand tight like the instructions say what you're going to find is that you don't have enough threads biting the nut now in conversations with arp they told me to actually not run the washer which i don't really like that idea so what we're going to do is we're going to install them this way and then torque it down properly i did some base level measuring and even doing it this way you get about a millimeter and a half or so more thread bite with this than you do with the factory hardware so doing it this way seems to be the common vr6 practice and something that should work absolutely just fine what that means though is we can't just thread our studs in and then put our caps on we have to get our main cap we have to clean it and we have to install our bearing a little bit of dirt on the outside not going to really matter but you do want to get the mating surface here where it mounts to the block get that all nice and clean do the same thing for the back side of the bearing install your bearing into the cap this one is notched just like the other side next we got to get our crankshaft unwrapped and ready to do some oil clearance checking now the crankshaft was polished as well as cleaned at the machine shop but one it's been a little while since that happened and two we want to make sure that this is perfectly clean or as close to perfectly clean as we can possibly get it using acetone and either the white lint free cloth or those coffee filters we're gonna clean every little bit we can get to on the crankshaft including the weights including both the main journals and we'll go ahead and clean the connecting rod journals as well once i got it as clean as i possibly can i'm gonna take some compressed air and blow out every little bit of potential leftover fuzz that we might have next it's time to set our crankshaft in place and measure our oil clearances for that we are going to be using some plasti-gauge plastic age is basically a little calibrated rope of plastic or wax that you lay down where the bearings are between the bearing and the crankshaft and then when you torque everything down it squishes your plastic depending on how wide that squish is it will tell you your oil clearances for example when your plastic gauge squishes to a green patch this wide you have a .025 millimeter oil clearance the more it squishes the smaller your clearance is now the clearance we're looking for is point zero two to point zero six millimeters so basically as long as our plastic gauge is somewhere between this green mark here and about this green mark here we should be good the wear limit is .01 which is not even on our chart here so let's hope we don't have to worry about that so what we're going to do is we're going to open up our plaster gauge and you really want to take a good look at this if it's all mushed onto the packaging and like you can't get it off or it just breaks apart throw it out and get some fresh ones i actually had to go and buy a new a new one because i think this is actually left over from when we did the white gti so we're gonna open it up do a quick inspection on it you see we got a little bit of green right there we'll get some scissors then we'll take the little the little tiny little tiny tiny piece and we'll lay it right on our main bearing and so we're going to do one on each of our mains then what we're going to do is we're going to very carefully set our crankshaft down you want to set it down as easy as you possibly can because when we apply weight to our bearings there it's going to give that plastic gauge a little bit of squish we also want to make sure we don't scratch up our bearings by just swapping down our crankshaft now that our crankshaft's in there is a very critical thing you got to make sure you don't do do not rotate the crankshaft if you rotate the crankshaft at this point all it's going to do is it's going to smear that plastic gauge all over and completely ruin it and ruin any chance of an accurate or somewhat accurate anyway results so from here on out we want to pretend that our crankshaft's locked now i'm actually going to put a little piece of plastic gauge on the top side as well that way i can compare the top and the bottom now we can go ahead and put our caps on and get our studs threaded in what you also want to make sure you don't do is you don't want to use the bolts to actually run the cap all the way down just give it a tiny gentle tap with a mallet to seat your main cap something you don't have to worry about for this part here is putting on your thrust washer we're going to have to take the crankshaft back off anyway one to check our measurements from our plastic gauge and two i like to clean the plasti gauge residue off it technically doesn't have to be cleaned off like you can leave it on the crankshaft and the bearings and stuff i just feel like if we're gonna go to the trouble to take it back off we might as well go ahead and clean it again one more time just to make sure it's well clean now it is time to begin our torque process for our crankshaft if you are using factory bolts 30 newton meters plus 180 degrees is the torque spec because we're using arp studs and the arp lubricant we're following the arp torque spec which is 60 pound-feet of torque what we're going to do is we're going to work our way up to 60. so we're going to start by torquing everyone to 20 pound feet then we're gonna do everyone to 40 pound feet and then hit our strike point of 60 pound feet at the last run we'll start from the inside and work our way out as we normally do okay everybody's torqued now the most frustrating part the second after you tighten that last bolt it's time to loosen them up so we can get all the stuff out of the way and check our oil clearances it's frustrating so what we're going to do is we're going to just slowly loosen all of these main caps in the reverse order starting from the outside and work my way in and i'm actually going to keep the bolts with the mains that i tighten them down with just for the sake of consistency so here on our very first crank journal you can see our little bit of wax from our plastic gauge that's smooshed in what we'll do we'll take our little measurer we'll hold it up and we can see that it's just a little bit smaller than that wide .025 millimeter green square here which is pretty good in our spec we're going to of course check all of them make sure that we don't have one outstanding or way off of the other ones so everybody looks pretty happy on our crankshaft that was the bottom oil clearance since our engine is upside down next i'm going to lift the crankshaft out set it to the side and we'll check what our bearings look like underneath looks like we're pretty close to that just over .025 millimeter mark now you can also check it on the crankshaft side as well it gives a little bit of a weird reading because we have this gap right here in the middle okay now that we know our oil clearances are good we can get our engine prepped and ready for the actual crankshaft installation now you can see we got this little wax goo left on from our plastic gauge technically you can leave that on there if you want personally i like to clean it off it gives me another opportunity to get my bearings cleaned up and the crankshaft cleaned up one more time before bolting the crankshaft down for this i like to use a little bit of marble mystery oil on our lint-free rag in addition to cleaning the main bearings we're going to clean the crankshaft you want to try your best to get the residue off of there if you're cleaning it at all if you're leaving it well then just leave it this will be our last opportunity as well to really do a thorough job on cleaning our connecting rod journals it's almost time to drop our crankshaft in before we do that though we want to see what style of thrust washers that we have so these are the thrust washers that came out of this engine originally they have a little bit of wear on them so i don't really love the idea of putting them back in what these do is these control the forward and backward movement of the crankshaft knees sit in number five main bearing journal area right about like this the alternative style for the thrust washer is a four piece setup so you have two pieces that go in the block itself and sit in the channel there kind of like this the other two pieces the ones with the tabs on them they sit in the main cap so it would kind of sit like this very similar i like that because it encompasses all around this area there's also other styles that the thrust washer is actually built into the bearing that's cool because that's less pieces to have a problem with since i'm going to be using the four piece setup what i'm going to do is i'm going to take a little engine assembly lube and put it on there like that all that's going to really do is hold this in place while we assemble the rest of the crankshaft and put our mains in this way it won't flop out because if it flops out it's going to be super pain in the butt to get back in you'll also notice that got little locating tabs right there that'll kind of hook in underneath our bearing and help hold it in place then once the mains are bolted in everything will be just fine so we'll get that guy in next we got to get some assembly lube on what is the top side of our bearings next we're going to take the crankshaft and set it gently into place just like we did for the block side we're going to clean our main caps okay now it is time to put our caps on i like to put the cap that has the thrust washer on first that way there is actually a little bit of movement back and forth with the crankshaft you don't have to do it this way i've just found that it's much easier to do this one first than to do any of the other ones and it can be kind of a pain in the butt to get it in if you don't do it this way actually it can be kind of a pain in the butt to do it either way but i like doing it this way we'll get a little bit of the gray assembly lube which which seems to help stick a little bit better remember this is just to hold our thrust washers in place we'll get these guys set squeeze them on there real good and then we'll go ahead and drop this cap in make sure your cap is faced the correct direction or get our studs started you want to make sure that you got lubricant on the threads still get these a little snug down and we're only doing this because i don't want those thrust washers to come out that's really the only one we have to worry about with it now we can just go in any kind of order and get our stuff put on double check your threads make sure you still have lubricant on the threads going into the block put a little bit of assembly lube on make sure your bearing is seated properly go ahead and just get them in the order for doing what we're doing here does not matter at all it's not until we torque them down that the order we torque them down in is going to matter i'm just tightening these down enough to have the the nut kind of bottom out on the washer down here it's kind of simulating a hand tight situation now it's time to properly and thankfully finally torque our main studs we're gonna do this exactly the same way that we did when we torqued them down in order to check our oil clearances with the plastic gauge the only difference is as we torque each one down i'm going to rotate the crankshaft a little bit to make sure that at no point our crankshaft gets bound up even though we checked oil clearances on each one of our mains it's just one extra little precautionary step so that if you do have one main that's getting bound up or binding up the crankshaft you know which one it is because you just tightened that one down so we'll start at 20 then go to 40. now we will go ahead and do our final torque at 60 pound feet [Music] once we have everybody torqued we'll go ahead and mark our bolts so that we know at a glance everything is tight next up we're going to get everything set for our piston installation and we have a handful of things that we need to worry about we got our piston rings we need to take care of we have our bearings we need to install we need to check our oil clearances and we're going to use plastic gauge for that as well just like we did on the mains and then we have our arp rod bolts that we have to deal with because we're using the stock pistons we need to clean up the pistons and the connecting rods we'll start by taking off the old piston rings then each piston and connecting rod assembly spent about 15 minutes in the ultrasonic cleaner the cleaning solution was simply a mixture of hot water and degreaser and i gotta say they came out so good i'm actually blown away by how clean these pistons and connecting rods are after some time in the ultrasonic cleaner we'll rinse them with plain water to make sure that there is no degrease or residue and then use compressed air to blow them dry i'm going to start by unpacking everything so here are our piston rings and as you can see they show you where each ring goes so we have our bottom one which is number one oil control ring middle or lower compression ring and then our top compression ring each one of these rings is different and so they're also labeled like this one says top right there so we'll get these unboxed and organized where they go at this point does not really matter but as we get our rings and we check our ring end gap in the cylinder bore we are gonna make sure that we're keeping our piston rings with the cylinder that we check just like with our main bolts when we install them and do our initial testing we're gonna keep them with the connecting rod that we check it i'm taking these out of the packages and organizing them because we need to do a handful of things to the rings to get them prepped to put on the piston number one we're gonna debur and clean them with soapy water after they're cleaned and deburred we're gonna put each ring into the cylinder that it's going to go in as i have labeled here and take our piston ring end gap measurement and depending on what kind of setup you're going to be running will depend on what you plan to do with that ring end gap hpa said they run stock or factory ring gap specs on all their turbo builds when they're using factory pistons so that's what we're going to be targeting we'll get our arp hardware in instructions for the arp rod bolts say that you really should be using a stretch gauge in order to measure how tight to tighten these bolts if you don't have a stretch gauge 40 pound feet is the way to go however we have a stretch gauge so we're gonna use our stretch gauge in a perfect scenario i would have a connecting rod vise that we could put these in and do all this out of the engine but i don't have that in a good way to hold the connecting rod so we're gonna do it in the engine but that's okay because we'll be able to check our bolt stretch and our oil clearance kind of at the same time next up we need to check our piston ring and gap you'll see i have the cylinders labeled here on the block and i have a section for each cylinder on our little board over there so we're looking for an end gap of 0.2 to 0.4 millimeters now i'm really only going to be checking the top ring and the tapered ring so this is the top ring this is the middle ring as it sits on the piston we're going to check each cylinder and document what we find that way we have an idea of where we're at with all of our cylinders i'm going to wipe out my cylinder make sure we don't have any yuck inside of there we'll do our final cleaning before we get our pistons in next what we'll do is we'll take this is the tapered ring we want to make sure that we're measuring it the exact same way it's going to go in the cylinder so the word top needs to be facing up we're going to squeeze it together then we're going to swing it down like this now we also need to make sure that our piston ring is straight inside of our cylinder okay so we have our ring inside of our cylinder and this little crack right there that is our piston ring end gap now we can measure it like this but what we really want to make sure is that the piston is properly seated in the cylinder i 3d printed this little piston stopper here to make sure that our piston is set properly which is when we'll find the piston having the smallest ring end gap so our spec we're looking for is 0.2 to 0.4 millimeters which means that any of these feeler gauges is technically within spec now because we're going for a boost application i would actually lean a little bit on the bigger side of the ring end gap if you find that your ring end gap is too small the ring comes out and gets filed down if you find that your ring end gap is too big you have two choices you can check it in another cylinder or you need to figure out why either you got the wrong rings you have a cylinder problem or you have a ring problem either way that is much less fun than having too small of a ring gap that's easily overcomeable so we'll take our feeler gauge we'll go right in the little opening there and we'll just work our way until our feeler gauge doesn't fit and then we'll use the size one down from that point three three millimeters fits pretty well and that's probably what it's going to end up being i don't think the next size up is going to fit very well we'll rotate our piston ring and then slide it out of the cylinder so we're going to put this back on our number one peg hook now this ring is not labeled top and bottom but there is some words right here so i'm gonna go with that as the top side sometimes rings are tapered in a way where they only go one direction sometimes they can go either way let's see our gap right about there we'll start with the same measurement that we had for our other piston ring so we'll go with the 0.330 millimeters for both ones which is excellent it's exactly where we want it we'll put this back in the cylinder one peg hook to keep them straight and then we'll measure all the rest of the cylinders our next measurements that we have to take for our piston and piston ring is going to be the piston ring groove clearance and what that means is when the ring is installed in the piston groove how much space there is for the ring now this isn't for me a hyper critical measurement but it's something that is worth spending a few minutes and just at least making sure that you're not out of spec now the spec on this is going to be for the top ring point zero four to point zero nine millimeters the tapered ring is going to be point zero three to point zero six millimeters with a wear limit of point one five millimeters i grab my .15 millimeter feeler gauge and all i'm going to do is i'm going to drop the ring in and make sure this does not fit if it fits you got a bad piston or a weird ring beyond that i'm not super worried about what the gap is so not even close on these two piston rings after you've taken all your measurements done any filing to be sure your ring gap is set properly what we're gonna do is we're going to get our piston rings and just de-burr them this will make sure we don't have any really really razor sharp edges on any of our piston rings after we deburr each ring we'll go ahead and take them over to the sink and we'll clean them really good with soapy water after cleaning them really really thoroughly be sure to blow them dry you don't want to leave these soaking wet that'll lead to rust potentially so you want to make sure they're really really dry after that i'm also going to clean the connecting rod bolts to make sure that we don't have any rust preventive treatment or any any yuck on it okay this is where the fun begins we pretty much got all of our cleaning done minus some wiping down of the cylinders and one more time around on the connecting rod journals of the crankshaft let's go ahead and get some piston rings on our pistons we're going to start with our oil control ring which is going to be our bottom ring this one usually doesn't require a tool to install this is a three-part ring so it has this middle part then it has two really thin really thin rings that go with it one of the really thin rings goes on the bottom of the kind of corrugated looking piece and the other one goes on the top you do want to make sure you offset the gaps on the three separate oil control rings typically 120 degrees off is where you want to do it so you'd want one opening here one opening here and roughly one there next comes our tapered ring which on this application is the big thick black one it's also labeled as top so we want to make sure the top faces up but this one i do like to use the snap ring pliers you want to make sure you're really careful with the snap ring pliers you don't want to just squeeze these as wide as you can you don't want to stretch out or stress the piston ring just enough to get it over and on is all you want to stretch it so there's our tapered ring and then finally our top ring very carefully as little as you possibly can squeeze it and put it on the clocking or orientation of these rings right now does not matter we're going to make sure everything's right as far as our ring gaps and where they are located right before we put our piston in so it doesn't really matter where they go once i got the rings on i'll go ahead and just lubricate the whole top of the piston with a little bit of engine oil to get a little bit down in there we'll properly lube these before going in just like that you're gonna do the same thing for all six or five or however many pistons you have now we have our piston the top part here all ready to go we need to focus on the connecting rod side we have our new bearings here these are actually upgraded bearings that have a coating on them similar to what we did with the white gti we still need to clean these though and get them all prepped for installation we're also going to use plasti gauge for taking our oil clearance measurements so we have our connecting rod we have our cap we're going to get two bolts we're going to set that with this stuff next we're gonna clean the connecting rod bore both sides where our bearing goes even though this has all been cleaned already we're gonna do one final cleaning just using some acetone do the same thing with our bearing now unlike the main side are connecting rod bearings don't have a top and a bottom it doesn't matter which way they go but we still want to clean them really really well we're not going to lubricate these bearings just yet because we have to take our oil clearance you'll notice that the connecting rod has this little channel right here that's a groove for the bearing to sit in you'll also see on the other side there's a teeny tiny little channel that corresponds to the rod cap so this has to go this way some connecting rods are also cold cracked which means that they're actually solid piece and then when you get them you break them so these surfaces fit absolutely perfectly so kind of cool just make sure you put this on the right way just about like that so we'll go ahead and drop one bearing in now we'll move over to our engine we'll get our coffee filter with some marvel mystery oil clean it again this is nice because it gives it a little bit of detergent and a little bit of lubricant make sure you check and you don't have any dirt we'll get a little bit of engine oil just lubricate the cylinder we're going to lubricate the piston as well so you don't need to go crazy with the engine oil here we just don't want to put the piston in dry next we'll flip the engine over and actually do kind of the same thing we did with the main journals on the connecting rod journal for cylinder one that way it's also clean and ready to go all right let's put a piston in before we do that we want to make sure that your ring end gaps are properly placed you want them usually 120 degrees off i have mine a little different than that just because we have the little oil gaps we have two on the oil control rings actually three on the oil control ring so i got them all offset ready to go we'll put a little bit more oil on our piston some people dunk these in oil and that's cool too also not a bad idea lubricate the uh the wrist pin here now i have the official the official volkswagen uh piston ring compression tool which is really weird and honestly doesn't work all that great make sure your piston ring compressor is clean and lubricated then what we're gonna do double check our rings one more time there we go there we go you really only need to get it in about this far with the tool from there we can just kind of tap it down now we flip our engine over making sure your piston doesn't fall by the way now we'll line up our connecting rod pull our piston up so now our piston is seated you guys can't see that our piston is seated on our connecting rod journal next we are going to take a tiny piece of plasti gauge we're going to lay that right across our connecting rod journal we're going to take our rod end cap making sure that our bearing notches line up bearing notches over here bearing notches over here always a good idea to mark these two when you're taking it apart that way it definitely goes back together right set that in place we're gonna be doing two things here we're gonna be checking our oil clearance with the plastic gauge and we're gonna be checking our bolt stretch on our arp bolt what we're gonna do with these is we're going to put our assembly lube on the threads and we're going to thread these in not even really hand tight this is going to allow us to take our initial bolt length measurement and then we can measure the stretch as we tighten the bolt what we're going to be using is called a bolt stretch gauge these arp bolts have a little dimple in the top and down at the bottom and what we do is we take the bolt and we put it in the stretch gauge just like that then what we're going to do is we're going to zero our gauge out for each bolt now i like to do it per bolt once you do one or two bolts you can probably use the same amount of torque on all of them and you'll be okay but i did find that there's actually some inconsistencies in these bolt lengths then what we're looking for as we tighten the bolt is we're looking for stretch so we're going to see the gauge go i think that that mark right there is where roughly our target is so you can see it's not a lot but it's enough to make that bolt a bit longer with the piston basically all the way at bdc or bottom dead center uh it makes getting this little gauge in quite a bit easier you want to move it around a little bit to make sure that it's in the dimple on the top that's easy to see but also the one on the bottom because you can't really see that our gauges in the divot at the bottom and obviously on the top now i had zeroed that other bolt that we used you can see that this one's off just a little bit that's enough to throw our torque reading off so we'll zero that out the stretch that we're looking for is point zero zero seven five two point zero zero eight so there's not a whole lot of range that we could be in and still have these bolts torqued properly i'm going to start 20 pound feet i'm just going to do them both to 20 pound feet then i'm going to do them both to 30 pound feet and see where we get it's also important too here don't rotate the engine around or don't let it rotate around i should say we don't want to smear our plastic gauge all over the place let's see if that even stretched our bolt at all that actually stretched our bolt more than i expected just at 20 pound feet of torque so let's move it up to 30 and see where we get that didn't move it very much let's go up to 35. once you get an idea of the torque on the first couple you can use that as a starting point that's about .006 so we'll go maybe up to 38 just a tiny bit more it's going to end up being 40 right on the nose let's go to 40. i bet this is going to be perfect all right bump it up to 43. i like that dead center between seven and eight that's exactly what we were looking for right there cool so 43 pound-feet of torque is what got this amount of stretch i'm going to check each individual bolt as we go and i'm going to start at like 38 just to make sure that some don't have a little bit different stretch characteristic but that should get us really close we won't have to step this through like we did on this one so the first one always takes a couple extra minutes the second and third one and all the rest usually go much much faster so i'm gonna document that it took 43 pound feet to get the stretch that we wanted which is .0075 inches and um now we're going to pull this back off cap back off and check our oil clearances also right before we go back together with this we'll put some lubricant on the bearings so we have that nice and lubricated too okay there's our plastic gauge i would call that a little less than .038 our oil clearance with the plastic gauge new is going to be point zero two to point zero seven with a wear limit of point one millimeter so i think we're really good right in that space now we can clean that off or you can leave it if you prefer put a little lubricant on here we can go ahead and put it back together we'll go back to our 43 pound feet of torque actually i'm going to do them 20 and then 43. then what we'll do is we will mark these so we know that we're torqued then i like to go ahead and rotate the engine around just to make sure we don't have any binding on that one cylinder then when i'm done rotating i'm going to leave the next raw journal up just like this and i'm going to go ahead and clean it while i'm here that way i have less flippy floppy of the engine around once all the pistons are installed we get to do my absolute favorite part of this entire job rotate the engine around and watch the pistons go up and down it may seem silly but i really really enjoy watching this and that is our short block i also threw some uh plastic wrap over the top to make sure no dirt or any yuck gets inside our engine until we get our cylinder head put on and of course we have a ton more stuff to bolt onto this but i gotta say i think for me anyway this is probably the most tedious part of this entire project is building this bottom end of the engine the rest of this stuff is super simple nuts and bolts maybe hard to orient things and stuff like that but it's all actually pretty easy from here on out i am also super excited because we have spent months months taking things apart and this is the first thing we're actually going back together with and that feels really good it's super motivating it's way easy to get stalled out on project cars but stuff like this gets me jazzed up so i'm really excited of course we've still got a ton of work to do with that i am out thank you guys so much for watching and i'll talk to you next time bye oh by the way i mentioned the gearwrench tools at the beginning i have identified a favorite of mine this teeny tiny ratchet that's 3 8 drive big fan of this guy right here you'll probably be seeing this more throughout the rest of this engine build

Channel: HumbleMechanic

Views: 364,753

Keywords: NTI, Nascar tech, engine, engine block, assemble an engine, replace pistons, replace a crankshaft, crankshaft, pistons, piston rings, engine block assmebly, build an engine block, replace a piston, replace a connecting rod, replace a main bearing, replace a vr6 piston, vr6, vr6 engine, vr6 design, engine block cleaning, engine block machining, engine block repair, engine block painting

Id: svyZcovMP8c

Length: 37min 52sec (2272 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021