Modernizing The 1929 Ford Model A Valvetrain

hello everyone and welcome back to the jmz online YouTube channel today we're getting back to work on the Ford Model A and we have multiple different Machining operations ahead of us as you may remember from the previous video the split valve guide design of this engine presents some difficulties for us in regards to Machining our valve seats but we found a solution before we get into that there are two manifold studs that still need to be removed from the Block for one of our first Machining operations these studs could very well be original and they're heavily corroded we don't want to break the studs so we're going to take a multi-tiered approach starting with soaking them overnight with coil who as you may know are a sponsor of our Channel since I'm also planning on using some heat to help extract the studs I opted to try out coil with graphite as it performs well in high temperature conditions you can also get to the back side of the casting through the water Jacket opening so we'll be heating the back side of the bolt hole as well in addition to the coil and heat we're also going to use the air hammer to help shock the stud further breaking up any corrosion we can Hammer against the end of the stud as well as against the back side of the casting being sure not to go too excessive to avoid any further damage with a stud removal tool on the ratchet we can attempt to unscrew the stud I did not think that was going to happen I have to admit I had already researched replacement studs and had them in my shopping cart because I was pretty worried that these were not going to come out without breaking them nice I'm pretty happy those came out so if you guys watched the video from a couple of weeks ago the big concern on this thing was being able to machine the valve seats easily due to the fact that from the factory they have a two-piece valve guide just has everything fitting kind of loose by today's standards so we got a lot of different comments on that video about what we could do and we actually got the modern valve training kit for this from a company called antique engine rebuilding so this setup actually has a valve guide that is one piece and it actually presses into the bore in the block and then it has you know your more traditional valve with a retainer and two keepers we'll just brush out the bores real quick as always we're installing the guides with some press fit lubricant on the bore as well as the guide starting them in straight and driving them the rest of the way in with the air hammer about like that's perfect so there's what it looks like from the top in front of the side the bottom I can drive the other three in here until they just touch that same thing on the other side and that way we can get them all at the same height on the bottom install the guide so that the top side in the port looks pretty much how the factory guide looked and then the bottom side protrudes through a little bit farther than the factory guide with the valve stems measured and a bore gauge set we found that the guides had plenty of clearance as installed so I am just barely going to touch it with the hone pretty much just like a couple Strokes there to make sure that we have any high spots taken down it's not uncommon for the end of the guide to be slightly deformed after installation so I opted to quickly give each guide a few Strokes with the valve guide home just to make sure that any of those tight spots were opened up and to verify that my valve guide pilot fit well for our valve seat Machining on the 30 later on before moving on to cutting the counter borers for our valve seats I decided to go ahead and get the block set up on our RMC 1000 boregon surfacing Mill in order to surface the valve cover and manifold surface of the block basically I want to do the manifold surface there and the valve cover surface but I also need to do this surface here since it's on the same plane but I have to miss this larger part here that sticks up so I've adjusted the cover on our cutter so that it's up out of the way we're going to start with the half thousand let's cut here to get the entire surface cut in one pass I had to wait until the table had fed past the raised casting and then moved the y-axis of the table as it was traversing in order to get the cutter past the edge of the surface after the first cut there the corrosion became a bit more obvious and I was glad that I took the time to set it up and get this side resurfaced so considering this is as bad as it is we're going to go in 5 000 cut increments taking it to 10 000 total it's much more like it I think a finished cut half down finish cut go down the feed be good to go I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say that everyone will agree that that looks significantly better all right so I found a seat that is about the right ID it's about one and three eighths on the ID the OD I've got a 1 625 that's kind of as big as we need to be to hit our valve but we're not going excessive and we're also only going seven thirty seconds deep just to avoid any risk of hitting water on this thing I'm going to go off of this seat here I already checked and the head is level here on the machine and I'm going to set my depth and I'm going to cut them all to the same exact depth I'm probably actually going to leave them maybe five thousands high and then we're going to take it back over to the surfacer and we're going to Deck the block so with the right size counter bore cutter for our seats I basically touched down right here on the deck basically zeroed the readout here on the spindle and I'm going to raise up five thousands and then we'll go up here and we'll set our stop so here's what that looks like and this is just down tight it's just a kind of a positive stop for the machine so we're about five thousandths up meaning when I'm done the seat is gonna actually be about five thousands high and then we'll deck it over in the other machine so there's our zero foreign [Applause] and I did go through and kind of poke around all the edges to make sure that we weren't through into water and we weren't these are going to look kind of nasty on the top just from the rust but you know you do what you can with what you got foreign since I did leave the seats setting a few thou proud of the surface the next step in the process is to Deck the block so I took a thousands off and we touched all the way across on this side well except for there which obviously is kind of deteriorated we touched all the way across here we did not touch all the way across here but we did touch just a little bit just skimmed it out over here so let's keep going there's pretty significant corrosion around the water jackets and it actually took 15 thousandths off the deck for us to be confident that the gasket would seal with the block decked it was time to move back over to the sturdy valve seat machine and set up our cutter to cut the valve seats in this case we're going to use a three angle cutting insert with a 45 degree seating surface that is 60 thousandths of an inch wide when it's all said and done the finished seat will mostly consist of nearly no bottom angle the full width 45 degree seat angle and just a sliver of the top angle after cutting the first seat I blew the valve to get a visual of where the valve seat was contacting the valve face at that point I actually opted to adjust the cutter to push the seat out to a bit larger diameter and seat the valve a bit further out on the valve face you can see that at this point we've pushed the seat out a bit further on the valve face but we're still not clear to the outer edge which is generally good finally the last check I did before moving on was to do a quick vacuum check on the valve which checked out well considering the clearance in the valve guide with no lube or valve stem seal we always check as we go because it's much easier to fix a poorly machined seat now than it would be later on at this point we're cutting the seats completely off of a visual as we cut we watch as the bottom angle comes in followed by the seat angle and when we just see a sliver of the top angle come in we know that we have our full seat width and need to stop cutting to keep our valves at all the same height we always prefer to grind the valves on our machine even if they are brand new to give us the confidence that there will be no issues moving forward after grinding all of the valve faces I installed the camshaft with a lifter in order to check that there was enough adjustment in the lifters for our customer to set the valve lash later on while there technically was enough we made the decision to grind 20 thousandths off of the tip of the valves to give a bit wider range for a buffer I know that this is not like a perfect surface here but I'm just kind of showing roughly how much we're taking off of these valves so here's a valve that we haven't grounded the tip yet and you can see it's at about twenty thousandths there on the gauge plus or minus you know a couple thou and here's one that we have ground the tip off of and when I put that one under the indicator here oops you can see we're at about zero there on the indicator the tips of the valves are easily shortened on our valve grinding machine after removing twenty thousands most of the chamfer will be gone so we also went ahead and re-ground the chamfer on the tip of the valves as well our original plan when this block came into the shop was to Simply touch up the cylinders in the hone keeping the bores at the current oversize of 80 thousandths as such I got the block mounted into the cylinder hone and gave each cylinder about five Strokes unfortunately the cylinder hone quickly revealed just how warped out of round and corroded each of the cylinders was after a quick phone call to the customer we decided that it would be wise to take the cylinders to the next oversized meaning that we actually need to remove twenty thousand Spore material from the current size so the nominal standard bore is 3.875 currently it's 3.955 which is 80 over we're gonna go to 100 over which puts us at 3.975 inches normally if we were going to go more than about 10 000 to oversize we would want to set the block up in the boring machine to bore all of the cylinders to within three to five thousands of finished size before moving into the home however at this point the block is already oily and mounted in the hone so we're simply going to put the coarse Diamond Stones into the hone head and rough hone it out here as opposed to boring the block the coarse diamonds are great for removing material quickly but the finish that they leave on the cylinder walls is extremely rough and not ideal for piston ring sealing at this point we have the block within a few thousands of our finished board size so we're going to switch over to a stone that leaves a nicer finish although this stone is still fairly coarse as well they're roughed in we'll switch over to our finished Stone for our final step in the honing process we're using an even finer Stone which after about five to ten Strokes of the hone is going to leave us with our final surface finish for this engine I won't say that this engine wouldn't have run if we had simply left it at 80 000 oversized but by going to the next oversize I can be completely confident that my customer won't have any issues with the machine work wrapped up on the engine block the last step of Machining that we needed to perform for our customer was on the cylinder head Flathead designs can be a bit complicated to get fixtured on our machine but I was able to get two bolts down through the spark plug holes to rigidly fixture the head along with a standoff to support the side that was hanging over it took a little bit of work but I was able to get it dialed in and rigid in order to Mill the surface so it touched across here all the way across this side basically we've got little skims here and here and here and here touched all the way across over here and it touched this corner over here so you can see it's just pretty wonky we're going to keep going after several cuts the surface finally cleaned up with about ten thousandths total taken off you guys always hear me say it and here I'm going to say it again the last step in the process and arguably one of the most important is the final cleaning of the components the block was ran through our spray cabinet before being fully rinsed and blown completely dry in order to get any and all debris out of any of the critical areas the block looks incredibly different than when it first came into our shop but before we send it home we decided to go ahead and assemble the valve train now for you old timers who have done the hundred of these or maybe even more give me a break because this was the first Model A that I've ever assembled so I did struggle a bit I looped up the valve stems and installed the valves which arguably made the next step of installing the valve springs more difficult and I should have done it in a different order once I had all of the valve springs pushed into place I came back and got the valve spring retainer slipped in underneath the springs I then used my grandpa's old Flathead valve spring compressor to compress The Springs in order to install the valve Keepers which I did with the eight of some assembly grease to help hold them in place as I release the springs that was everything but fun getting those installed the lifters have to be able to raise enough to install the camshaft pass to them so at this point we used some of my old Legos to hold the valves open to give the lifters enough room I don't think we usually look like hacks on the YouTube channel but this might be the one foreign well put that as part of your video I know it looks kind of goofy and if I was gonna do these every single day I would probably design a tool to do this but in this case it worked the customer is going back with their stock camshaft before installation of the cam we lubricated all of the lifters with driven assembly grease and installed them into their bores we then lubricated all of the cam lobes and journals of the camshaft to help with break-in before installing the cam into the cam bore once the cam was fully installed we were able to again open the valves using the valve spring compressor and remove the Legos which had acted as wedges to keep the valves open and with that our work on the Ford Model A is complete to recap we have somewhat modernized the valve train with the modern valve kit from antique engine rebuilding we've resurfaced the manifold and head gasket surfaces of the block as well as the head and we've honed the block for the next oversized Pistons all in all we're extremely happy with how it turned out and we hope that you will like subscribe and stay tuned for the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Jim's Automotive Machine Shop, Inc.

Views: 618,739

Keywords: kroil, model a, ford model a, ford, engine machining, engine rebuild, Engines, Engine Machine Shop, Machine Shop, Engine Shop, Machining, Automotive Machine Shop, Automotive, Cars, Trucks, Tractors, Gas, Diesel, Performance, rebuild, high performance, internal combustion engine, pistons, cylinder heads, jim’s, jim's automotive, jamsi, jamsi online, Blueprinting, rebuilding, engine building, connecting rods, engine block, boring, valve job, engine rebuilding, jim's automotive machine shop, built

Id: U7Kvr383qhk

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 27 2022