This 225 Buick DAUNTLESS V6 Odd Fire Was WORSE Than We Thought...

hey everybody this is the cleaning guy as you recall from our prior videos here Nicholas has been working on that 383 Chevy trying to get it wrapped up and I figure it's time I get started on the next project here uh which happens to be a 225 Jeep dauntless engine which is actually a Buick engine Buick V6 this engine was out of a late 60s jeep that just so happens uh as you recall in that 383 that engine belonged to the little brother of a by the name of Mikey that I worked with years ago when we were kids and this engine belongs to one of Mikey's High School buddies from when everybody was kids years and years ago so it's just kind of funny we've got uh two different customers here that are both connected with Mikey and uh we appreciate him send them this way so anyway let me flip this phone around so I can record some of this I'm going to show you what the customer brought us he tore the engine down himself trying to do everything he can on his own but after he got into it he decided maybe he better bring it here to the machine shop and let us take over and work our Magic on it Story Goes that this is not a very high mileage engine but it has sat for years and years in that jeep and now he's restoring that jeep uh back to its original glory and just wants a good stock rebuild done on this so I've got everything lined out here just the way he brought it in and I'm going to try to get this tore down and in the Bake Oven as much of as I can this evening so that it can bake overnight and tomorrow when we come in we'll start cleaning these parts up and get ready to start doing the machine work I'm going to start the process by removing the main caps pulling out the main bearings that are left in here they can go into scrap IR or the bearings can go into scrap iron I'll remove all the freeze plugs uh drain plugs uh if there's any gy plugs here in the back of block we'll take those out we'll pull out the ones here in the front uh customer left his sending unit in there we'll have to pull that out and save that for him okay so I've got all the cam bearings gelly plugs uh freeze plugs everything you can think of removed from this block so let's take it over and see if I can put it in the oven and we'll let this bake overnight I already have a uh 350 shev Block in the oven and a old Ford FE intake manold hopefully this will all fit so let's see if that hole here isn't just big enough for this to go in put the phone down here a [Music] minute okay I had to shut the phone off there and use both hands to get this done but the block is in there along with the Chevy block along with the 4 Fe manifold now let's see if there's any of these other small pieces here uh that we can get in on the same load the more we can put in the better it works well I didn't get quite as much in there as I like to have but we do have the uh 350 Chevy block the 230 or 225 Buick uh Jeep dauntless engine both exhaust manifolds the intake manifold the valve covers uh All the Small Parts bolts main caps things like that are in cans don't down along the sides there so anyway we'll close this up now and uh set our temperature here at 650° there it is 650 and uh I think we ought run this about 4 hours or 240 minutes is what I'm looking for here on the timer there we go and we'll go ahead and start that up so for the next 240 minutes that will be attempting to cook to Let's double check yeah 650° so we'll leave that go tomorrow morning when we come in those parts will still be pretty warm but we'll get that opened up he'll cool off real quick and we can run them through a combination of either glass beading and or through the steel braider there to get those all cleaned up ready to do the machine work so we'll still have the heads the timing cover cam shaft rods and pistons looks like harik balancer and the crankshaft to run through uh either the oven or through the spray cabinet here to get those clean so um last time we left off I was tearing this all down getting the block and heads cranking everything put in to clean and we've since run them through and have everything clean ready for inspection now and I knew this motor was was probably in pretty good shape but uh set up the gauge here to measure the wear in the cylinders and there's probably not any of them that have more than maybe oh two maybe 3,000 wear in the cylinders um this going back in this old jeep that they're restoring just kind of something for fun it's not going to get a lot of miles on it uh so they've opted to just kind of do an oldfashioned rebuild on this and we're just going to rring it uh and kind of put it back together the way it was crankshaft is beautiful uh it needs uh cleaned up here just a little bit more and then we'll polish it but man it's it has no wear on it whatsoever so let's step over here where we've got the uh heads you can see I've got those all cleaned up they're ready to go through here and uh we'll go ahead and put the hard exhaust seats in so they'll stand up to unlet it gas I think I'm going to replace exhaust valves they show a little bit of wear they're not that expensive but what uh I think we can op to put some new ones in and then our Pistons our intake okay yeah the intakes are real nice I'm going to go ahead and just grind those I'll polish the stems grind them and reuse the intakes again but I I will do a new exhaust Pistons uh I ran them through our jet wash and they actually clean cleaned up pretty nice but there was just a little bit of carbon left in that top ring Groove a lot of times ones like this if they're trying to reuse we'll put them in glass bead them um but then you've got the problem of trying to get all the glass beads about out out of them it's about impossible unless you take them off the rods and now we're you know getting into the area of adding so much more label labor cost to it that maybe it'd be better just bought and put new pistons in but anyway I dug out one my dad's old tools uh this is a ring Grove cleaner um probably don't see those much anymore but anyway it has different width blades here you can turn that around to whatever your ring Grove width is and put that on the Piston like that and you just turn it around like this and it scrapes the carbon out of those ring grooves without hurting the piston in anyway so on this set after I washed them since there was just a little bit of carbon in there I got this old tool out and I just went around those and uh get that on there right I just went around those and scraped the last little bit of carbon out there and once I probably rinse those off one more time they'll be ready for a new set of rings I'll put that block in the hone we'll put some good crosshatch back in the cylinders again and uh polish the crankshaft and uh continue on from there I did get our parts kit in already today I'm kind of surprised that uh is easy to get parts for this as it was um but they had everything I needed in Denver with the exception of uh I think it was the timing set had to come from Oklahoma City and the um rod bearings came out of uh believe it was Albuquerque but uh we'll keep going maybe get this finished up this week so it was just rare enough that with all the shortages of Parts nobody has ordered these parts I think that's I think that's exactly what it was is it's just rare enough that not maybe rare isn't the right word but uncommon yeah just uncommon just old enough that there's probably a bunch of old inventory left on the Shelf yet that hasn't been used up because I'm guessing once some of that inventory is used up it probably will be obsolete Obsolete and harder to come by all right we'll move forward on some of the machine work here okay with the block set up in the sunen CV 616 cylinder hone the hope is that we can just refresh the surface of the cylinder walls without removing so much material that our piss into wall clearance is excessive however after just a few Strokes in the hone these cylinders might have more wear than initially meets the eyes what do you see get some really weird wear in a situation like this it'll come down to a judgment call of desired end quality balanced with an increase in labor and parts cost before making that call we decided to see if more cylinders showed similar wear all three cylinders did show the funny wear and after more honing it was looking like the wear was more substantial than we initially believed and would require removing excessive material for standard Pistons after Consulting with the customer we opted to do the best job that we could and bore it for oversized Pistons I don't know want make of it it's kind of weird yeah so it's oil rain yeah cuz there's still Ridge down in the bottom so I'm getting ready to do this block here and I started looking at the surface on that and I don't know if you can see it here on camera or not but uh it looks quite rough to me Factory finish but it's just not very smooth on this block so I got out the gauge here and I thought it would run a a test here and see just how rough it is look at these numbers I'll let Nicholas explain what those all mean so we're just going to look at our a here and 117 means it's rough not really that surprising to see a rough finish on something manufactured 50 or 60 years ago but we'll go ahead and deck this side of the block before we do our boring and when it was done our machine left an RA of just under 30 the first oversized Pistons available for this block are 20,000 oversiz so we'll go ahead and bore the cylinders to within 3 or 4 thousand of that size before moving back over to the cylinder home if needed we'll also chamfer the top of the cylinders after boring in decking but in this case the factory chamfer was already pretty large on most cylinders our fixture locates off of the main tunnel of the block and the pan rail ensuring that the cylinders and deck surfaces come out true to the crank center line and 90° from each other each cylinder is centered up individually before boring and in this case with a light cut the spindle is running around 550 RPM with the cylinder board on the Second Bank we'll go ahead and switch back to the Milling head head for the machine to cut the deck surface we have a zero point set on the digital readout from the opposite Bank as a reference for the deck height and if we're lucky the deck will clean up with the engine ID numers still intact the first couple cuts only cleaned up towards the inside of the engine and when it was all said and done this bank had to go 1 and 1/2 th shorter than the opposite bank which is nothing to get excited about on a stock engine and the bonus is that the numbers were saved next step in the process is to finish out the cylinder in the cylinder hun I got the block finish owned here uh got my clearance where I want it to be and since you got this new uh what do you call this thing profometer profometer I couldn't say that word uh we've been checking our work here a little bit closer and and before we had had that we weren't really having a problem and just kind of guessing where the Finish was but now that we've got that we can actually check our finish and see if we can improve upon that and we have changed what we've been doing forever just a little bit since we got that uh but anyway I ran the test on this block here and found out that my Peaks are just about perfect where I want them to be but my valys are a little bit shallow I need to work a little bit harder and uh make sure my valleys are deep enough with the vitrified abrasives it's a little more difficult to get consistent results but yeah so your Peaks are really good I mean it'd be cool if we were under 10 but anything under 15 is I would say great your Valley's at 35 Maybe maybe would like to see him closer to 45 but 35 is just fine there's your little picture of it flat Peaks flat Peaks that's a good thing yeah so the block you can get cleaned up you got new Pistons we still need to do the heads my goal is tonight I want to have the short block together before I quit for the evening okay and then tomorrow we'll do the heads okay this engine does utilize pressfit Pistons so the old Pistons were pressed off of the connecting rods in the rod press and the new Pistons were installed by heating the small end of the rods in our goods and Rod torch which expands the small end or of the rod slightly allowing the PIN to slip into place before it cools and shrinks achieving the interference fit I think I have both of us thoroughly confused here but we've been going through this trying to figure this out uh this 220 25 Buick which in this case is a Jeep dauntless 225 Jeep B rights to that engine used it in their Jeeps uh it's based off of a Buick 340 but they chopped two cylinders off of it and made a V6 out of it and in doing so on the crankshaft here instead of each crank pin being 90° apart they change the spacing so each are 120 120° apart uh to make the full circle 360° but they put this crank in a 90° V6 block and in doing so that combination doesn't come out right to have six Pistons each come to top dead center to fire at exactly 120° apart so it's a little confusing here but had to go through this so I actually decided to draw up a little diagram because the way we explained it there on the bench didn't make a whole lot of sense and it was hard to imagine so what he was mentioning is that on an even fire V6 the cylinders would fire at every 120 degrees of crankshaft rotation but on an odd fire like this because of it being a 90° block basically the math doesn't math so what we have is our firing order 165 4 3 2 so we have cylinders 1 3 and 5 over here we have cylinders 2 4 and six over here this is Imagine looking at the looking at the engine from the front the red lines here represent the crankshaft journals here so we have the crank pin with cylinder 1 and two the crank pin with cylinder 5 and six and the crank pin with cylinder 3 and4 and these are equally spaced 120° apart from each other so let's just imagine that piston in cylinder 1 is at top dead center here it fires now we need to have Cylinder 6 fire because the firing order says it goes from 1 to six well the crank pin for Cylinder 6 is down here but we need it to be up here for it to Fire and you can see if it rotated 120° it's not going to be in line with top dead center on that cylinder yet so what it actually has to rotate is 100 50° between number one and number six firing okay so now Cylinder 6 is at top dead center here and it fires the next cylinder in the order is number five but we know it's over here and it needs to be over here because cylinder 5 is on this Bank of cylinders now we can see that's only 90° apart so this is where you get your odd fire from number one to number six the crankshaft had to rotate 150° from from number six to number five it only has to rotate 90° so now number five is at top dead center it can fire okay the next one we need is number four well number four is down here for it to be at top dead center it needs to be over here 150° so now number four is at top dead center number four cylinder can fire the next cylinder in the firing order is number three well number three needs to be on this of cylinders so it needs to rotate 90° to get number three at top dead center next cylinder in the firing order is number two so again that's going to be 120 + 30 is 150° so now number two crank pin is at top dead center on number two cylinder here and it can fire now we go back to the beginning with number one firing and again that means that number one has to go from being over here to being over here where number one cylinder is which is 90 degrees and with that the process starts over again so that's where you get your odd firing and that really messes with your mind here trying to figure that all out uh but that is what gives this engine a very distinct sound uh that all the Jeep guys anybody that's into these just think they're really cool because of the distinct sound this engine has and I always thought they sounded like a tractor engine but you pointed out that maybe that's why I like things too is because they sounded like one of my tractors it is confusing on these and the distributor is also set up uh so it fires six cylinders but they're not firing evenly so your distributor has to be set up to fire this same 90150 9150 pattern uh but it you can't you know on a V8 or an even fire engine you can stick the if you want to you can stick the distributor in and just move the wires around on the cap anywhere you want and you can make it run it may not be correct by the book but it'll run all the same it doesn't know the difference this motor knows the difference if you have that distributor off you're going to have this cylinder that's supposed to be firing at 150° the spark is going to happen at 90° either before or after mhm when it's supposed to be and it'll never run right and you got have a cam that and you've got to have a cam that's ground that way in 1977 it was I believe midy year they made the change and they offset these uh crank pins on the crankshaft so they could still use a 90° vtype block but with the pins offset and each rod on its own journal there they turned it into an even firing engine and I remember back probably in the early 80s I rebuilt one of these engines out of a uh I think it was an old's cutless and there was a mistake in the catalog listing the cam shaft and we ended up with I don't remember which way it was but either even firing or an odd firing cam in a block that needed the opposite and our customer puts this back in the car and this thing no matter what they do they can't get it to run right and you can mess with the distributor and turn it One Direction it would kind of run good and then you'd mess with it and turn it a little bit different and it would kind of run good again but you never could get it to where it ran correctly because it was either running correctly on probably three of the cylinders or you'd turn it the other way and it would run correct on the other three cylinders but never all six together so that was a warranty we got to do over and I've never forgotten yep on it all right all righty you want to polish this up yeah let me uh get the belt out polish it okay well I think Siri jacked my polishing footage but after getting the crank polished up and the block final cleaned we went through and installed all of the C bearings and freeze plugs before getting the main bearings lubed up and the crankshaft set into place I'm up to the point now I'm getting ready to put the Pistons and rods in one thing I want to do here is check the end gap on my rings I'm not anticipating any problem this is all stock parts everything should just go together way it is but we do want to check this so I'm going to take one of my top Rings my second ring and the Scraper on the oil ring and we're going to slip those in the cylinders here so there's the oil ring scraper there is the top ring and there is the second ring I can tell the difference on those two this is straight cast iron ring this here is a Molly ring and I'm going to take my piston and I'm going to shove those down in the cylinder just far enough to square them up so I can get a good measurement here and as far as in gap on the Rings um my specifications on this engine doesn't actually show what uh they're calling for but as a general rule engine like this uh just stock naturally aspirated 3 to 4 th000 per inch of boore is a real good place to be on in gap for a minimum reading so if we take our 3.77 board * 3,000 gives us 11 4,000 is 15 so somewhere between 11 and 15 is going to be our minimum uh if you are over that it is not a big deal I think people get really hung up on the end gap on rings and it's not as important on an engine like this as people would like to think it is minimum end Gap is important but once you have the minimum you could probably be up to 60,000 CM gap on this and you honestly are not going to see a difference in the amount of blowby or the way this engine runs but anyway I have had these in here prior and uh I don't know if can see on the camera there but there's my end Gap and there's an 18,000 sper gauge uh just just goes in that Gap and same way on the second ring here seems like they both came out and that was a little bit snug but yeah there's there's 18,000 in there and then if we look at the oil ring Gap here I'm not even going to measure that it has significant Gap and it is even less important on the oel ring than it is the compression Rings because you have two scrapers pulling the oil off the cylinder wall uh that will be fine so we've got minimum 18 or we've got 18 here which is a little bit more than our minimum so we should be good to go on that okay so I'm getting ready to put my piston rings on the Pistons here and this again is one of those areas that everybody has a different opinion on which way the ring should go on I don't know how many am are right or wrong I think the biggest thing is that when you get your rings on you get them in the correct Groove you get them correct orientation as far as up and down on rings you stagger the gaps on the Rings and you make sure that the rails on the oil ring are staggered from each other I think that's going to be the biggest thing but some of the information I've seen lately they talk about wanting the Gap in the top ring on the right hand side of the engine so I'm going to take my Pistons I'm going to make a little dot here on what would be the right hand side just so it makes it easier for me to keep track of where I want everything to be and I'm going to start with this piston here doesn't matter which one you start with just as long as you get the job done and I'm going to put my uh expander for the oil ring in uh with The Gap I'm going to put it on the uh left hand side the oil rails don't try to use a ring expander on them you'll have to actually spiral them into place and I want those to end up opposite of where my Gap in the expander is so I just going to spiral that one in that way I'm going to spiral this one in this way so I end up with the Gap in my expander over here and the gaps in my rail opposite from each other on the opposite side of the Piston but none of this lined up together then I can take my second ring I look for the dot that needs to go up and you can either put them on by hand and I'm going to put the gap on it to the left side of the engine or if you have an ring expander you can use that my top ring here has no markings of any kind it can be put on uh either position won't make any difference and I'll do this one with the expander and turn the Gap around over here to line up on right hand side of my engine so I've got a gap here second ring Gap over here Oil ring reil gaps are on this side and again I want to emphasize there you need to spiral the oil ring rails onto the Piston but never try to spiral a compression ring on because if you don't break it at the very least you will put a twist into it and uh pretty much destroy the ring they just need to be expanded down on the Piston okay so we're ready to put the uh pistons and rods into the block now I have taken my rod bearing inserts and I've put all those into the rod caps I've got them in the rods and we need to put a little lubrication little assembly Lube on things here to get started what I usually do is this put a little band of uh assembly Lube on the rod bearings like this and then over here on the Block I like to put a uh band of assembly Lube inside the cylinder there's different schools of thought on right or wrong way to lubricate your piston and rings when you get ready to put an engine together what has always worked for me or what we have come to use over the years is I just wipe a band of assembly Lube like that into all the cylinders kind up at the top and that way when you shove the piston in it will scrape that oil that assembly Lube down the cylinder wall coating the cylinder wall just like what that wall is coated with oil when the engine is running I don't put any you know I've seen people dip their pistons and rings in oil I don't like doing that because all of that oil that gets in behind the uh rings when you do that will just cook into that top ring Grove and start sticking your brand new Rings right off the bat I don't feel like they need that much lubrication so I'm going to put some bolt boots on the rod here protect the crankshaft when I shove that in I need my rubber Hammer over here and I need my ring compressor so once again our rings are still lined up nice like what they were when we put them on I've got number one piston number one cylinder put my ring compressor on there if I can get it over the Rings squeeze them down see I need to make sure the crankshaft is turned so the pin is down okay I'm not going to force it doesn't like that ring compressor let me go get a different one okay one thing you never ever do is force your rings in they'll either piston and rings will slip right in or they won't and if they won't you need to figure out a different compressor let's see what this one does for us no better there we are and I'll go ahead and reach around the back side here okay pull my bolt boots off I'll put a little bit of Lube on the bolts and the rod Journal flip my cap on couple of nuts another thing I like to do is Bump the Caps front to back kind of just like we did the crankshaft sometimes helps to align the Caps a little bit of course you got to do that while while they're just barely snug you can't do that after they're tight [Music] okay feels like it turns nice I want to look for some side play here I do have side play this is a good check if you can't get any side play out of those rods they are either too tight or you can also sometimes find find a uh bent Rod that way if you have one that you haven't checked the rods for straightness and you get to this point and you can't get any side play pull that cap back off look at the bearing and it'll be wiped on two opposite sides showing you that you have a rod that's bent and it's pulling it sideways in there but with that I think we've got a short block together as far as I'm going to go for this customer next we moved on to the cylinder heads and despite being a fairly low mileage motor the valve guides had a fair amount of wear so the heads were drilled to have new guides driven in the tops of the valve guides were machined to have positive valve stem seals installed and the ID of the guides were honed to achieve the proper valve stem clearance next the counter boards were cut and hard SBI exhaust seats were driven into place finally we moved over to the CI where both the intake and exhaust seats were cut for a three angle valve job at that point the heads were each resurfaced and went through a final wash and reassembly our little 225 Buick nless engine here we thought we was going to get to just rring it and not have to do quite as much on it but after we run the hone through the cylinders it showed up a lot more imperfections in there than we wanted to leave so anyway everything's been cleaned magn flux checked out we polished the crankshaft it will be standard size uh we put we board the block uh 20 over finished the cylinders there put in new Pistons Molly Rings uh reused the original connecting rods with new rod bearing standard size we have a new cam shaft in here with new cam bearings uh went through the heads quite extensively all all new valves all new guides we put the hard exhaust seats in so it'll stand up to unlet gas cuz this engine was built before uh unleaded gas was the norm uh new valves guides we put positive valve stem seals on it these originally do not have any valve stem seal at all uh so we did cut the guides down put a positive seal on should hold up a lot better these heads have the uh holes drilled in had a small pump pump air into the exhaust there and yeah it's got fuzzies on it too anyway whoever removed that from it probably years ago just screwed some uh 1/ in bolts in there to plug the holes so I did take those out when we did the heads took the little nozzle out so it's not restricting the flow and then put some Ellen head uh set screws in there to close the hole back up looks a little more professional than just six random cap screws sticking out of the heads there uh so anyway this is the point our customer wanted to take it to uh we did clean up quite a bit of the other parts covers pans manifold everything for him but he's going to take over from here finish assembling it and put it in his Jeep and get it running so anyway another job done all right quick little build on it yeah

Channel: Jim's Automotive Machine Shop, Inc.

Views: 191,406

Keywords: 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, jeep, buick, dauntless, dauntless v6, odd fire v6

Id: XFWAe3yOfV0

Length: 35min 21sec (2121 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 15 2023