Tomble's adorable go cart / distraction / Alto Works

[tomble]

Fiiiine

Doug's happy 4x4 key arrived before the weekend, fortunately.

 

We put it somewhere safe until it was time to crack back into things.

 

It is indeed 4x4mm on the dot and has a fair bit of length for me to play with. I gave it a quick test when i got it to see how it fit, and it seems to be as people on the interwebs describe it should be - firm, but no need to tap it in, and no play.

 

I tidied up one end, cut it to length and tidied the other.

 

Fits gud! This let us complete the timing chain, but not before a bunch of thinking to make sure that the chain links were 100% where they should be. I'd rotated the crank twice with the plastic key when verifying everything, so the chain marks had moved on. Nothing some link counting doesn't solve!

 

The oil pump/chain case goes on next. The bolts were a bit manky so I tidied them up,

 

We schmooe'd the edges and this one little bolt hole in the middle,

 

Girlface lubed up,

 

Then we increased how much the engine looks like an engine by at least 15%.

This also completed the water pump job, as the final bolt goes through to the block.

 

The next morning it was time to tackle the crank pulley. I cracked out some iron and some old bolts to hand-fashion a special tool to hold the crank in place.

 

At about 30 degrees (out of the 70 desired) it was clear that this wasn't quite enough.

 

It's times like these I wish I had a welder, and the knowledge to use it. But I don't so... I hammered it back to straight, tapped it into the pulley for extra seating, notched the bar (weakening it further but what can you do) to allow the socket to still fit and then found an old socket to sit on one of the bolts to provide some rigidity against the other side of the bar.

It barely worked, but it worked.

 

Nextly is the cover, with a nice shiny new gasket and two tiny blobs of permatex where the oil case cover meets the head.

While I was at it I spent some time removing that shitty aluminium tape on the cover, and some copper tape on the oil cap - both still present in the picture below.

I don't know what it was for.

I think the previous owner was genuinely mad.

 

Then, since I don't like open holes, I cracked out the new spark plugs I'd been procrastinating installing back when I got the car.

 

 

The gap spec is 0.7-0.8mm. They were pretty good out of the box, but some very light taps (mild drops, really) on the anvil got them all a little better.

I put them in and followed up with cleaned and dialectric greased coils.

 

The oil pressure switch called for a certain torque that I couldn't provide, thanks to its 24mm socket size and my lack of anything deep enough for that. So girlface and I cracked out the maths to figure out how to torque it using a socket wrench attached to a torque wrench.

One of the scary things here is that it doesn't seat all the way into the block, there are exposed threads, so if you were a visual person you'd just send it and break something. Really glad I held back.

Then we came back and swapped torque wrenches post-maths. 

It was at spec already. Calling it good ...  

 

Things started getting on so kind of skipped a few photos.

- Got the water pump pulley on.

- Alternator's in there too baybee

- Mulled over why there's an empty hole in the case that doesn't seem to have a purpose. Decided it was always empty.

- Got the idler pulley and tensioner on and situated, ready for belt.

- Wondered why we never ordered a new belt.

[tomble]

I was thinking "oh I'll just finish X then get a post up" and that happened a few times so I guess I should stop and do a dump.

And what a dump!

Where last we left off I threw up a bullet point list and left it at that, so here's a follow-up pic barrage for that. I believe we're just after what engine reconditioners call a long block?

A long block with a nice un-aluminium-taped surface.

Little strips of copper and aluminium tape are EVERYWHERE. In the strangest places - on the insides of the intake funnel, underneath the steering wheel, covering the holes in the bonnet, some absolutely random spots like one corner of the windscreen and the top of the oil cap. Truly the last owner was absolutely mad.

The engine internals were mostly closed in. I rectified that by putting the new oil pick up on with a nice new lubed o-ring, off-brand threebond and the nice and cleaned sump and wire-brushed bolts.

If we were a long block before, I guess this is extra-long?

 

Then Girlface swung by and we took the engine off the stand as it was just getting in the way now.

We got the flywheel sorted out with a pry bar, four arms and three legs.

Brake cleaner was once again misused as a non-brake cleaning product to thoroughly clean the clutch and flywheel surfaces before we got it installed with the special tool. This is the one place that the manual's machine translation kind of suffered - it did a piss-poor job of communicating how it wanted the bolt sequence done - but we figured it out. The printed tool worked a treat!

 

And ya know, can't really leave it there before you go inside can you

 

The next day I further accessorised with the new thermostat and its housing and returning the water temp sensor. 

Followed up by intake manifold - but not before separating the throttle body to install its new gasket. I also gently cleaned the TB with brake cleaner, about 50x more filth came out of it than it looks like it contains in the pic.

 

One thing I tried to keep on top of was understanding where things went. Various bolts, pipes and other widgets are safely grouped on various garage surfaces and knowing where something goes ahead of time lets me avoid doing shit out-of-order and having to undo work, and gives me the confidence that I'm not going to be left short a bolt. So when stuff like the breather plate has a big ol' hole in it, I get antsy until I know what goes in there. Fortunately, my paranoia has served me well so far.

 

The injectors never left the rail so no need for new o-rings there, but we didn't think to order new o-rings for the business end. They seem okay and they're easy to access so I'm OK re-using them. I made sure to give them a quick clean before putting the rail on (bottom injector cleaned here).

 

I had left a coolant pipe attached to the oil cover because it gave too much resistance to being removed. I was going to leave it there, but after figuring out that the final item in my gasket kit was a new o-ring for it, we decided to just apply lube, pucker up and start jerking. Fortunately it got off after a few hard tugs and we were able to apply the new rubber. The old one was quite flat, so glad we did that.

 

Loom time. When we removed the engine it was a pretty mad dash to do so, and we didn't have the manual. If we did, we'd have known we could have left the whole loom intact on the car and just disconnected it at the battery and fuse box.  This hurt because the connectors on the back of the engine in particular are a total bitch to access and unclip, especially without damaging the clips. So, unfortunately a few of them suffered.

What extra-sucks is that despite ordering a ton of cable clips from aliexpress of various types, not a single one of them is suitable for any of the clips :|. Josh taught me how to re-use clips that had been sliced through the cable, so I got them set up for the most important two broken clips, threw a naked zip tie on the second most important clip, and have left the rest for a later order of fresh new clips - they're reasonably accessible.

I got left short a bolt. There was a bolt left for the knock sensor, but it only engaged by about 1-2 threads, so clearly not quite the right one. No idea where the real one went, but I had to get a new bolt from the stash. Maybe it ran away with the shaft key. Hopefully this is the only time that'll happen... 

 

Anyway, we've run out of things the engine needs before it goes on the car. Loom is on, turbo's going on after the engine goes in because it fought us too much on the way out, the extra intake stuff on the top will just get in the way. It was due to rain off and on over the weekend which is kind of a pain if you need to use the garage for something that isn't Starion work thanks to the Starion being not exactly weatherproof but... fuck it, it'll survive a little weather under a cover.

On Sunday morning I cracked open the garage, tetris'd stuff around, threw the steering column back in the starion and made way for progress.

First niggle: now that the loom was on the engine and not the car, there was no way of unlocking the steering (push-button ignition). We solved that by applying a lot of force to a tiny jack on a very weathered concrete driveway... :X ... but eventually we got it situated. An alternative would have been to dig around the steering column but easier mental path.

I procrastinated a little by noticing a bunch of rust on the wiper stalks, fixed with a careful wire wheel and light coating of grease.

Kelv came over to help and the three of us got stuck in. I always forget to take pics when there's company so... sorry from here on out lol. I remembered I hadn't done shit until the final engine mount was in place. The first two required some manoeuvring to situate, and at least one bolt was swapped with another, but honestly wasn't a struggle.

 

We had a car with an engine in it: day's goal complete!

With that done, we could now push the car out of the garage and tinker with it from the driveway or something. No need to wait for a sunny day and mess around with car locations. Everything is unlocked.

 

A secondary goal of the day was to get the drive shafts in. Because existing neural pathways are preferable to forming new ones, I wanted to just wrangle them in as we nestled the engine into the bay. It didn't look promising.

But with Kelv and his experienced brain with us, we instead decided to take the wheel route. I'd resisted this just because I hadn't put any thought into how the suspension on this car is configured and didn't want to crack into that with all the other shit floating around my head, and also because of the chance of it needing a re-alignment. But with Kelv leading the charge we managed to break the lower control arms free and bend the hubs just enough to be able to squeeze some shafts into some holes.

It ended up being really easy, to the point that we were actually going at it so hard we didn't even realise the ball joints were separated right when we first started wailing on them, and we were just about to get creative. No alignment needed fortunately!

Secondary goal of the day complete! It's all extra credit from here. Aww yiss.

 

Whilst Kelv and Girlface noodled with torque specs and radiator hoses (we replaced the two main hoses because... well, because),

I rushed to the bench to complete the turbo stuff I was meant to have done already. There's a set of gaskets and whatnot to fix up, and two crush washers need seeing to on the oil feed banjo fitting. Those old chestnuts...

 

Whilst doing this, Kelv sorted installing the belt and idler. The belt feels a little tired and there's a nick in one of the grooves, so I've ordered a new one. We decided that the old belt will do in the meantime. Based on Kelv's swearing and grunting, the new belt will be a PITA to install. He also went off and brought his poorly Alto over to serve as a reference for niggly bits like earthing cables and 1-way check valves. What a tiny-ass country.

After cleaning a silly amount of gunk off the turbo, flushing the turbo oil lines with brake cleaner then following that up with fresh oil and assembling its various components with gaskets into one turbo unit, it was time to put it on the car. It was very tight, and the oil line had to come back off to clear the A/C compressor, but we got it on.

And then we went to connect the oil line. 

No matter what angle we took, how we bent or held things, the banjo bolt absolutely refused to grab threads. It was happy to do so without the line around it, so it wasn't fucked or anything, it's just that the angle of the banjo fitting needed to be 100.0000% for it to even think about being seated. Access was pretty poor with lots of crap around the seating site. We undid the block end of the line and that let us get the turbo end on, but then the block end was fucked, and it was even harder to access.

The A/C compressor was in the way, and the A/C compressor is part of the belt system, which Kelv had already sorted.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued but we took the belt and compressor back off and with further effort were able to sort both of the banjo fittings out. They were proper bitches even with clean clear access, so I'm glad we didn't just suffer needlessly. Also Kelv put the belt back on so really, I didn't experience much personal additional suffering.

While that was getting wrangled, Kelv and Girlface got various bits of bracketry connected, hoses connected, ABS lines refitted, ECUs plugged in...

 

It was around here we were like... "wanna get it started tonight?"

Fuck yeah we do.

We sorted out the clutch line - it's a bit loose, so we'll need to mess with it a bit more, but on the plus side there's a solid bushing (Kelv has pointed out a lot of things that are aftermarket that totally sailed by me). Apparently that was a common upgrade for the clutch that I was probably going to look at down the line for myself anyway, so nice to know it had already been done lol.

Girlface sorted the cat and exhaust. "It was really easy". Kelv didn't manage to exit this pic.

We filled the transmission with nice fresh gear oil and two new shiny plugs.

The engine was filled with mineral oil to the most perfect mark on the dipstick I've ever seen. 

We double-checked all the coolant pipes, vac hoses, fuel pipes, plugs, sensors and whatnot. 

We ran the starter without injectors and coils for a while, which really made the battery quite sad, in order to circulate oil and build some pressure. It was looking a bit dire as the light stayed illuminated but just as the starter was really starting to lurch unhappily the light went off, indicating that pressure was okay <3

And seven hours into the job, what else is there left to do, but...

 

What a fucking rush.

It sounds good. The revs are all over the place because of the lack of piping but there are no leaks (that we can see), no weird noises, it's got oil pressure, and the knocking that the car always has is completely gone. We just have a (sort of) new engine now! All the bits that matter anyway. 126,671 KM -> 0 KM.

And Kelv's standing there congratulating us and our efforts, "you've just rebuilt an engine!" It's obvious he would have been chuffed at getting it running that evening, but I could just see that he probably was getting even more out of just seeing how happy and excited we were to have achieved this. This second-hand enjoyment of our chuffedness is what really separates blokes like him from the unwashed masses. I got a lot of third-hand enjoyment out of that lol.

Thank you @kws, we'd never have achieved what we did that night without you, and that manual you helped organise has saved a lot of headaches and added a lot of confidence in our work.

We threw the bonnet back on and zhuzhed the drive shaft nuts up to log(n) ugga-duggas in the absence of a sufficient torque wrench / brakes (we'll sort all that out later), swapped the two cars around just as it started spitting, bid each other good night and went to get inebriated and watch the eurovision finals.

Pretty good weekend, in all.

[tomble]

Monday. 

I had a little bit of time after work and before dinner to get some stuff done. I raced out to Supercheap and grabbed some demon water and set our poor little beastie up to get at least some light and tool access.

I wanted to take it easy that day, so just put the master cylinder back without attempting to bleed anything just yet (Kelv later looked at it and realised there's plenty room to access the belt with it there so it probably could have gone on earlier). The hosiery followed. I could remove the zip tied heat shields but... meh, some other time maybe, they're actually possibly slightly functional for the time being. Besides, priorities...!

I also got her started with some demon water - again, no real intent to bleed the full system of air just yet, just getting things started.

The strut brace and ECU found their forever homes, 

And then the cat heat shield was pretty much the last engine-related thing to go on the car. Let me tell you, it was a proper biatch to get in there.

For extra points - and because priorities, right? - I took the opportunity to properly clean up the wiper cowling of its waxiness with some isopropyl, a magic eraser type sponge thing (fuck me that was some effort, don't wax trim people) and then zhuzhed with some Meguiar's ultimate protectant trim restorer. We'll see how long that lasts.

Before packing it in for the night we also wanted to give it a cheeky start now that everything was on the car. Theoretically all the sensors and air and whatnot should be totally happy.

They were 

 

Tuesday.

@kws was coming over again with the goal of getting our first post-rebuild drive in and breaking the engine in. He had a vacuum brake bleeder and a chunkier torque wrench that we needed for the hub nuts, and of course his desirable presence.

First I did the car tetris thing and got the alto up ready for some brake bleeding before I got stuck in to tinkering. This shot is after I'd reinstalled the bumper mounts/braces and torqued up the bonnet latch.

The first real tinkering to be done is to get the clutch happy - it's a light clutch, but it's too light now, the pedal is super soft and doesn't really have much resistance until it's nearly on the floor.

The manual states that resistance should come at about 10-20mm. Uh... so I guess 45mm is too much?

The adjustment procedure is to tighten or loosen the I was about to get measurey but I noticed there was some easy slack, so I started by just winding it in until the slack disappeared.

This brought it perfectly in spec, so I did up the jam nuts to lock it in.

The other day while taking the bonnet off I lost a bolt, it fell down into a cavity over the wheel well and no amount of poking around with a magnet could find it. Kelv suggested running a hose down there to see where the water ends up (and hopefully flush the bolt out if it's just sitting somewhere high). It didn't come out, and the water ran out the sill far from where I could get at it with the magnet, so I just left it for the time being.

But I had a brainwave now that it was in the garage, what if bounced along the wheel liner and into the sill? There were only four clips left holding it in so I wrangled it off.

Of course there's more random padding... in the bin.

And the possible remains of a bird. But there's also my bolt . So now the bonnet has four bolts. Still needs adjusting but it's secure.

Not pictured: the extreme grot all around and inside the bonnet latch. It got an absolute shitload of brake cleaner, brush and paper towelling followed by some WD40 to get things less grease+road dirt sounding when actuated. We reckon the insane previous owner must have just kept throwing grease at it for some reason, because nothing else was even a fraction as dirty.

 

After everyone had had a feed Kelv popped over. We cracked straight into bleeding the brakes. It was really easy with the vacuum bleeder, especially for me. I just held a funnel and then changed roles to pedal-presser to finish it off manually.

Then we 175 Nano mangled the hub nuts with Kelv's calibrated rod and punched the retainer into place.

 

Girlface got the lights and bumper on in the mean time.

With the bonnet bolt found, we could put the cowl back into its forever home (sans a few broken clips :\) and install the wipers. We nailed the position first try.

Some final clips to install, then the wheels go back on.

The actual last of the engine bay bits go back in... including our previous "zip tie the rattly intercooler duct" fix because the clips are too large...

 

And now we're all prepared for the main event.

To break in the engine we took an amalgamation of the internet's collective wisdom and took the core of what everyone suggested, discarding the outliers:

1. get it up to temp, make sure the cooling system is fully bled of air (no proper coolant or additives yet because the steel head gasket doesn't like it)
2. while getting up to temp, constantly change the rev's to give it the best chance of avoiding premature ring bs
3. take it out for a spin, avoiding boost or high revs, constantly changing between gears and engine braking to provide different levels of RPM and vacuum to ensure the rings are correctly moved in and out of position as they grind against the bore walls
4. also avoiding boost  

Step one took fucking ages. Everything got warm but the thermostat just refused to open / fan refused to turn on.

The engine cooked off some wisps of oil from where we inevitably sloshed it on components, especially the turbo, but nothing major and it sorted itself out pretty quick.

After a handful of antsy minutes we were about to give up and just proceed anyway. Just after I turned the car off, Kelv felt the pipe start to get warm. I turned the car back on and a split second later the fan turned on and the thermo was open lol. We turned her off, waited for the bubbling to cease then zipped her up.

There was one minor scare where a dribble of oil had appeared on the floor under the engine. Crawling under the bumper, the sump plug had a thicc drip ready to separate from it ... :X 

It turns out that while we'd made sure that the sump plug was in, we'd never made sure it was tight. Oops. Another quarter turn and a paper towel sorted that drama out, really glad we caught that!!!

 

Anyway enough dilly dallying... off we go...

It was a blast. I struggled a little with the clutch at times, it's extremely light and a stark difference from the MX5, first in this car is super touchy with either not enough or too many beans, and I was never amazing at clutch control anyway.

I struggled much more with staying off the turbo. Fuck me it's so easy and every fibre of my being wanted to just absolutely send her. Almost every acceleration event was met with a "boost!" from the passenger seat, the back seat, or both.

At one point we decided to merge onto SH2 to make a loop. It's only a 70km section, but I'd forgotten it was up a hill. Fortunately, and I've never seen this before, but a Tractor just happened to be noodling its way towards the intersection with a long tail of cars behind it, providing the perfect merge window.

Of course since it's me and it was a hill start, there was a mild burnout. There was also a lot of turbo admonishment. And here I am, trying to baby her up to 70km/h, sweating as I see a literal fucking tractor gaining on me in the rear view mirror. We stuck to the 50km streets after that.

The brakes work perfectly and the ABS seems happy. The driving position is on fleek. Fuck I love this car.

30 minutes and 20 kilometres later we rolled back into the garage, with a nice little exhaust graze as we mount our stupid driveway.

 

The engine oil is now littered with ring glitter, assembly lube and whatever else, so we have to get rid of that. Feels odd to do an oil change after only 20km.

The engine was bone dry pretty much everywhere. There were a few lashings of oil under the turbo and the A/C pump which was totally expected - we really did slosh it around getting that thing on the car - and some legacy moistness on the subframe because it hadn't been cleaned. Nothing that caused concern. There were no dribbles around any of the sealed surfaces with the exception of the A/C pump's corner of the block, which again, was explainable. 

The oil looked good, the colour had definitely changed but no water or anything.

Girlface helped.

The glitter wasn't immediately obvious, even with a magnet, until we emptied the pan back into the empty oil container.

 

We did one last stock take at what was left and... well, there isn't anything notable, really. The two edge pieces of the cowl need to go in but I'm going to zhuzh them up first. The bonnet needs to be fettled a bit to fit quite right. Gotta address the squeaky belt or just live with it until the new belt arrives.

Our bolt supply was almost perfect. 

The knock sensor bolt had clearly been used somewhere a shorter bolt should have been, so after using a bolt from my stash to replace it, having one bolt left over made sense. 

We also mangled a few clips; I'll need to order a bunch.

We did lose a bolt however, which was one of the final bolts for the ECU mount. Once again, the stash comes in handy. I suspect this bolt is sitting somewhere in an otherwise empty bolt hole somewhere on the body, screwed in after-the-fact when i was trying to find homes for things.

 

Victory pose with bonnet not latched because we're fucking photographers

 

Wednesday morning

We left cardboard under the car overnight. Girlface reports no undue moistness, so she got her first 'normal' drive post-rebuild.

 

Girlface also thought up the perfect name for her, based on a quip she made last night in the garage. We bought a lemon, but instead of getting sad and throwing our toys, we made lemonade. 

So, her name is now Lemonade. Lemmy for short I guess.

It's a real shame that there's no yellow on the car... a real shame...

 

Anyway, we now have about 100km of easy driving, and 500km of no-dropping-the-clutch ahead of us. It'll be over before we know it, I'm sure.

[shrike]

Im assuming you did fresh oil and filter when you dropped the first load of oil? (again not wanting to tell you to suck eggs)

Lots of different views as you said on how to break an engine in

Did you hand crank the engine over a few times when you had put it all back together?

Great work

Typically if I don't want to see boost I just pull the rod off the wastegate actuator on the turbo so it doesn't stay closed as the flap will open without that resistance (or pull the spring out if its external)

In saying that, only if its something you can access easily

[tomble]

31 minutes ago, shrike said:

Im assuming you did fresh oil and filter when you dropped the first load of oil? (again not wanting to tell you to suck eggs)

Did you hand crank the engine over a few times when you had put it all back together?

No worries at all, I welcome feedback and questions and double checkings.

Yeah, fresh mineral oil and filter for the break in, then fresh mineral oil and filter after the 20km. We'll go back to the regular stuff after 200km.

We turned it "a few times" on the stand by hand just as a part of assembling and validating, then built oil pressure once it was all back together via the starter (spark and fuel unplugged).

31 minutes ago, shrike said:

Typically if I don't want to see boost I just pull the rod off the wastegate actuator on the turbo so it doesn't stay closed as the flap will open without that resistance (or pull the spring out if its external)

In saying that, only if its something you can access easily

Great idea with the boost. We did have good access to it. That'll be useful knowledge for the starion

[cletus]

Well done! 

Pretty cool that you and your partner just got stuck in and did it. 

 

Not sure what the story is with that sticky stuff but it's quite common on imports , had this in yesterday 

 

 

[kws]

oh god, old mate moved onto a Mazda after the Alto