fuel's 'oh god what have I done now' GT-Slow

[mjrstar]

I had the balancer part company on my mivec diamante, fortunately all it left me with was no electricity..

[fuel]

1 minute ago, mjrstar said:

I had the balancer part company on my mivec diamante, fortunately all it left me with was no electricity..

sucks that the 30M Diamante is prone to the same issue too, as one of my spare balancers is from my 30M engine which is more or less the same apart from the timing mark being in a different spot. I have another spare that is supposedly good that I will use temporarily until a new one turns up - I've painted some marks on it so I can easily see if it's starting to separate and allow the outer ring to shift like on my original balancer. 

[shrike]

@fuel how long you in Melbourne for and what part? 

Keen to grab a beer?

[fuel]

4 hours ago, shrike said:

@fuel how long you in Melbourne for and what part? 

Keen to grab a beer?

Am in Niddrie (near Essendon) but only here til the 27th and kinda jam packed with family shit so far. Where are you in Melbs?

[shrike]

10 hours ago, fuel said:

Am in Niddrie (near Essendon) but only here til the 27th and kinda jam packed with family shit so far. Where are you in Melbs?

All good no pressure, I'm currently in Frankston at the inlaws but I'm based out of Werribee

[lowlancer]

20 hours ago, fuel said:

Already have a head gasket set and new valves delivered to me while I'm in Melbourne for the Xmas holidays and will piece it back together when I'm back. A few weeks back I fitted some RS-R 'Down' springs I ordered from Japan a while ago, as well as refitting the missing fog lamps and bumper grills.

Not slammed but definitely better than the sky high look it was before, and the ride is much firmer too. 

 

Man these look great with some subtle upgrades.

While not 6G levels of punishment, I ran a facelift Legum VR4 a few years ago. No surprises the spark plugs on the rear bank were ancient.

[fuel]

Slowly plugging away at this - cleaned up the block deck surfaces and fitted new water pump, crank oil seal, tensioner & idler

 

Some of the new parts ready to go - am still waiting on the lower timing cover to arrive from Japan. Amayama are doing their best to ghost me with no updates despite an another order placed after the timing cover order arrived already.

[fuel]

Cylinder heads cleaned up, bent valves removed and new valves fitted. My first time lapping valves so I was worried it wasn't going to work out. But eventually sped up the process by fitting the valve lapping tool into a drill at low speed. I did one pass with coarse paste followed up by a fine paste and the end result was valve to seat contact patches all within spec. Phew.

 

And they seemed to hold fluid just fine

 

I guess the real test is when they're back on the engine and running. Am getting half way there though

[fuel]

Now featuring both heads.

 

I accidentally dropped the 10mm hex part of the tool to tighten up the head bolts into the rear cylinder head, which conveniently found its way through the perfectly sized oil drain hole down to the sump. D'oh. Magnetic tool wouldn't pick it up, so off came the sump.

The sump has been off before at some point, so will be a bit happier about cleaning up the excess sealant and resealing it properly, not that it seemed to be leaking before. I did find four of the rocker arm needle bearings which is good, but brings the total of needle bearings found up to 40 now. Three rocker arms were destroyed letting their needle bearings escape, and the small issue is that 40 doesn't divide by three cleanly so there must be another two needle bearings floating around somewhere. The good news is they are larger than the sump pickup mesh strainer, so I'm not too concerned about them being ingested into the oil filter. The oil did seem free from metallic sparkle which is reassuring, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother dropping a big end or the mains girdle to check bearing condition or not.

Belt on and all timed up - somehow got it bang on first try which was nice - usually with these quad cam V6's I have to attempt at least two or three times to get it good. Not too much left to do before it's running now.

[fuel]

So kinda forgot to update this before I left NZ end of Jan.

Shortly after the last post I slapped the cleaned out sump back on, filled with oil and fired it up with the covers and ancillary belts still off so I could inspect everything:

 

The tapping noise is just a hydraulic lash adjuster because I was too lazy to individually bleed all 24 of them before reassembling the cylinder heads. The noise went away after a few minutes of idling once warmed up.

I did have an issue with the timing belt auto tensioner however - and I'm not sure if it was part due to being a crappy $20 china part from Rockauto or installation error on my part. I do want to preface this and say while I myself have never experienced an auto tensioner failure up until this point with any of my Mitsu engines (be it 4G63's or 6G72's), plenty of folk mainly in the US where the 3000GT is a bit more popular have had issues with the auto tensioners failing taking out the timing. I wanted to somewhat mitigate the possibility of a timing belt auto tensioner failing by inserting a small plastic puck you can buy from Volvo on the tensioner rod which in theory would prevent the arm from slackening off fully if the tensioner rod were to retract fully. However what ended up happening was the tensioner arm fully rested up against the puck at all times causing the tension on the belt to be a bit on the tight side. I slackened off the tensioner just a little bit however this had the effect of the rod extending a little further and the auto tensioner no longer seemed to be doing any tensioning at all, as seen here:

 

[fuel]

With just two days to go before I had to leave NZ to head back to Canada, I was able to shoot over to Rotorua from Taumarunui where a BNT had a reputable Dayco branded auto tensioner on the shelf on clearance. I was headed to Taupo on that day to see family for lunch so the extra 2 hour round trip from Taupo wasn't too bad at all. 

 

I slapped it back together cleaning up the damaged lower timing cover because the brand new replacement from Amayama that should have arrived mid-Jan was nowhere to be seen.

 

And as luck would have it, just three days after I left this turned up on the front doorstep