I got the engine out of the car without too much trouble. It takes a while to get all the parts off the engine before I can actually get the engine out of the car. In total it took about 2.5 hours (maybe 3). I had a bit of time between start a finish due to the rain. It rained for almost 2 days straight here in AZ.
Anyways, I got it out today and started taking the engine apart from there. Here are a couple pictures of the engine before things start getting taken off once it was out of the car.
I started with the clutch because I had read that the sound I was hearing could be the flywheel coming loose so I pulled the clutch to check the gland nut there.
But it wasn’t that.
So, then it was time to take the cylinder heads off and check that area. Well, there was certainly an issue there. The cylinder head on the left is good, the one on the right is bad. You can see that the head has damage to it, and it is quite bad. There were chunks of metal embedded in the cylinder head (not good).
Then I looked at the pistons (in the cylinders). Again, left a good one, the two others bad. You can see the pistons have damage as well and there is “stuff” in the cylinder.
Then I had to figure out what had happened. Called my dad and he said that something clearly got into the cylinders from somewhere. Since the pistons were intact that means it wasn’t from inside the case (thankfully), but where then? Did a carburetor break and drop something down in it? Did an intake manifold casting come apart and drop something in? Did a valve guide come apart?
Upon further inspection… I looked at the intake manifolds and they seemed fine, as did the carburetor. Then I decided to see if I could identify anything with a valve guide without taking the valves apart, and low and behold… I saw that a valve guide had clearly come apart. As you can see in the picture below there is supposed to be brass all around, but clearly there is a section where there is no brass valve guide (on the left hole you can see a silver section (that is the valve) and partial brass around it (that is the guide that is supposed to be all the way around).
So, there was the problem. Good news and bad news. It doesn’t seem to be a rod bearing so I am not going to have to split the case (thank the Lord). But I am pretty sure I can’t have the cylinder heads worked on and used again so I will have to buy new cylinder heads (that sucks). I will also have to replace pistons and cylinders, but that is a relatively easy thing to do.
I will also have to replace all the gaskets around the engine as well, but again nothing too bad. So, it could have been much worse than it is, but it is still not a cheap fix. I will start looking into parts after Christmas sometime, and hopefully be able to get things back up and running by the end of January.