Ever had a project that just kept expanding and seemed to have taken on a life of its own? My project not only has done that, but it has also spawned its own offspring. So far most of the daughter projects haven't reproduced much.
Back in October I agreed to remove my exhaust header from my '75 BMW 2002 so a friend who built a custom turbo manifold for his E30 318 could test fit his manifold on my car for fitment. He posted his project in some forum or another (E30tech I think) and someone from the west coast asked if he would make another header and if it would fit a 2002. To remove the exhaust manifold there are 8 nuts that need to be removed from the head studs and three nuts where the manifold connects to the down pipe. Now it is nearly February and I still do not have my manifold back on. (The turbo manifold did not fit BTW - frame rail in the way)
For some reason, I decided that since the exhaust manifold was off, it was a good time to start my Megasquirt conversion prject that I had been gathering parts for. So I removed the intake and carb. Then I figured if I was going to that much trouble I might as well remove the head to replace the valve guides and stem seals that liked to let oil by under high vacuum leading to a smoke screen if I coasted down a long hill in gear.
To have more room to remove the head, I removed the radiator, hoses, & thermostat. I removed the grilles to have better access to the crank pulley to get the engine to TDC.
I found that my pistons were not the factory flat-topped ones, but rather had a small piano top dome. This meant that the spare head that I was going to put on there from a E21 320i was not going to work because the combustion chamber was way different and the domed pistons wouldn't like impacting the head. So I had to dissassemble the head and take it off to the local machine shop. I disassembled the head on one of those folding workmate thingys. I left my workbench in the old house in Virginia
Concurrently, I decided to mount my Megasquirt box in the center console instead of in the glove box where my Megajolt box used to live. I also decieded I needed to have an AFR gauge. So that led to making a custom gauge panel for my center console that relocated the hazard switch, got rid of the factory dummy switch and deleted the ashtray. Of course during this I saw just how poorly the aftermarket radio was installed - wired by a chimp I think. So that had to come out too. I went through several iterations of my gauge panel design before decieding I needed to add another gauge for symetry's sake. So I bought a boost/vacuum gauge as well.
I'll leave out the long sad story of my fuel system other than to say I know have to external pumps and a surge tank and associated filters that need to be mounted in my trunk and new fuel lines that need to be routed.
When it came to reassembling the head, I decieded that I needed a nice clean work area. One weekend I tried the kitchen table when my wife was out of town for 2 days. I quickly realized that I had the old style valve stem seals and the newer style valve guides. Needed to order more parts. My window of opportunity closed by the time I could get the correct parts.
This lead to building a new workbench for the garIage. My garage is full of a lot of crap so I needed a place to put the workbench. The target was to get rid of an old entertainment center that we bought in 1992 and retired to garage duty about 5 years ago. I tossed out about half of the stuff on the entertainment center. Then got the brilliant idea (from my in-laws and wife) that it could be cleaned up, modifed, and painted, and brought back inside. Re-purposed as a flat screen tv/home theater entertainment center for the flat screen tv we didn't yet have.
After a lot of cleaning and scrubbing, then removing three of four shelves I made a space large enough for a flat screen TV. My Father-In-Law painted it and I put casters on the bottom and we brought it inside. We planned to buy a new TV to finally joing the world of HD flat screens in March or so if I still had a job. (Expect a new contract about then). But the pressure of having this clean and bright entertainment center in my living room just sitting empty while we huddled in a small bedroom converted to a TV room was too much to take. I did some measuring and found that to adequately fill the available space in the entertainment center I'd need a 55" TV. The wife decided that we might as well get a new reciever and speakers while we were at it. I had dreams of playing GT5 in HD with a nice sound system. I found that the entertainment center could use another shelf to hold the reciever, the TIVO, and the PS3, so I made a new shelf out of the scraps of the removed shelves. This part of the project is now complete. I can watch blu-ray movies or stream netflix or watch football games in HD on a nice 55" screen now. But back to the garage.
The workbench I designed is on casters. It is more of a work table I guess. It was just what I wanted and I am happy with it. Like I said before it was to go where the entertainment center used to be out in the garage. No problem, but what about the other half of the junk that was stored on the entertainment center? Where to put that in my overfull garage? I decided to take a shelving unit and remove the lowest shelf so the workbench and my air compressor could fit under it and that would hold the stuff I needed to find a new home for. What about the stuff on the shelf? It was mostly all of our Christmas decorations. I'm no Clark Griswold, but we have a lot of stuff. Really. I was a bit stumped and while standing in my garage I looked up for inspiration and realized that with a 14' high ceiling there was plenty of room "up ther" to store stuff. So, I designed and built a storage loft to keep all the Christmas stuff up and out of the way.
That brings me to last weekend. I decided it was time to put my cylinder head back together using my nice new workbench that so far had only been used to build furniture and a loft. It has been trying its best to act like a real winter down here in the south. We've had more than our normal share of cold and snow and this weekend it was in the low 20's at night and in the 30's during the day. I got all the valves installed without a hitch and was ready to install the rocker shafts and rockers. This is where I ran into trouble. My head took a lot of persuasion to get the old rockers driven out of the head. 5 pound mallet and "a suitable drift". My new rockers were also a tight fit. Internet wisdom is that if they are that hard to get in the head is warped, but my cam can slide in and out easily and the machine shop found the head surface was flat. I couldn't decide which way to drive the rocker shafts in. The Haynes manual tells you to remove them by driving them out towards the front. To re-install it just says to those steps backwards with a few tips and caustions. Should they go back in from the front or in from the rear? I chose to go in from the front as I am a conservative type fellow. The rocker took a lot of pounding to get it going and I got the exhaust side rockers on for cylinder 1 and 2 before I figured out why I should've gone in from the rear. There is a little cutout near the front of the rocker shafts and that apparently doesn't like to repeatably beat upon by my mallet since it broke the end of my new rocker shaft as I was nearing cylinder 3. I removed it and ordered another shaft. I think the trouble was that I was doing this when it was 30 F and the aluminum head contracted more than the steel rocker shaft making a very tight fit. Once I get my new rocker shaft I am going to try warming the head up to a little over 100F in the oven before trying to get the rocker shafts in.
Hopefully before spring I'll get this project finished and get my car back on the road, but I now have a nice new storage loft, and new workbench (including vice and bench grinder), a 'new' entertainment center, a new home theater, two new recliners (forgot to mention them), and I still haven't put my exhaust manifold back on. .