On this episode of HOT ROD Garage presented by Lincoln tech we dig into the seized 1971 340 Engine from our #Greemon340 project. Watch Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa investigate the dead engine for signs of failure and damage. A complete tear-down and analysis of this engine shows why the 340 stopped running
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MotorTranscript
00:00 [sad music]
00:08 [music]
00:10 Take this.
00:12 Oh boy.
00:14 This is not enough.
00:16 Give me the air.
00:18 Come on baby. Come on.
00:20 Hammer it.
00:22 [hammering]
00:24 Don't you die on me!
00:26 It's not working.
00:28 Clear.
00:30 [hammering]
00:32 He's sucking a bacon.
00:34 [hammering]
00:36 [sigh]
00:38 39,235 miles.
00:46 Never gets any easier.
00:48 [music]
00:50 [music]
01:10 Don't forget you can check us out online at MotorTrend OnDemand.
01:13 You can search, click, and view a whole wealth of automotive content from our MotorTrend universe.
01:18 [engine revving]
01:21 Welcome back to Howard Garage presented by Lincoln Tech.
01:24 Today we're going to be dealing with that seized engine from my 1971 Dodge Demon 340 that we had briefly running in an earlier episode.
01:31 Now this thing stopped without any warning, so we're going to do a kind of mechanical autopsy and see if we can figure out what caused the problem and how we can rectify it.
01:38 But first, let Clarence Barnes lay it on you with this quick tech tip from Lincoln Tech.
01:42 [music]
01:46 One of the most important steps in painting a vehicle, especially if you're doing a repair that involves just one area, is masking off the areas you don't want overspray to land on.
01:54 There's a lot of masking tape out there, and here's a few tips for picking the right one.
01:58 Foam tapes work great in door jams, while lifting tapes are for areas of gaskets or moldings.
02:03 Fine-line tape makes outlying patterns or stripes quick and easy because you can bend the tape around corners or curves.
02:09 All of these tapes come in varying widths and degrees of adhesion.
02:12 In general, you won't want to leave any masking tape on a vehicle for more than a week inside of a shop.
02:17 The longer it's on there, the more likely the adhesive residue will be left behind when you go to remove the tape.
02:23 In vehicles exposed to rain or sunlight outside the shop environment, you'll want to remove the tape even sooner.
02:28 After painting primer, you can remove the tape in approximately 15 minutes.
02:32 After spraying a base coat of paint, you'll want to wait 20 minutes.
02:36 Once the clear coat is laid down, you should wait until the product is fully cured before pulling the tape.
02:41 Remember, if you wait too long, you risk pulling the paint from the surface along with the masking tape.
02:46 Lincoln Tech can teach you how to have a career working with cars.
02:49 See LincolnTech.edu.
02:52 Alright, so here's a little bit of background on this engine.
02:56 I stopped driving this thing in high school, and it sat for about 18 years.
03:00 About halfway through, about 10 years ago, I refreshed the top end, rebuilt the heads,
03:04 new camshaft, lifters, rockers, pushrods, all that stuff.
03:07 Then it sat until last year where I briefly got it fired up.
03:11 About a month ago, we loaded the whole car up on a trailer and dragged it out here to Los Angeles.
03:15 Okay, so in an earlier episode, I put in fresh gas, put on a fresh carburetor, pre-lubed the engine,
03:22 fired it up, it sounded good, we set the timing, and that was the end of the episode.
03:27 Now, it's a brand new camshaft and top end, so I decided to break the camshaft in,
03:31 which usually means running it at about 2,500 RPM for about 20 minutes.
03:36 Oil pressure was good, water temp was good, it started to sound a little bit rough,
03:39 and as I started to investigate, it immediately ceased.
03:42 Now, that's a huge bummer, it's a big setback in getting my car back on the road.
03:46 And here we are, this thing is not spinning, we're here to investigate, tear it all apart, see what happens.
03:52 So we've got our C's 340 up on the engine stand, torn down to a long block.
04:00 The first thing we're going to do is we're going to check the lubrication system.
04:02 Oil keeps things spinning, so we're going to see if we can find any signs of failure there.
04:06 That means we're going to drain the oil, we're going to drop the pan,
04:08 we're going to look for any kind of metal material, we're going to take the oil filter off,
04:12 we're going to cut that open too, that should also tell us what was going on when this thing ceased up.
04:16 Alright, you ready to pull this off?
04:17 Let's do it.
04:18 Let's do it.
04:19 Let me drain the pan first.
04:21 This is the oil we drained out already, so there's a bunch of metal material on the magnetic drain plug.
04:29 That's not a great sign.
04:32 [Music]
04:34 A bunch of crushed up metal in here, that's not great.
04:49 Alright, I've got the oil pan off, I'm already seeing evidence of bearing material,
04:54 and some darker metals too, possibly parts of the engine in here.
05:00 Here we've got our filter cut apart, the base of it also looks to be bearing material,
05:05 possibly some metal from the engine.
05:07 Alright, so we know that there's definitely been some lubrication failure of some kind.
05:11 What we're going to do now is we're going to pull the timing cover off,
05:13 see if we can figure out if it's the crank that seized or the camshaft,
05:16 and try to figure out our problem.
05:18 [Music]
05:20 Maybe drain this.
05:27 Wait, put the cardboard there.
05:28 Yeah.
05:29 [Music]
05:31 This is part of the plan.
05:34 I'm surprised to see that.
05:44 What?
05:45 That it's still there.
05:46 So we'll pull off the timing gears and the chain, see if we can't get one of these to spin,
05:52 figure out exactly where the damage is.
05:54 [Music]
05:56 Now that we've got the timing chain and the gears off,
06:06 we're going to pull the rocker shafts so that there's no pressure on the springs,
06:09 and we're going to try to spin the crankshaft and the camshaft, see if they're bound up.
06:14 So we're going to take special care to make sure everything gets marked in its original position
06:18 in case we want to reuse these parts.
06:20 We'll probably go ahead and get new stuff, but in case you didn't,
06:22 you want everything to go back into the cylinder it came out of and the exact position it came out of.
06:27 Mopars have a pushrod rocker system, and they're oiled through the central shaft,
06:33 so there can be an issue with you assembling them wrong.
06:36 Got to make sure that this groove is down, which it is, so I don't think that was our issue.
06:40 All this stuff still moves very freely. It was all brand new.
06:43 All right, so the camshaft spins freely.
06:45 Crankshaft spins under a bunch of force and not very smoothly,
06:48 so I'm assuming in here is where the bearings went bad.
06:51 I'm surprised at how good this thing actually spins, considering.
06:54 So we're going to pull the cylinder heads off, look for any kind of damage inside the cylinders,
06:59 and we'll flip it over, start taking parts off of the crankshaft, see if we can find the problems.
07:04 So we've got the heads off. The heads look okay.
07:17 I found a small bit of material missing from where one of the head bolt holes are.
07:20 I don't think it's a huge deal, and the cylinders and pistons seem to be fine.
07:24 Now, we know that the camshaft spins freely. Crankshaft does not, so we're going to flip it over now,
07:31 see if we can figure out why it's not spinning,
07:33 see if we can figure out the oiling system, if there's a failure anywhere.
07:39 So I had an aftermarket pan on here, which necessitated some modifications to the oil pickup.
07:43 First thing we're going to do is we're going to check the height against the pan of the pickup
07:48 to make sure it wasn't too low. At high suction, it could actually suck the pan up to it, starve the engine for oil.
07:53 That's the first thing we're going to do.
07:54 So we have measured the bottom of the pan to the mounting flange at exactly 9 inches.
08:05 So we'll see how far up that pickup is sticking.
08:09 What do you got there?
08:12 - Eight and three quarters.
08:14 - That's good.
08:15 - Good day?
08:16 - That's perfect.
08:17 - Let's pull the cover off first and see if we can get inside that pump and have an idea what's going on there.
08:25 So we've got the cover of the oil pump off. It is driven fine.
08:29 Looks like there's some marks on it from some material, but nothing insane.
08:34 I've definitely seen worse with an engine failure.
08:37 Now we're going to start pulling off the rod caps, see if they look scorched or ruined,
08:42 and then I'll pull off the main bearing caps and see how they look next, see if we can figure out what the issue was.
08:47 So we've been tearing off the piston rods off the crank.
09:06 Up until this point, everything has moved freely.
09:08 As you can see, these last two at the rear of the motor have obviously got a ton of heat in them from the color,
09:13 and they do not move freely.
09:15 All right, so we only have two pistons in the motor.
09:18 It still doesn't want to spin, so I think those are our problems.
09:23 We're getting there. A little more.
09:27 Yeah, you can see it's all torn up.
09:30 Hot, not hot.
09:32 You guys remember hot or not? Remember that internet website?
09:35 [Music]
09:45 All right, so as you can see, this is a good rod end cap and bearing.
09:49 They're supposed to move together.
09:51 We're seeing on number eight, the rod bearing actually spun inside the cap,
09:55 stayed with the crankshaft due to a lack of lubrication.
09:58 So that seems to be the majority of the damage.
10:00 That's the reason why the engine would not spin.
10:02 Keep digging into this thing, hoping we can figure out the problem that caused the lubrication.
10:06 If not, it'll just be a total overhaul of the lubrication system with fresh parts.
10:10 Once this thing goes back together, it should spin freely.
10:13 This is an original matching numbers block.
10:16 We want this thing to survive, and it looks like as nice as it's spinning now, it should definitely be usable.
10:22 There's definitely some damage to the crank.
10:24 Could possibly cut it, use oversized bearings, replace the crank.
10:28 There's all sorts of options now, but the real concern was
10:31 if this block was totally screwed, we'd be in bad shape.
10:34 All right, so we've got my 340 engine torn apart.
10:41 The main damage looks like the crankshaft journals here
10:44 and these two rod bearings that really took a beating here.
10:47 So we'll take this thing, send it off to the machine shop.
10:50 They'll let us know if we can reuse this crank.
10:52 If not, we'll have to replace it.
10:54 We'll have the entire engine cleaned out, the oiling system cleaned out,
10:57 and then once it's there, we'll also do some modifications,
10:59 such as opening up some of the passages in the crank and in the block
11:02 to allow more oil flow so this doesn't happen again.
11:04 All right, that's it for this episode of Hot Rod Garage, presented by Lincoln Tech.
11:08 Now next time, we have a really special episode for you.
11:10 Earlier this year, my buddy Mark Lennardin passed away in a tragic motorcycle accident.
11:14 Now Mark was on staff here. He had his hands in just about everything.
11:17 Editor, director, he shot stuff, he worked on cars, literally everything.
11:22 Mark also had a personal product, an LS1 RX-7, and he never quite got running.
11:26 So next time, we're going to take it over for him and we're going to get that thing going.
11:29 So stay tuned for that.
11:30 If you want to keep up with us between episodes, you can check us out on Facebook,
11:33 Hot Rod Garage Show. You can find me on Instagram, tangelo96.
11:38 See you next time.
11:40 [music]
11:43 [music]
11:47 [music]
12:15 BAM!