Okay, i have the oil ring dowel pin leak or whatever the heck you call it. Now until today, i was thinking rebuild but peejay mentioned that if it runs good and good compression and all, that i could just do dis/reassembly with a mazda gasket set.

My question

How long do you guy think it would take me from start to finish(im talking pulling the engine out of the car to getting it back in) to do this?

I have never done it before, but i am good at stuff

 

The book calls for 26 hours I think, most likely quicker though.

 

Have you pulled your motor before? Just have someone there that's done it before we speed things up. I remember my builder and I pulled my motor out in 20 mins!

 

If you can fling a wrench around okay and know how to put stuff back together after taking it apart, shouldn't take longer than a weekend.

Three people had my old '80 gone from towed into the shop, to engine disassembled on the floor, in the space of maybe three or four hours. That included me doing most of the engine disassembly work, stopping for pics, and the like. Almost no air tools were used.

A nice trick, if you're REALLY just going to tear it down for a reseal, and not going to care about measuring seals etc., is to use electrical tape to tape the seals to the rotors. Tape through the center across the apices (apeces?) to hold the apex and corner seals in place, then tape through the center across the rotor faces to hold the side seals in place. Actually this is a good idea to do for any disassembly, so the seals stay with the rotor until you are ready to start cleaning and measuring, and it prevents the corners from getting banged up. But I digress.

QUICK AND DIRTY... no cleanup of the rotors or other bits, just stash 'em right into plastic bags so they don't get contaminated with dirt. Powerwash the outside of the engine before you start disassembly, helps prevent grit. You'll spend a LOT of time removing remnants of coolant O-ring from the grooves, scraping gasket remnants, etc. Scrub the housings clean with a stiff nylon brush, laundry detergent, and the hottest water that you can stand to work with. Pay most of your attention to the mating surfaces of course. Then throw 'er back together.

NOW... here's the only problem. Say you rip it all apart and you find housing flaking, or find that the housings are about as shiny as primer. This is the "oh ****" moment - it turns out you really should think about rebuilding. Throw it back together with the knowledge that it's only going to last a year or two tops? Or start amassing parts for rebuilding? Decisions decisions.

Sometimes ignorance really IS bliss. Personally I have a hard time driving my '85 hard. After all, I haven't seen the inside of the engine, I have no idea what condition it's in, and I'm not going to bother yanking the engine and dealing with the A/C and P/S nightmare on the side of it until I have something a bit more portedful to put in there.

 

yeah, see thats my prob. ill get it apart plan a reseal--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Then i ll find something wrong and a rebuild needed

hmmmm. this is a daily driver so.......

Do these oil leaks get worse quick or do they take a long time?

 

You're like me, Peejay. I have a relatively hard time gunning in my 7, only because I have no clue what condition my engine is in...and busting an apex seal in my daily driver just wouldn't be my idea of a great time...lol