A good afternoon's worth of work
 

Well it has started.

With the influx of spring parts waiting to go in, and the Ottawa May Rotary Meet only a month away, I decided to get started on tearing the engine bay apart so I could clean it and reassemble.

Here for your enjoyment I have "before", "during" and "after" pics. Not bad for one guy, in one afternoon, for about 4 hrs of work.

The idea is that I'm stripping the entire thing down to just the "keg" so that I can clean all the gunk and crap off the engine bay walls. Then I'm gonna get in there with a wirebrush and clean the keg.

I'll come back in about a week and post the finished product :)

Jon

I had a good afternoon too, on the daily driver got the 2GCDFIS installed, fixed return spring problem, fixed clutch adjustment, swapped tires, fixed ventury problem and installed air cleaner. On the race car continued the saga of the tubbed rear end and got some good progress done, thanks Peejay....

nice work for only 4 hours. i think ive spent almost that long on single bolts before. hehe

Hence the reason that the beehive is still in place. The rest came out pretty easy, since most of it was out at some point before one piece at a time. But the inner nut on the beehive is a royal bugger!

I was actually amazed with how quickly and easily I ripped it apart. And I'm supremely confidant I can put it all back together. :)

Is there much real value, for a daily driver with mild mods, to remove the beehive, my race car is FMOC, but for the road car I wonder if it is necessary?

Yes it is!

http://www.frosted7.com/24.jpg

http://www.frosted7.com/katrina3.html

Oh God... how did you get that out in the end?


As for replacing the beehive on road cars, it depends on what you're doing with your DD. This is my summer DD, but it's also my only 7, so it does double-duty as a "spirited" driver and will be doing light autocross. I will eventually be switching to FMOC, but for now, I'm just giving the beehive a freshening up.

If you're just literally daily driving the car, the beehive is fine.

Jon

Yeah 99% DD, but a LOT of DD for the good months, up to 1000 miles a week. Mods include Mikuni, RB exhaust, 2GCDFIS. I only use Synthetic in all the drivetrain. Stock GSL drivetrain, street suspension mods next.

Obviously reliability is the major issue.

The only reliability problems with the beehive are the o-rings deteriorating, leading to small oil leaks that leak onto the coolant hose, deteriorating it.

Click on the link above in darkfrost's post and go "previous" one page to see his blown coolant hose. Mine did the same thing last year. It's the j-shaped hose.

So if your beehive's o-rings and coolant hoses are up to date, reliability is no problem. It just sucked to blow a coolant hose.

Though if you get the chance to do the FMOC swap without breaking the bank, it's always worth it. FMOC also adds to the reliability of the engine, since teardowns of 83-85 12a (beehive) motors have shown more stresses from lack of cooling than the FMOC 12a's. Can't remember the exact nature of the differences.

Jon

Good to see you're finally getting a chance to work on your car. Door #3 looks great.

Wait until I get the powdercoated bits in place :)

Jon

Not much progress today. Got the motor mounts and front piece installed though.

AFTER I got them installed, I noticed these extra pieces were attached to the originals. Since I wasn't in a mood to take it apart again tonight, I figured I'd ask you folks what their purpose is and see if it's worth pulling it all apart to put them back in again.

They seem to just be "bump stops" for when you revv the engine hard, so the engine mount will compress, but only to a certain point.

Jon

Not sure Jon, but I think they help contain and protect the rubber part of the mount. I never really understood thier purpose either. Might even be for heat rejection.

Looks good. But you're not going to able to stop with just the cleaning. Once you get the purty powdercoated bits in there, everything else is going to look like it needs to be shined up or something and before you know it you'll have a lot more $CAD and elbow grease invested. You better get rolling on that shopping list you posted.

I have a gsl se oil coller on my 12A I didnt put it in but it was the previous owner.

also whats up with the oil filter?

Speaking of cleaning, Jon, I"m suprised you didn't do more before installing 'MY' parts. lol

I'm going ou to the shop now to put some used motor oil and dirt on your new wheels. :rlaugh:

Lol, don't worry about it scott.

There's a heck of a lot of cleaning left to do. Including the front of the engine. I just wanted to get the old motor mounts out of there.

When I'm done with the engine bay though, the engine is still going to be the most out of place thing left. The side walls and firewall are going to be cleaned to a shine, and almost everything else in the entire engine bay will be new (or newly coated). The engine though *is* being replaced next year, so I'm not going to go all super-polish on it. Just a wirebrush and lots of degreaser :p:

You'll see.. when I'm done I'll be posting pics. I *will* do your parts justice, I promise.

Jon

I don't understand the question.

It's a Purolator PureONE PL14459. I don't use anything but those because of their high quality. Heck, I even make trips down to the 'states *just* for those oil filters.

If you're talking about the weird lookin' thing under the oil filter, that's the oil cooler, or "beehive". It has both coolant and oil running through seperate passageways in it, with the idea being that the coolant will absorb lots of the heat from the oil, and take it away to the radiator where it can be dissipated. It was a good idea, but just wasn't effective enough. The air-oil cooler mounted under or ahead of the rad in all other models was much better.

Jon