Seahawk 356 project:

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by targa911S

sure, why not. ya'll come.

I'm thinkin' steak for dinner and biscuits and gravy for breakfast.

Maybe they will both keel over from cholesterol and leave the car here.

Will drive the rental car then, need to leave something to someone you know!

Excellent come-back BTW!

[speeder]

Originally Posted by milt

Need a tab welded on or fix a cracked something, let me know.

Very nice to offer. There very well may be, plus another small welding project that I will tell you about soon. Thx.

[Rufblackbird]

very cool! did the opposite route (MD to CA) 6 years ago...this is gonna have some lasting memories!

[Shuie]

Awesome thread. Thanks for sharing.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Very cool guys. If you come back through KS the beer's on me, Paul you know where I live. I might even have a spare room if I get my basement done.

[speeder]

Wow, I can't believe that 2 months have passed since I last posted on this thread. I've done some work on the car in that time, (a little), but mostly it's been pushed to the side because I've been busy with other things.

Now it's time to bring it back to the forefront because Paul is coming to collect it in approx. 3 weeks. Milt is coming over this week to weld in the new battery box floor, (trunk floor), which is the only rusty spot on the car. None of them escape corrosion in this spot, unless they never had a battery. The new piece arrived from NLA this week, they basically sell every part that you'd need to build one of these cars from scratch.

I had been planning on pulling the engine all along to re-seal it for oil leaks. The seller of this car was deceased but his regular mechanic claimed that the engine had been "rebuilt" some time in the not too distant past. The wrench, (or more accurately shop owner), was a very nice older guy but his garage was not the right place to maintain this car. He supposedly sent the engine out to be overhauled but could not remember where,(??), and there are no records of this ever occurring in the receipts we got for the car.

There is an old saying/truism in the world of used cars and "rebuilds" which is this: if there are no records, it did not happen. Unfortunately, in this case something did happen, let's hope it wasn't Motormeister. I tore it down today and did not see any JB Weld, still haven't split the case yet, though. The car ran OK and idled fine but leaked oil from every possible crevice due to blow-by and it was a noisy motor. I brought it by one of the top 356 wrenches down in Costa Mesa a couple of weeks ago, (does all of the engines for European Collectibles and others), he drove the car and confirmed my observations about the noises and leaks. He had no firm idea of the sources of the noises w/o a tear-down.

Soooooo, here is what I did today. Tomorrow it will go to a good machine shop for measurements, etc. This is what I'd refer to as a forensic tear-down, just trying to figure out what it needs to really put it right. These are fantastic cars and this one has its original Super engine, which was the "in-between" option. The 1600 normal was 60hp, the Super was 75 and of course the S-90 was 90 feisty German galloping beasts.

I'm sitting in a cafe and battery is about to die, so I'll continue this when I get home.

[speeder]

Starting point. Dropping the engine on this car is pretty darn easy. Instead of jacking the rear of the car 3 or 4 feet off the ground, I drop the motor from this height first and then raise, (the now very light), body with floor jack and slide the motor out. I dropped it onto some luan board, perfect for sliding and protecting aluminum case + driveway from random oil drips.





Engine is now on a nice soft piece of MDF behind the car, ready to tear-down.

[speeder]

Carbs/linkage/sheet metal/fan-genrator/exhaust/oil cooler/clutch/pulleys/heads/P&Cs. It just gets smaller and smaller as you go. And of course bigger and bigger when you put it back together.

[speeder]

A couple of things worth mentioning. A very experienced machinist and engine rebuilder I learned under once told me that he never uses impact tools to tear-down an engine. His reason was that he wanted to feel the parts and fasteners coming off, they give clues as to why it failed. (If in fact it did). My reason is that I want to know if fasteners were over-tightened or finger-loose. If the engine has never been apart since the factory, it's less crucial but on this one, I really had to know.

I do not have access to a torque-monitoring wrench/device, (they cost 10s of thousands of dollars), I rely on my hands to check previous torque when removing nuts and bolts. Proper tightening torque on fasteners is important on all types of machinery but on air-cooled engines, it's absolutely critical. Air-cooled boxer engines are like furbies or chia pets, they are almost living things. They expand and contract quite a bit as they get heated and cooled. I haven't read the torque specs for this 356 engine yet but the head nut torque on a VW engine is something like 36 lbs. A little more than finger-tight. When the engine gets hot, they get a lot tighter.

It was hard to tell whether the head stud fasteners were over-tightened on this one because the previous "rebuilder" used some type of thread-locker/glue on all of the threads that really stuck them. I will reserve judgement until I get the skinny from the real experts but my experience is with assembling 911 engines and you definitely do not use glue on any threads, with a couple of notable exceptions. Not on head stud nuts, thats for sure. Half of the studs came out with the nut when turned, not the end of the world but not right either. If anything, thread-locker is used on the other end of stud, ie. in the case end.

Thread-locker glue:



A stud that unscrewed:

[speeder]

Other than that, nothing seemed terribly out-of-whack. Heads came right off with a gentle mallet tap:


The heads on these engines are ambidextrous, IOW it does not matter which one goes back on which side. They are identical. None-the-less, I labeled them in case there turns out to be any info gleaned from them regarding a particular cylinder.



And of course I labeled the P/Cs. They are very likely going right back on.



The pistons look new-ish and like JEs or some other after-market brand. I did not see any markings on the jugs indicating who made them. If they were Mahles or KS, they would have prominent markings. They have very interesting oil-control rings very low on them:



The jugs look fine as far as visible wear/ridges. I did not see any. Will get a much better look tomorrow. Sorry if these pics seem tedious or like over-kill, this thread is going to be part of the permanent record of the service being done to this beautiful, matching numbers car. The photos, my write-up and the receipts. Just like I did with my 911SC rebuild.

Stay tuned, "more will be revealed"...

[Schumi]

Denis, let me know if you need any help on the car this week. I'm available to roll up your way any time after work.

[speeder]

Lastly, for tonight, I've been saving-up boxes for this little project. It's all about the boxes.


And that's a wrap for now.

[speeder]

Originally Posted by Schumi

Denis, let me know if you need any help on the car this week. I'm available to roll up your way any time after work.

Will do, buddy. If nothing else, you can just come up and hang out.

[Joeaksa]

Boy, sorry to see the crap on the studs. Guess different people work in different ways but never seen that before.

Keep it up!

Joe A

[kanadary]

thanks for sharing, this is very cool. i can't believe you're doing all this in a drveway but i guess that's what living in paradise is all about. k

[id10t]

I'm gonna post a thread about getting my 356 going again...

However - one mod I *strongly* recommend - you can find directions in the old 356talk posts on the 356registry.org website. Anyway, it is a simple 6v buzzer that acts as a "you left your head lights on again you idiot" warning... total cost about $7, includes the part needed from radio shack and the cost of the 1 beer you can drink while you do it

[Dottore]

Well talk about a feel-good thread! Very nice.

My hats are off to you. (Paul and Denis)

I hope we can see you when you come through the northwest.

[nostatic]

I"m no use mechanically, but I could film the documentary...

[speeder]

Originally Posted by Joeaksa

Boy, sorry to see the crap on the studs. Guess different people work in different ways but never seen that before.

Keep it up!

Joe A

Yeah. On the face of it, it just seems wrong. I'm going to engage Grady Clay on this, see if I can get him to hop onto this thread. (Pun intended).

It seems like it would be impossible to accurately torque the nuts w/ that crap on them. usually, you need to oil the nuts and get the threads perfect and clean, the design of them makes them hard to turn freely and also contributes to the fact that they just NEVER come loose if they are torqued correctly. Thread-locker on the other end, (in case), would be OK if needed. 911 engines have Loctite on studs in the case from factory.

This will all get rectified.

[speeder]

Couple more quick pics. The oil cooler looks a lot newer than the engine, the dirt on the fins is normal after years of use. It will get completely cleaned and tested. It's very important to have these flow-tested, some people only have them pressure-tested for leaks which can let a massive internal blockage go un-detected. Then the car over-heats in the middle of the desert or going over a mountain and the owner does not know why.



These are of course push-rod motors, the PRs are very interesting with what looks like aluminum in the center for weight-savings. Older ones had wood centers. Those crazy Krauts.