My god, what have I done?

In reply to engiekev :

That's the Fel-Pro gasket I got. I was looking at the more expensive one, but it seemed like overkill for this engine & it's projected power. Not to mention it's not very Challenge budget friendly. 
 

Thanks for the tip on the pan bolts! I somehow didn't notice they were different lengths, probably due to all the grime they had & the general darkness & confines space under the car. 

I decided to clean off the #1 & #4 pistons before I called it a night since they were already at TDC. They have 99810 stamped on them which shows up as this Ross piston set. 
 

The #1 piston is still nice & shiny. 
 

#4 has some slight pitting/corrosion, but I think it's still ok?

I checked #2 & #3 bores. There's a little wear on them, and I can feel the mark on the left side of #3 slightly, but it's not sharp/deep enough to catch a nail. 
 

Slap it together and run it until you can't crank up the boost anymore.  You know they have a plaque for that right?

What Stampie said. It's a Mitsubishi, it's going to blow up anyways. Might as well have some fun with it.

Well I think I'm done cleaning the engine bay. I'd love to be able to paint it, but I have neither the equipment, talent, or place to spray paint; and from my small test area I'm not sure that brushing on Rustoleum would be an improvement. 
 

So I started moving toward reassembly by cleaning the lifters & letting them soak overnight in carb cleaner. The recommendation for 4G63 engines is to do that twice, then soak them once in fresh oil before they're installed. 
 

I also cleaned the old gasket material off the deck, so I'll just need to wipe it down with solvent before I reassemble it. 
 

I started cleaning up the wiring harness routing behind the driver's headlight. There were a couple unused leads just dangling, so I zip tied them out of the way. 
 

Lastly I crawled under the car & started cleaning off the PTO before reassembly. However I noticed it leaked slightly from the rear seal(and it may be leaking from the input seal too), so if they're not too expensive & don't require disassembling the PTO I may go ahead & replace them while it's out. 

I manually pumped the lifters today & dropped them back into the carb cleaner overnight. 
 

I decided to go ahead & check the block to see how level it is. With my strait edge & .0015" feeler gauge I couldn't slide it under the straight edge from any position or direction, so it's as flat as I'm capable of measuring it. 
 

I pulled the transfer case out. 
 

And started cleaning at least a decade of grime off of it. 
 

The head is back on. 
 

I'm waiting to reassemble it any further until I'm done painting around the engine bay. So far I've done the PS unibody rail-to-firewall corner, you can compare it to the front part of the unibody rail to see the difference. 
 

I painted the front crossmember too, but was tired & forgot to get a pic. 

You have way more nesting instincts that me.  I would be all slap that all together and spend 2 hours trying to figure out what sensor I didn't plug in to get it to fire than let's clean the engine bay first.

In reply to Stampie (FS) :

2-years ago that was totally me. I've apparently gotten old since then. 
 

I would have made more progress this week, but we had termites swarm twice. The first time I didn't notice until the garage was half full of them & all I could do was turn off all the lights & wait for them to lose their wings while they kept landing & crawling on me...

Termite swarm?

Oh hell no. 

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael (Forum Supporter) :

Napalm is the only correct answer 

Sorry you had to burn your garage down twice. 

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael (Forum Supporter) :

Meh, at least they don't bite like the nightly swarms of mosquitos. 

Our house is cinderblock on cement slab, so while termites can certainly still be a problem, it's less of a concern than a wood-framed house on pilings. 

You have been busy!  Hope to see it and you at the challenge!

In reply to Ben_Modified :

That would be great if you can make it down!

Since Stampie was so disappointed in my lack of mechanical progress, I used tonight to purge, pre-lube & install the lifters; installed the HLA regulator, and started cleaning up the intake manifold. And then I painted. 
 

Nothing photo-worthy really, but I should be done with painting after my next night in the garage. I'm not sure if that'll be tomorrow, but hopefully by Monday I can focus on reassembly. 

As I mentioned over here yupididit nailed it earlier in this thread with his hunch that I have a 50-trim turbo. Unfortunately, now that I was spending some time cleaning it tonight I discovered it has way more axial play than I realized. The impeller shaft end moves at least 1mm...I don't think that's good?

I think I'm done painting the engine bay. I focused mainly on the passenger side & subframe, as that's what's visible once the engine is reassembled. 

I also cleaned & lubed the rockers, and got them installed. I need to go through all the gaskets & seals, but I should have everything I need to reassemble the engine.

1mm of play on a journal bearing turbo is not much to worry about. I however would worry more about axial play (In and out) than about radial play(side to side). Axial play makes me worry about the thrust bearings being worn and can lead to the impellers contacting the housings.  I used to buy core Holset turbos, fix and flip them for beer money in college.

In reply to RacetruckRon :

Well I thought it was ball-bearing, but after reading through some Turbonetics literature this housing was available with either journal or ball-bearing, so maybe it's ok. I couldn't feel any axial play, but I'll try to get measurements for both. 

I tried measuring the radial play, but I didn't have any way to get my dial indicator close to perpendicular to the shaft. So I took pics of the impeller/housing clearance at both min/max deflection. I think I'm ok, it's just under 1mm, and there's zero axial play. 
 

So it's self making voom voom noises now?

Berk it. Ship it. I mean it was running for the most part before you took it apart right? 

In reply to RacetruckRon :

Neither Anthony nor I did anything more than drive it on/off our trailers, but yeah we both commented that it seemed to run well despite the blown HG.

And also despite this - I was getting ready to install the intake & needed to get the coil pack cleaned up. I'm not sure these are the original coil setup, because I couldn't take off the intake without removing the coils & I couldn't remove the coils because the intake was in the way... Anyway, tonight I discovered the core for one of the coils was snapped off. Fortunately I found another one in the stash of spare parts. 


 

I started prepping the exhaust manifold for VHT & made it about 1/4th of the way. It's time consuming trying to get into all the tight spots, and I'm afraid this will all be covered in flash-rust by the time I get back in the garage tomorrow night.

This is coming along nicely. I'm looking forward to hearing woosh noises soon.

Turbo looks fine for a challenge build!  Once you get it running if there is excessive oil consumption or smoke, odd noises from the turbo, then take a second look.  However smoke and oil consumption can come from other install issues like oil feed location and proper oil drain.

engiekev said:

Turbo looks fine for a challenge build!  Once you get it running if there is excessive oil consumption or smoke, odd noises from the turbo, then take a second look.  However smoke and oil consumption can come from other install issues like oil feed location and proper oil drain.

 

 

The PO did say the oil feed location was wrong and too high pressure.