Got all of the pistons in with new rings... ooouucch my fingers.

Had some issues with getting the rods to sit on the journals nicely... there's not a hell of a lot of side clearance between the rod and the counterweights. I'm going to measure it later and see if I might have to have the crank machined a bit to increase the clearance.

I literally spent like 3 hours cleaning the ringlands with old rings. Sheesh.
It might have been worth it to purchase new pistons.

 

good job..

 

So, I got busy... got married, let the LR sit outside for a while with no engine while the block took up a chunk of space in my garage.





With my new toolbox, I felt motivated to work on the Land Rover. It's pretty difficult moving large things around in my M3... and frankly I missed the LR.

So I put the motor in... except I forgot something, which I will go over here in a little bit.



I searched on these bastards for a while trying to find TOP, which is supposed to be marked on the head gasket. With no discernible difference other than the red marking, I just put it up.



Slapped the heads on. My angle gauge wasn't working well, I kind of wish I had went with ARP studs so I had an actual torque value to tighten to. I ended up marking all the bolts with red fingernail polish so I knew exactly how far I turned them. Worked well.



Installed the lifters and pushrods. New lifters, re-used old pushrods.



I had a slight problem here, as the valley pan gasket didn't want to align up absolutely perfectly. Ended up having to grow a third arm in order to get it all to align right. Remembered to put RTV on the seals so it doesn't leak!



Assembled and mostly back together!



I put the motor back together, fired it up and broke in the new cam and lifters. Unfortunately I had a bit of a leak. It was a steady drip...drip...drip... until a large pool would form. I thought it was the crucafix seals. So I popped the oilpan back off, used Hondabond on the seals and made sure to cover all the locations I thought it could possibly leak out of the seals. Put it all back together, waited a day... Still leaked.

At this point, I was pretty upset. I was pretty sure it wasn't the rear main seal... the oil appeared to be coming from somewhere else. I thought it might have been coming from the valley pan gasket in the back, so I sealed up the tranny cover plate really well and cleaned it all up. Fired the motor up and oil started coming out of the weep hole in the bottom of the bellhousing. Well, ****.

I pulled the motor out and it was immediately obvious what I had done. At this point, I could get the motor out in under 2 hours.



In my excitement to put the motor back in, I had neglected to put the cam plug in. Well, ****. Okay, easy fix. I searched every autoparts store for a 1-13/16 plug. I could find 1-49/64 easily, but nobody had a 1-13/16, so I ordered one.

I didn't want to pull the wiring harness off again, so I just cut the wires. I'm pretty good with wiring (Have to be to own a Land Rover!) so I figured I'd just put weatherpack connectors on. It looked like 3 small wires and 2 large wires, so I ordered weatherpacks for that and snipped them.



Well, it's not.

The two thicker wires are a twisted shielded pair. They must be for some sort of data communications with the ECU and transmission. No problem, I've dealt with things like this before. I stripped the twisted pair as little as possible, trying to retain the shielding.



I went ahead and put new o2 sensors in while I was in there.



Here are my new plugs so I don't have to pull the harness.



Anyways, been running well. I have a CEL that I need to figure out for a misfire. I replaced the plug wires since mine had gotten pinched in a box I had thrown them in. Probably needs new plugs. Actually, does the orange o2 plug go to the drivers side o2 sensor? I might have gotten those backwards. It's got a very faint miss at idle, almost imperceptible.

It's had a slight tick that I am pretty sure is a rocker. I did have the rockers in a rubbermaid tub with the starter that got knocked over. I'm wondering if I slightly smushed a rocker. I have new pushrods, rocker shaft and rockers for the passenger side coming from LRdirect.com here in a few days, so I'll be posting that hopefully.

 

Great thread! Thanks for documenting so well and with all of the pictures - love it.


The last set of pictures aren't showing for me. I see the first picture in your last thread (with the box in the middle of the garage) but all of the rest have a minus sign in the middle of a circle for me.

 

The last posts pics aren't showing for me either. Excellent thread.

 

Last photos aren't showing for me either. Ditto on the excellent thread thoughts.

 

Pictures uploaded again, in no particular order:
















Of note though, I ended up having to replace the Britpart lifter with Crower lifters. I had some odd noises from the lifters, turns out all of the Britpart lifters were bad. I could not, even with a press, get the Britpart lifter to compress. The Crower lifters could, with a bit of force, be compressed using my fingers.

Also, I really cheaped out on this rebuild and didn't replace things that I should have so there is a bit of piston slap until the engine gets warm. This was really just a minor refresh since the oil pressure on this motor was extremely low.

Pre rebuild the oil pressure stayed below 10psi at hot idle, now it hovers around 25psi. Off idle it goes up to around 35psi where it stays no matter the RPM... which really was my goal with the rebuild.

I also went ahead and slapped a OME 2 inch lift and shocks as well as 265/75-16's on.



They just needed a minor camel cut to fit 32" tires.



I spoke with the wife and I am going to go ahead and start gathering parts for a GM Vortec swap using a 4L80E and the Marks 4wd kit. Also in the works are Wolf steel rims, a detroit trutrack for the rear and a 2wd LT230 conversion with locking hubs and a locker for the front.

 

Fantastic thread. Looking for a 4.6 right now to rebuild and have ready when mine takes a dump.