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engine rebuild 200 1983

If you haven't mangled the cam or the head, you can probably recover both using only hand tools. I did it to an '81 with a seized cam, and another 150k miles went on the car before it died of advanced rust.

You can "resurface" the bearing surfaces in the head by wrapping fine grit emory cloth around a socket of the same (or almost the same) diameter as the cam bearings. Reinstall the bearing cap (cam out, of course) and slowly work the socket with paper through the hole while turning it. You must do this 'til all the high spots are removed and you're starting to cut into the pillow block. This can take an hour or more.

For the cam, you can use a new, flat, clean file and LIGHTLY file the bearing surface to remove the soft aluminum that has galled into the steel. When the file starts to cut steel, stop. Then use fine emory cloth (with oil) round-'n-round the bearing to smooth it out.

Be sure to clean the grit from the cam and head.

The cam bearings are very non-demanding. The load on them is light and does not change with engine load (as happens with the crank and rods), and the cam has 5 bearings -- so there's plenty of cam bearing area available.

Be sure you solve the mystery of the missing oil to the cam bearings. Sometimes it's a blocked passageway alongside one of the head bolts.

In my '81, the problem was a bad O-ring on the oil pump delivery pipe.
--
Don Foster (near Cape Cod, MA)






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New engine rebuild [200][1983]
posted by  someone claiming to be artoink  on Mon Feb 23 08:31 CST 2004 >


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