Limited disassembly of a 1980 IC 196

Maybe today will be the day. But it's 25 degrees outside and my garage isn't heated. It's about as ready as it can be, I suppose. I have a small propane burner going under the large oil sump to warm it up, and hopefully the block, too.

Maybe in the next couple of hours I can get it fired.
 
Success!!!!!!!! :dita::dita::dita::dita::dita::dita:

it's alive! Pre-warmed the engine with a propane burner for about an hour. Had a few hiccups along the way. I pre-filled the carb, but the fuel pump wasn't "picking up", so I had three mis-fires, so to speak, where it ran for maybe 5-10 seconds, then died. Finally got it running, and never let the rpms get below 2,000, probably no less than 2,500, really. Or more. Revved it up and down, kept doing this for twenty minutes. Now I'm deaf. Burned off all the oil on the manifolding and stunk up the garage big time. My wife was watching but that just drove her out into the yard. The oil filter adapter began weeping but not enough to shut it down at that point! Deal with that later. Engine temps finally came up (this is a 3-row hd radiator and fan setup), oil pressure stayed past the half-way Mark on the gauge.

Now it settles down to a good idle, good response, and seems smooth. No backfiring or odd behavior. Tomorrow will warm it up again, put on the cut-out valve cover to verify the push rods are spinning, then button it up and do some tuning.
I took some video on my iphone, but don't know how to upload it so you can see it in action.
 
Robert,
warmed up the engine today, and then put the cut-out valve cover on it. While idling, I observed the pushrods. Put a black dot on them so I could tell if (and how fast) they are turning. Most turn slowly, but there's one that turns very, very slowly, but it is at least turning.

How slow is too slow? Thoughts on this?
 
So long as they turn all is well. Bad when they stop. Might take a look after a few hundred miles and see if they are still rotating.
 
Just need to hook up the rear driveshaft and I can actually drive this thing out of my garage, where it's been on jack stands for what - the better part of two years???? I know, you can't rush these things! ;) most of the front clip is still off, but everything's accessible till I work out the bugs.

So will the lobes "improve" with mileage or is whatever surface they have be what it is and provide (hopefully) the life I need from them? I know at idle that one turns extremely slowly, but I couldn't rev it up and look to see how much faster it would spin without having oil fly all over the place. I'll modify that cover again so I can zero in on what I need to see, and see how it goes with higher speeds.

Engine is actually real quiet, for an IH, that is. You have to put your head to the engine to actually hear any valve train sounds. No knocks from the lower end.
 
As the lobes break in and polish, the forces that induce the rotation will change. We all hope for the better but as things in life go, that is not always the case. Just verify that the rotation continues or gets faster after some miles.
I could tell on my 152 that when I initially ran the engine they rotated by the circular witness marks but later on they seemed to have stalled by the rather uniform witness Mark superimposed on the circular one. Think you can find my post from way back called odd lifter wear of something like that.
 
Still working on getting my iphone .mov clip in a form that is uploadable. It's 58 sec and I just discovered 106 megabytes :yikes:, so I think that's contributed to my problem in getting it uploaded!

Anyway...weather's been real cold (around freezing), but I have had opportunities to go outside and crank it up and run it until it warms up - just because! When I first fired it up I was running it from a jug of fresh fuel, and then quickly switched over to the tank line and drove it up the street and back. But yesterday I tried driving it out of my driveway, but with no luck. It kept dying when I'd give it gas and let out the clutch. Although it idles pretty good and revs up without problem or backfiring, I believe the problem is that the four gallons of gas in the tank is now almost two years old and stale (I guess adding sta-bile has its limits!) it stalls just like it did before I rebuilt the engine and tried running it with rotten gas (after pulling the tank and having it boiled out and coated, even that tired engine ran normally on fresh gasoline). Good news is that the shop that did the work added a drain nipple to the tank, so it's a matter of pulling the plug and draining out the old gas.

Oh. I pulled the oil filter adaptor and used an oem gasket I got from Jeff. I lightly wiped it with "the right stuff", then bolted it back on and waited a few hours. It no longer leaks. I think that the narrowness of the gasket, coupled with the relative high pressure loading when bolting it down, did the trick. Before I had a home made gasket cut out as wide as the contours of the casting's curves. I think the overall pressure on the gasket was lessened, allowing high pressure oil to sneak through.
 
That sounds great! Is that power steering bracket set factory? Do you know where I can find one? Putting a 196 in my trail rig and the donor had no ps.
 
Robert,
now that it runs, I wish to offer you sincere thanks for your input in bringing it to this stage! But it is only the beginning of the real work, as the vehicle itself was a beater (with potential), pulled from a field. Now it's a beater with a fresh engine! I'll only begin to be happy once the I know the camshaft isn't going to have a flat lobe or two. There are little glitches to address. The t19 weeps from the pto plates, the d20 weeps from its oil pan, and the exhaust came loose last night (big surprise there). I had hoped the engine would run smoother, and I'm still dinking with the carb. Gas tank was emptied completely and now it runs on fresh gasoline. Engine needs to be broken in before any real conclusions can be drawn. I live on a 1/2 mile road that's an 8% grade, so yesterday I'd start at the bottom and accelerate to the top using the lower gears. Did that a bunch of times. That's a start in getting it broken in. Vehicle isn't roadworthy so this is the best I can do for now.

Anyway...cold starts are good. Couple of pumps to set the automatic choke, turn the key and it starts easily. I have the idle now at 600, and the meter shows it only drifts through a range of about 20 rpm, which is good. Tomorrow I'll put the gauge on it to see how much vacuum I'm pulling. And now that it runs, I'm going to finish up installing the edis/megajolt ignition. Now that it starts reliably and runs, no longer a reason to keep the distributor. My prediction is that the crank-fire system will change the nature of how it runs. That's been my experience with this system.

About the power steering. This is factory p/s on a late ic, so the brackets are oem. Because I needed to pick off the drive from a pulley more forward than was ever done stock, I had to move the pump forward the distance equal to the width of a pulley. I put a dog-leg in the adjusting bracket to account for this (you can see in the video). That bracket May be stock or maybe it came from something else, I can't remember, but otherwise there was room to space it forward without any trouble at all. You wouldn't know it wasn't designed this way.

Update: static timing set 5 degrees btdc. Vacuum advance then hooked up, idle set to 700 rpm, idle screw adjusted best idle. Pulling 16" vacuum. I suppose there's room for more static advance?
 
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Glad to help Mark.

The hill easy hill climb and return down the hill is a good ring seating procedure. Some good highway drives intermixed are good too..

I definitely think setting the total timing at 32-34 will take 10+ degrees of initial. Will also help the vacuum... Won't hurt anything.

Keep us updated if you can. Cool to see a project comming together.
 
This is exactly what I was hoping to find sweet project I cant wait to see what that motor turns out. Hp and torq. And I bet it will sound bad ass ...keep up the good work man


post a video I gotta hear that lol.
 
The saga continues. Since my engine does run, there is no reason not to finish installing the crankfire ignition system. Just ordered my new megajolt jr. Ignition module tonight, it should arrive next week. In the meantime, I've fashioned the wiring harness needed to operate the system. A "custom" harness is made from adding sections of wires, as needed, to the salvaged ends that plug into the coil pack, driver, and trigger wheel sensor. I am taking pics of that to show how it's done, but it is hardly rocket science. The installation on a four-banger is fairly neat. I have a standard relay on the firewall that will get its signal to "close" from the ignition wire itself, then route switched power from the fuse panel to the relay, to run the coil packs. Those fuse for 10 amps. This wire will also power the mjlt, and branches off and is fused for either 1/4 or 1/2 amp, as it's really only a fancy flash drive. The leads (pip and saw) from the driver to the mjlt is shielded security wire from hd, what, 20 cents/foot? I want to do the crank-fire ignition mod as a separate thread, so watch for it. It will have step-by-step pictures, some that have been seen here before. So if all goes well, it should appear by next weekend....
 
No different than a modern 4x4 crossing a deep creek. Clearance between the rotating teeth and the pick-up sensor is about 1 mm (0.040"), so water shouldn't be a problem. I'd be worried if mud and pebbles got jammed in there, but if it did, I think you'd have had far more serious problems first.

Once I document this, those with four-bangers will immediately see how relatively easy this becomes. The only real thing to farm out would be to have teeth cut onto a pulley sheave. I would not have had to do the fancy aluminum disc piloted into the forward-most sheave and all that had I stuck with the oem single belt drive for the water pump. I'm anal and like the dual belt setup, hence the additional fabbing. But it isn't necessary. One might not even need a welder to concoct that pick-up sensor bracket. From my pictures, one can see what's necessary and adapt as needed.

What I'm really looking forward to is someone with a v-8 to do this. Those use damper hubs and I haven't thought about how to adapt a trigger wheel to the backside, like mine used (if it even could be done), or more likely, a wheel bolted to the very front of the damper. I have one of those wheels and in fact was all set to do the equivalent of this before I got turned on to the idea of the rear sheave (a sbc guy did it and showed the way....). I'll sell it for $25 if someone's interested - I'll never use it now. That I can easily imagine, although the pick-up coil would then have to be positioned somehow to avoid belts and such, but I believe it could be done.
 
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