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16 August 2012

Chrysler Cleaning, Part 2

So, I left off with some nasty parts and some new parts. Today I give you more nasty parts and some cleaned up and "fixed" parts.

Clean, new parts in boxes!

EW!

 Those are the rocker shaft bolts. While cleaning this set, for the front "V" of the engine, I found this rather disconcerting wear:



 Ugh . . . What a mess. Since I don't have the luxury of being able to find those parts for sale easily, I am going to weld them up and file them flat, which is actually going to be better in the long run than the stock material.

This is what the sides of that spacer thing looks like with "normal" wear:

I didn't actually like that. Chrysler didn't even bother to to anything except stamp the piece out in a hydraulic press and install them. That just plain sucks . . . So of course I have to do something about that. Time to bust out the file! I carefully smoothed over the edges that abut against the rockers themselves like so:


 Before anyone complains about removing material . . . The nominal width of the part varied greatly meaning the stamping dies weren't made particularly well in the first place and Chrysler wasn't really concerned about dimensionality. So no, I am not worried about removing material at all, especially with how crappy this setup is.

Once I filed the sides, I put them to the sanding disc on my belt/disc sander to polish them up some more:

Hardly a mirror shine, but much, much better than before. I call that "functional polishing." If the rockers do hit the sides, then there will be much less wear as there is a greater surface area to bear the load. I also de-burred the edges. Tomorrow I will fix the really bad ones and then file and polish them, too. 

4 comments:

  1. Awesome Matt!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you, anonymous person!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can I send you my Chrysler parts to get smooooothed out..

    ReplyDelete
  4. If you really feel the need . . .

    ReplyDelete