Most of my time over the last few months has been spent on another project that's been in the family for about 39 years. It was my uncle's first car and his first build. It is a 1923 Ford T-bucket. My uncle drove it for a few years in the early to mid '80's until he rolled it on one trip up north. Then while repairing it, the original fiberglass body and interior went up in a fire. So he bought a different style body, a Fiat Topolino, to put on the frame and once he got that body, he decided to just build a whole new car. The T-bucket sat for a bunch of years, honestly, I thought it had been sold off. Then after selling the Fiat, the T-bucket frame re-appeared, another body was found, and the work began. I joined in the build at a later date. My uncle passed away in 2002 and then the car sat for a few years again, before my Grandfather and I decided to finish it. It was supposed to be done for many years now, but this year it finally returned to the road. This is the short short version of the history.
Unfortunately due to some technical issues, the engine has been swapped to a 283 (actually the original to the car), since the engine that was put in the frame by my Uncle in the mid '90's had some rather large issues. The 283 has issues of it's own though, most notably a timing chain that has 14 degrees of slack to it, so it doesn't run as well as I had hoped. So now I'm waiting to get access to another engine that a friend of mine has, but we're having a hard time getting it out of the storage place it's at currently. Hopefully within the next week it'll be in my possession.
Anyway, since there's no 60 degree V6 in it, that's about as much as I'm going to write about it.
Back to the 60 degree content...
There's still some progress being made on the LZ9, but will post when there's significant updates in the other thread.
Other than the Datsun I also have a 1985 GMC Jimmy that is/was a 60 degree V6 equipped vehicle. I plan to get it back together hopefully later this year or the beginning of next. So since the LZ9 build will take longer than I had hoped, due to many circumstances, I figure I'd throw an LX9 together use it in the Datsun for now, then move it over to the Jimmy, when the time comes.
One thing that I wanted to do with the LX9, which really started years ago when I wanted to do this with an LA1 was to add oil squirters to all of the cylinders. The LX9 has them on cylinders #5 and #6, but not the rest. So I contacted my machine shop guy, the same one who made the trans alignment pin for me, as shown earlier in this thread about doing this. With the blown up LX9 from December, I dropped that block off for some exploratory surgery. We started with the same locations as would be seen in an LZx engine, which worked perfect for the #3 and #4 cylinders, but not so well for #1 and #2. The blocks are quite different in this area between the LX9 and LZx engine for that front oil squirter. We came up with an alternate location and it looks like it's going to work, so I will be dropping a good block off to him next week.
You can see the middle oil squirter location, along with the front locations in this picture.
As you can see some exploratory machining was done. What would be the stock LZx location breaks through the side of the oil galley so it's a no go.
A better shot directly above the area. You can see how my machinist tried to use the same offset that GM did from the center line, but had to move it over a little so that the oil galley stayed intact. This location will require some reshaping of the oil squirter tubes, but that's a minor detail here.
I did drop a crank and piston/rod combo in last night and it looks to have the same clearance as the stock location from the rod and crank. I forgot to get pictures of this step.
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