Other projects keep coming up or we needed to drive down to the valley over the weekend.
To be honest, as much as I like my Civic, I really did not want to work on her. Everything goes wrong and it is frustrating when something should be easy, but takes hours, or when I need to stop and look up instructions for something not included in the FSM and other guides.
Worse, everything regularly grinds to a halt because I need to order and wait on another part or tool.
More than anything, I worry that I will ruin something.
I have concerns. Noted. As we said in the Army, "You gotta deal with it!"
There were times when I needed to wait to work on the Civic, but I spent too much time recently trying to get the dents out of the roof of my Accord. However, I should be able to fix anything that I mess up there.
So, I cleaned the mating surfaces, cleaned out the water jacket the best that I could with Scotch Bright pads and a toothbrush, blew out the engine and the bolt holes, found the head gasket kit and other parts that I ordered, and realized that I only wrote out the disassembly instructions. They always say that assembly is reverse of disassembly, but with my engine, I want to make sure that I have everything right, and I need torque specs and stuff.
There are at least four dowel pin holes, but I only found two dowel pins. Fortunately, that is the correct number, but I only realized this after searching for others for a while, determining that none were sold up here, and it would be days before any would arrive. Apparently both are supposed to go on the exhaust side:
There are better diagrams, but this was the one provided in the first assembly instructions that I found on-line:
The guy in this video showed it and I adjusted it to be usable:
Everything checks out, but I suggest this one instead:
You wouldn't want to confuse a 3 and a 5 or a 7 and a 9.
It was surprisingly difficult to line up dowel pins and holes through a thirty-pound opaque cylinder head and then the dowel pins kept sticking in the head, so I would need to set down the head, pull out the pins, put them back in the block, align the gasket again, and start maneuvering the head again.
I got it on and then needed to pick it back up to secure the inner timing belt cover, got it back on, and then needed to pick it back up to move the intake manifold out of the way.
I had tried to follow Old School Funk's method for avoiding adjusting the timing belt, but I just do not understand how to make it work.
- You need to tighten the wire holding the camshaft sprocket and the timing belt to a broom as tight as possible. It cannot move at all.
- If you have it that tight, you run risk of breaking the wire. Then what?!
- You need to have the head machined and they need to move it from top dead center. How do you move it back without the camshaft sprocket, which is secured to the timing belt and a broom?
I always have difficulty getting everything aligned just right. It seems like the engine goes from one tooth short to five teeth too far every single time. It seems the camshaft sprocket is one tooth off, but the crankshaft sprocket is several teeth off. I guess that it shifted when I detached the camshaft sprocket from the broom and timing belt in order to adjust the head.
Now I am waiting on a new backscratcher so I can adjust the top and bottom separately:
It should be here Tuesday, which is frustrating, because I do not have any clients Monday, and I really want to finish this.
I spent all day Friday working on this. On Saturday I took my brother to the farmer's market and when I got home Mom told me my sister's dog died unexpectedly. My sister used to say that was really my dog.
I kept trying to work on my Civic, but I was useless.