Off The Shelf Engine Build

The EMPI Engine Battle has come and gone, and with the 2234 engine pretty much all disassembled, it is time to begin rebuilding it. So with a bunch of new parts, and bench full of the originals, Sam begins cleaning and reassembling this engine into what he hopes will be a very stout street engine. This time we're putting in larger 94mm pistons and cylinders to bump the displacement up from 2234, to 2332. In this video, we're just concentrating on the short block build which for the most part will be identical to what was already done. A few exceptions are the extended oil sump tube for the deep sump, the JayCee Powerflow Oil Control System and some XRP AN fittings to match. Along the way Sam find's some previously un-diagnosed issues while cleaning up some of the parts from the first version of this engine, and nearly drops a $1500 crank assembly on the ground. Enjoy the reincarnation of the EMPI Engine Battle Build!

Video Transcript

And that is the last piece of this case I needed to pull apart.

All for that little piston that just would not come out. We got some oil pump piston pullers, and I don't know if it's an error in the pistons or the tools, but you can see this is dark and shiny, so I actually had to grind this down. What do you want from a $20 tool made in China that probably isn't originally designed for this application? I don't know what to tell you other than minor clearancing might be needed. I tried magnets, blowing air, and everything I could, short of getting this tool to get this piston out of this engine case, to no avail. You get the right tool, you have to make it work. The piston's out, and here we are.

With that, I still have to pull apart our connecting rods, and I think that's about it. I did have some damage on this drive gear right here when I was pulling out the distributor drive pinion. This brass gear took a little damage, so I will pull these guys off and replace this brass gear. We have all the parts now, including stainless steel windage-style push rod tubes, we've got some velocity stack filters, billet velocity stacks, my new bearings—told you, new bearings, new bearings. JC Power Flow tapered ring compressor, we have some stage three cylinder heads, new pistons and cylinders, so this is going to be a little bit bigger engine than last time. Oh, new fan shroud.

Back at it again finishing up the teardown, some of the cleanup, some of the prep work to get our 2234 rebuilt into a 2332. I'm going to start tearing down all the connecting rods, and we're going to get everything cleaned up and get our short block put back together, hopefully today. Let's see how that goes.

All of my connecting rods, they're all numbered so I know what connecting rod came off which journal and where it's going to go once I put in some new rod bearings.

This is the wear, if you want to call it that, on our rod bearings—I’m not certain what any of this discoloration in here is from. Possibly from being over-revved? Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not an engine builder, and I’m just doing this because I can put stuff together sometimes. Sometimes it stays together, sometimes the fan blows up, or sometimes somebody drops a nut inside your cylinders—you know, whatever. So, just having fun.

No worse for the wear at all. Snap ring, let’s get that guy out of here. Here we go. I don’t like pulling those things off; that’s such a pain. Oh, we got it. Now pull these guys off. Now you can see the damage I was talking about on our brass timing gear. Is it the end of the world? No, but we can replace it.

All right, now that I’ve got the crank all disassembled, I’m going to throw this in the parts washer. It’s got some hardware and bits and some bobs and some pieces and some parts. Reset our sump plate studs, get those guys locked in place. Nothing particularly fancy about this, but I do like doing it. Bring you guys in for a closer look here. Now again, we are running a deep sump, so once these things are held on with our deep sump hardware and everything else, there’s no reason these guys should ever come out. But making certain that these studs won’t pull out later on down the road is really helpful, so that’s why I put nuts on the inside. Spring washer, nut; spring washer, nut.

Now I’ve got to drop in our oil pickup tube. This is just the standard extension tube that comes with the deep sump kits. However, as opposed to clamping it in place, I’ve actually welded it in place and pressure tested this. Now I’m going to drop this guy in place. I’m going to put a little bit of thread locker around the inside of this as I slide it in, just to make certain that we don’t have any seeps or leaks or anything else in that. Then I can go ahead and put on this top nut up here. This is just going to help seal the pickup tube to the case so that we don’t have any cavitation air and oil getting sucked into this tube. That will cause cavitation that can cause leaking or foaming on the oil—just nothing good. So, a little bit of thread locker around the outside edge—that’ll just go in there and seal up the pickup tube to the case. Now we have extended pickup tube is in place, and we can already see the Loctite sealing the edge at the case. Once it cures, it will be airtight, just like our extended pickup tube.

Over there I've got the gears warming up for our crank, and I've cleaned up our crank. While that's warming up, I'm going to clean up our connecting rods, test fit the rod bearings, and make sure everything is good to go there.

That glove only lasted 30 seconds, but I've got the gears in, with our two notches in place. Just like that, the gear is locked in. It goes that quickly. Now, let's put our gear spacer in. Let's get our brass here go. Your timing gear in place now. Alright, I'm going to finish pulling these rods apart, getting them clean. We have a new snap ring for our timing gear set. The bearing offset pin goes towards the flywheel, and since this is the bottom of the crank, it points down.

Slinger keyway—ah, dag nab it—I forgot to pull up the torque specs for these connecting rods. In the meantime, I can get these guys out and test fit them, making sure everything is happy, hunky-dory. The 073 is for number four, which will be facing this way. Tangs are always at the bottom, matching up with our numbers. Numbers, tangs, tangs, numbers—let's put some assembly lube down on our rod bolts. This helps them get torqued to the correct specs.

Nice, that feels good. Just leave that set until we actually get the torque specs.

Connecting rod 0202 is for cylinder number two. Perfecto. Let's point that way. Keep in mind, on all these connecting rods, we didn't have to do any work to balance these connecting rods; they were already balanced. Every single end weight was the same, and every single overall weight was the same. So, these are a completely balanced and matched set of connecting rods, all within one gram. I can't remember if one or two of the connecting rods were off by 1 gram each, or if it was one of the pistons, but either way, we balanced those two offset sides at numbers two and four, and the other ones went to one and three. These are all balanced, as is our crank and flywheel. This was balanced by DPR Jose, and you can see it's just machined off a little bit right there.

Alright, 26 ft-lbs is our last step. That could have been much worse. Now, let's make sure that I still have the bottom side of the crank. Numbers, numbers, numbers—check, check, check. Good to go, good to go, good to go. Alright, the crank is ready to go in the case, but our case needs to be finished cleaning up. Out of the parts washer.

We've got all four lifters on this side back where they started—numbers three, four, flywheel, etc. I had this cardboard box cut with all the positions of the bearings, lifters, cam bearings, etc., so I know where every single piece came out of. That way, when it goes back in, it goes back in the exact same spot. If I was to reuse it, these cam bearings show virtually no wear, even though I do have a new set right here somewhere—I'm not going to bother. These bearings look perfect. I see nothing on these bearings to even indicate that they were hardly even run, so we're just going to put those guys back in after cleaning them, of course.

All right, so we've got two washers on here. This drops through our distributor hole. Two washers in place, sits on that shelf, and that spins in there. Now, really important here is lining up this, whichever way you want your distributor lined up. Sometimes they line them up this way, sometimes they line up this way. It just all comes down to personal preference. However, what I like to do is use whichever distributor you're going to be using.

That sucks. I have no idea where those came out of.

The wear—look at the wear, look at the wear, look at the wear. All right, one thing at a time. Let's put some lifter clips in those to make certain that doesn't happen again.

I want number one pointing to number one so I can put our distributor in, and I know that it was already timed from the last time we ran this. But anyway, at this point, I could just go through and rotate the body to wherever I want the body to hang out, still spinning there. So wherever the crankshaft drops in now, when we drop it in, it's going to be set at number one, top dead center. Now let's take a look inside and see that, well, essentially, the D shaft right there, if you can see, is offset parallel in line with the case sway. So that's where we want our distributor drive here.

Now, we've got to clean these lifts again. Based on what I can remember, this was our number three exhaust, this is our number three intake. So what I'm going with—or number four rather, but yeah, I got my engine backwards. So now I'm backwards. All right, drop our camshaft in, crank in. I mean, half it really doesn’t matter at this point. Trigger drive’s in, drop our crank in, and our cam. Then crank's here, ready to go.

Spin this guy around here, number three is that way, number one's this way. The bottom of the crank's here, the bottom of the case is here, so this should go straight from here straight in there. I can give you guys a little shot of lubes on these mains just to give it some extra, extra loving. There we go—ow, that was only my finger—there we go, that feels golden. Let's double-check that front bearing; that one's good. All right, now drop our camshaft in once I clean it. Where's our cam at? There we are, let's clean our cam.

This is a happy little dance of making sure our distributor drive gear doesn't fall out and making sure our crank doesn't fall out. You know what, let's just put our distributor in for the moment, just to make sure that gear doesn't go dropping out. Now, what we're looking for here is to drop this camshaft in with that big mark in between those teeth right there. Then, as we run our crank around, everything's nice and smooth, buttery, like right back in between there again. Number one, top dead center, back where we started. Cam's all happy, so at this point, this side of the engine case is ready to go. Now we got to prep the other side. Let's get rid of you for the moment.

Gaskacinch and lifter clips, then hopefully I have my torque spec sheet around here somewhere. Yeah, looks like good.

All right, no washer, no washer. All right, cam bolts are the first to get tightened.

All right, we're going to get these guys torqued to 14 ft-lb and make sure that our crank rotates okay. I'm also going to throw a couple across this front, even pressure on that case. Not torqued, just snug. 14 ft-lb, 14 ft-lb, we're golden. Going to go 15, 20, 24, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 15, 20, 24. But first, I got to get another glove on and put some seals on those nuts. Why? Because that's what Volkswagen did—what do I know?

15, no problem. 20 ft-lb, 24 ft-lb. All right, back down to 14, and we'll get all the rest of the bolts around the case.

Still smooth like butter. Not tightening that one until our oil pump is in. Speaking of oil pumps, let's get that ready. We've got some fanciness to do there. We've got this guy and this guy, and this guy. This guy goes there, this guy goes there, that guy goes there like that, apparently. Hopefully, that is compatible with this oil pump.

What happened here? I just found some interesting stuff in there. That oil pump happened to pick up something right there and right there, so that was not happy. Could have been worse—yeah, that got chewed up and chunked into that oil pump, so I'm going to go see if I have another heavy-duty full-flow oil pump. I will return.

So, I've got a new pump to replace our other one. My guess is that when the nut went through the top of that piston, that piece of piston went into the engine, got sucked up into the oil pump. Yeah, I bet you that's what happened, and that's what was in the oil pump. The old one, the new one doesn't have that problem.

Before we do anything, make sure that everything fits—check, check. All right, make sure that your hole for your long gear sits at the top, so it lines up with the center of the cam.

Those little dots—all they tell you is that this side is out. Doesn't matter if they line up or not, just matters that they are pointing out. And the front cover just gets the thinnest coat of gasket seal.

14 foot-lbs. I do have a fitting for that. I mean, we're going to make a nice engine; might as well make a nice engine, right? All right, so that's that. Fuel pump block off. We'll tap that off, tap that off, tap those off just for safe measure. Whatever, let's do it.

Where did my torquey go? Mr. Torquey, where did you go? Really, pretty big tool just to up and disappear. Oftentimes, I find if I sit down, the solution presents itself.

Alright, put some pistons in place. Got a little bugger there and there. We're just about there.

Come on, there we go.

Take, take, take. Not bad for a day's work, from a pile of parts, some good, some bad, to a complete short block that spins over buttery smooth versus last time. You can see that we've got some AN fittings. These are XRP AN fittings for our oil system. I figured since our power flow system through JC is already set up for AN fittings, I'd do the same with our case fittings this time around. We're going to go ahead and put our deep sump in on the bottom side of things. You can see our extended pickup there on the back side. I'll get our flywheel seal and our flywheel in place. With that, our short block is ready for version two. Yeah, because I guess we had version 1, 1 and 1/2, 1 and 3/4 almost last time.

I think the biggest surprise obviously would have been that piece of metal that was stuck inside the oil pump. Again, probably from the hole in the piston. That piece of metal went down into our oil pump and got stuck in the oil pump. We'll see what happens tomorrow, but in the meantime, I'm Sam, this is jbugs.com. Thanks for watching, and life's full of good people. If you can't find one, be one. Later, guys.