'59 Plymouth Forum

Hello Fellows,

As promised, here come the first pictures of the 361 bottom end in the machine shop. The block was cleaned and rectified. It took the man four hours to remove all the sludge of the inside walls. Then the block was mounted on the bench and bored to 0.030” over. See the pictures before and after. What a difference!

Bore before and after….

Block before and after....

Decking the Block....

The rod journals were pretty bad. We had to remove more material from the inside than from the outside otherwise the journal would have been too thin. Now it has a little more stroke than original - something like a mini-stroker. Which one is the Mopar shaft?

Decking the block - some more pictures....
(sorry for the bad quality)

Now the fun part begins! It's nice to work with new and clean materials.

- Installing Piston Rings
- Piston ready to install
- unpack the engine block with a little help from the next generation of Plymouth owners.

Sweet pix, Stefan! More please!

Dan

Of course Dan,

here come the next pictures:

- The Oil passages won’t stop bleeding and it takes several hours to get all that sludge and dirt out

- Finals cleaning with a brush. Now the block is really clean – as new!

- When you go for a complete rebuilt, then you have to decide between parts you have to substitute and parts you can use again. When you finally install the new parts you might figure out that the parts you evaluated as “reusable” are not good enough anymore for your Project. Well, that’s what happened also to me.

- The oil pump intermediate shaft bushing had a little gab and also the shaft has some wear. I better replace them too. The sliding hammer shaft is a good tool to drive the bushing out.

- New cam shaft (P4286675)

- Creased and ready to install

- The oil pump shaft works as a tool

- Installation – slowly and carefully

- Almost done

- In – couldn’t be better

Finally the bottom end is clean and free of sludge, carbon remains or anything else that doesn't belong into. Needless to say that this is the fun part – working without gloves and no dirty fingers so far!


- Installing the rear main seal

- Crank shaft bearings (Only the top bearing has the groove)

- Ready to receive the crank shaft

The crank shaft was one of the worst pieces of this block because the #7 connecting rod bearing was completely burned. What I’m trying to say is that when I disconnected the rod there was simply no bearing in it anymore. Also the #7 rod journal was severely carved. Simply reworking all the journal to the same stroke would have weakened the whole crank shaft and was therefore not an option. In order to save the crank shaft we had to remove more material from the centre side of the rod journal, than from the side away of the centre. This way the engine has now not only .030” oversized pistons but also a 0.020” higher stroke.

- Is anyone smart enough to calculate the new displacement? -


Crank shaft – reworked and posihed – sorry for the bad quality of the images. I promisse to teach my son to take better ones.

- Crank Shaft

- #7 carved rod journal

- You won’t belief the weight of this piece until you hold it in your hands.

- Crank shaft goes in – I’m extremely careful to avoid damages on the journals.

- Caps with the new bottom bearings

- Here the reworked rod journals – What a difference compared to the picture up.

- Tighten up to 80-85 lbs