Alaska red crewcab build thread

nelstomlinson

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I'm going to use this thread to keep track of putting my '94 crewcab back into good running order. The engine is ragged out, will burn a quart of oil in 50 miles. It smokes terribly under load. The e4od transmission is OK so far, and other than letting the engine wear out, the previous owner kept up on maintenance pretty well. It has a new throttle cable, new radiator, nice new battery cables, rebuilt injector pump by Advance Diesel down in Anchorage, and not many problems overall. It was a farm truck, and the body shows that. It's scraped against several trees.

My plan is to get a new engine in it this summer, since that's the only major defect.

I just had a junkyard engine come back from the machine shop with 8 new sleeves and the crank balanced. I have a 90cc pump and injectors from Wes, and he should be sending me a rebuild kit and a turbo real soon now. I have a typ4 cam from Russ. I also have some nice blue Bronco seats to replace the front bench.

The previous owner thought this truck was an Alyeska truck, which means it spent years driving up and down the highway along the pipeline, idling all winter and most of the summers. It's probably already on its third or fourth engine. The previous owner had it out on a farm for some years, and he told me he hadn't realized it smoked until he brought it across the river and tried to sell it.

Here is a picture of the engine on the stand, fresh from the machine shop.

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Exhumis

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Following. I'm from Kenai and my dad lives in Palmer. Whereabouts are you? My dad takes his powerstrokes to performance powerstroke in Wasilla in case you need an extra hand. I believe they do transmission work.
 

Exhumis

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I'm in Delta Junction, so Fairbanks is way closer to home than Wasilla.
Cool. I went to UAF for a semester, loved it up there. Man don't take Alaska for granted, never knew how much I loved it till I wasn't there anymore. Like you said I bet that's an old pipeline truck, maybe a slope truck. Good luck!
 

nelstomlinson

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Some gratuitous pictures of the red truck, a couple of the other trucks and the south side of the shop. It's breakup, so there is mud and water standing in the low spots.
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nelstomlinson

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I'm taking a couple of days off to try to make some progress.
Today I replaced the piston cooling jets, and put a drop of blue Locktite on their bolts.
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Then I stuffed the main bearings in, set the crank in place, and plastigaged the mains. The worst of them was #3, at about 0.003+. IH specs call for 0.0018 to 0.0046, so that should be safe enough. I did that with a couple of the con rods, and got similar results.
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I now see that my phone camera doesn't focus correctly. Oops.

Tomorrow, I'll roll the engine right side up and start checking the gap on the rings and putting them on the pistons.
 

Exhumis

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Some gratuitous pictures of the red truck, a couple of the other trucks and the south side of the shop. It's breakup, so there is mud and water standing in the low spots.
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Breakup. Haven't heard that in forever. Good memories
 

nelstomlinson

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Today I got the rings gapped and the pistons and con rods assembled, and shoveled off the mud the gravel from the driveway that I had plowed up with the snow during the winter. This was the first really snowy winter we had for a while, and the plow truck got a serious workout, and there are piles of gravel on the mud beside the driveway where I want grass to grow.

For a NA engine, the IH manual calls for 0.013-0.023 gap on the top ring, about 0.060-0.072 for the second. That looked dangerously tight on top, and crazy loose on the second. I guess that's why our engines get so much blowby when they get old.

I called a friend and he suggested about 0.006 per inch of diameter, for about 0.025 gap on the top, a little less below. I talked to Justin at R&D, too, since I got the rings from him. He suggested 0.016 or a little more. I compromised and went with about 0.020. I don't plan to let the EGTs get crazy high, but I might slip up. It's a long hard pull out of Valdez, for example.

I'm probably not giving up much by letting the gap be a little more than the minimum, since I went with the Total Seal rings.

The arrow on the piston points toward the cam, and the notches in the piston for the valves go on the cam side. That looked wrong to me, but after I held a piston up to the head, I realized that it's right.
The big square knob on the top of the con rod goes AWAY from the cam side. The little chamfer on the big end of the con rod goes toward the other con rod on the journal.
 

nelstomlinson

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Today I got the end bits off the old cam and got them onto the new. I had a bad moment when the screw from the end of the old wouldn't go into the end of the new. I contacted Russ and he told me that both should have the same thread, so try a tap. That did it, the threads were just buggered up. The threads are 7/16NF.

I got it all back together and installed, then realized that the fuel pump cam needs to be installed with the cam section to the front of the engine. Oops, back off with the gear and the cam, and turn it around. Then I found that I had put the cam gear on the wrong way, and it was rubbing on the block. Back off with that. NOW it's all together, and all right. I have the dot on the crank gear matched to the zero on the cam gear.

I started trying to compress the rings, and screwed up the first one I tried. The Total Seal spring bit on the second ring came out of its groove and got bent. I'll have to contact Justin and see about getting another. Here's a fuzzy picture of the damage:
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I also went to the farmer's co-op and got 50 pounds of grass seed, and scattered most of it on the mud beside the driveway. Maybe by next breakup we'll have sodden grass instead of mud.

My wife's Subaru is still acting up, so I tried a different coil pack. It's still intermittent, but at least it's no worse.
 

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