Update 4:30 on Saturday - We have fought through several problems already. First was as we were filling the engine with water, all kinds of water started pouring out of the exhaust bolt holes in the heads. Apparently on 392 Hemis this is standard, and Joel didn't know it. With my SOHC headers bolted onto the engine, only three of the header bolts are used, so as we filled the engine with water, it started streaming out of the unused bolt holes. Joel pulled the headers off on each side and stuck some kind of a probe into each header bolt hole, and found two on each side that went into the water jacket. He plugged those with some 3/8" set screws with sealer, then bolted the headers back on. We filled the engine with water, and then the rest of the exhaust bolts started leaking; apparently even though they bottomed out with Joel's probe, they still went into the water jacket. I took this opportunity to question Chrysler engineering
I mean, really, header bolts into the water jacket??
After Joel repeated the procedure and got the headers re-installed, we finally got the engine to hold water. It fired up immediately, but sounded like we had some interference rubbing going on in the bellhousing. We shut it off and pulled the started to look inside, and sure enough we could see the flywheel plate rubbing against a starter nose support that was cast into the aluminum bellhousing. Joel went in there with a chisel and cut the offending part off the bellhousing, because the starter he has doesn't even use the support. After he did that we started the engine again, and it sounded a lot better, but there was still some noise, and Joel saw some sparks coming out of the bottom of the bellhousing. We decided to pull the starter again, and sure enough we could see that the starter gear was contacting the flywheel gear. Joel added two washers to the starter to space it out from the bellhousing, and next time when we started the engine it finally sounded OK.
We warmed up the engine for about 5 minutes and Joel set the timing, but then we started to hear some valvetrain noise, so we shut the engine off and pulled the valve covers. Unexpectedly, when we pulled the covers we saw a LOT of water in the oil. We traced the noise to a rocker arm that wasn't adjusted properly, so that was an easy fix, but as I sit here typing Joel and Jeff are pulling the intake and heads, because Joel thinks the head gaskets are the likely source of the leak. We will see. Here is a photo of the engine with the valve cover off, and you can see the milky color of the oil:
Joel thinks he can get the engine fixed later this evening, and maybe we can even run a pull by then. More updates as they become available...
