I've been able to get more work done on assembly of this engine over the last couple of days. After getting the backing plate glued into place, I started assembly on the timing components. I put the chain tensioner in place in order to get the chain installed, so I could install the upper chain guide. A photo of the tensioner is below, showing the top section of the tensioner where I brush some machinist's blue on the part. You can see the grooves in this factory piece, showing where the chain has rubbed on it in the past. I like to keep the chain tight enough so that you don't see this kind of rubbing, so with the machinist's blue dye on the top of the tensioner, you can pull the inspection plate on the right side of the front cover and look at the tensioner to see if there are any witness marks in the dye after the engine has run for a while. If there are, I usually will tighten the chain tensioner bolt an eighth of a turn or so, re-mark the tensioner with dye, and then run the engine again and look for contact. I just keep doing that until there is no contact between the chain and the tensioner during a dyno pull.
After installing the tensioner I put the chain on, and then installed the upper chain guide. Next I tightened the tensioner so that the slack was out of the chain; you don't want to go any tighter than absolutely necessary here, because the front cover is not yet installed and you don't want to pull too hard on the nose of the stub cam. You just need to have enough tension so that the chain doesn't droop between the two cam gears. Here's a photo of the guide installed before the chain was tightened:
The upper chain guide has to be adjusted so that its nylon rubbing blocks are just a whisker away from touching the chain, as shown in the photo below. There are two bolts that hold the chain guide in place at either end, and the chain guide is slotted so it can be moved up and down with respect to the chain:
These chain guides are aftermarket units. The rivets used to hold the nylon rubbing blocks to the sheet metal of the guide stick up from the top of the chain guide by a fair amount, and this will interfere with the front cover during installation. Before installing the guilde you need to grind those rivets down a fair amount, as shown in the photo below:
Next you have to install the lower chain guide, but in order to do that you have to remove the tensioner arm, because the lower chain guide bolts are behind it. Fortunately you really don't need the chain tight to install the lower chain guide. The bolt holes in the lower chain guide are oversize so that it can be moved around a little bit; you need to try to make the lower chain guide nylon rubbing blocks parallel with the rubbing blocks of the upper chain guide. Here's a photo of the lower chain guide installed:
Next I reinstalled the tensioner arm and snugged up the chain so it was close to its final position, and then started installing some of the other bolts. On the right side there are two bolts that go into the block and the holes pass into the water jacket. One of them is the lower water pump bolt, which goes on later, but the other is a bolt normally used for a stock FE timing cover, and this bolt is not accessible once the front cover is in place. You don't want a leak here, so put sealer on the threads and also around the head of the bolt after it is tightened in place. See the photo below; sorry for the poor quality:
For my engines I install supplemental oiling tubes to do a direct shot of oil onto the fuel pump gear bearing and the tensioner arm gear bearing. I like to do this because these bearings are normally oiled only with splash, and at idle I don't think there's a lot of splash in this area. Since my engines are all run on the street for extended periods, idling for long periods is required, so I like to provide supplemental oil. On each side of the engine I tap into the front oil passage coming out of the head, and run a small inverted flare tube up to the bearing as a squirter. I pinch the end of the tube so there is about a .010" orifice there, so only a small stream of oil will come out; you can see this during pre-oiling. Here's a photo of the left side squirter tube close to its installation position, and then a shot of it from the side showing it pointing to the roller bearing behind the fuel pump gear; you have to oil this one from behind, because the gear blocks access to the bearing from the front:
Here's the same arrangement for the bearing in the tensioner arm, which can be oiled from the front:
The photo below shows everything installed, ready for the front cover installation. The two studs shown in the photo go into the block, and it is best to cut up a scrap piece of gasket and put it between the block and the backing plate before you tighten it in place, otherwise you will be trying to distort the backing plate and front cover a little when you tighten those bolts. The small piece of gaskets basically spaces the backing plate out from the block the same as the normal gaskets between the block and heads, and the backing plate:
If you'd done everything right the front cover will then just slide into place along the two studs and over the stub cam nose. Mine went together very smoothly. This is a Pond front cover, and is an excellent piece compared to some of the other front covers that are available:
Note that the water pump is not yet installed, but the bolts are used with spacers to tighten the front cover against the gaskets between it and the backing plate. At this point the stub cam is not yet in its final position; in order to pull it forward and install the snap ring, you need to put a bolt in the front of the stub cam and pull it forward with a pry bar, as shown in the photo below:
Last thing I did before calling it quits was to set the valve covers and the sheet metal intake with the Dominators that my friend Greg lent me to try out on the dyno, just to see how it would look:
I should be able to finish the engine up by the end of this week, then put it on the dyno on Saturday. We'll see what happens...
