Motor Maintenance

No four wheeling for me this weekend.  I noticed my motor was leaking oil pretty badly last weekend so it was time to see what was wrong. 

It took about two hours to get everything unhooked and the motor out.  While I am in there I am going to pull the A/C out and re-wire all the relays.  The rewiring plan involves making a plate that mounts under the glove box.  On the plate I will have a fuse, a power distribution block and the relays for the rock lights, ARB, headlights and starter.  I figure this should eliminate over 20 wires under the hood since only one wire from each relay will have to pass thru the firewall. Anyway, that's tomorrows project.

One other problem I have had since I rebuilt the motor is it would leak a lot of water down the side under the intake manifold.  It looks like the head gasket is the culprit.  While I have the motor out I am just going to replace all the gaskets.  I am hoping the head is not warped, the water leak only seemed to occur when cold.  If I didn't top off the radiator it would eventually stop leaking which but the water level would be a couple inches low in the radiator.

Here's a before shot of the wiring, we'll see what I can do to clean it up.

As you can see the timing belt is soaked in oil, not good.

After 5000 miles everything looks pretty good.   The does seem to be a lot of build up in the water jackets but I did run a couple bottles of block seal thru the system trying to stop the water leaks.

I had cleaned up the oil pan from the parts truck a while ago so I planned on using that oil pan to save me some time.  When I tried to mount it to the block it wasn't fitting.  Seems they changed the design of the oil pickup somewhere between 86 and 88.  

By 6pm I had nearly everything back together.  On Sunday I'll install the new timing belt, new plugs, the distributor and alternator.  I may also build a new power steering bracket to move my pump down lower since the A/C compressor is no longer in the system.

Update 4-12-02

Here's a picture of my relay panel I mounted behind the glove box.  This eliminated about 20 long wires from under the hood.  

After replacing all the seals the motor was still leaking, this time oil from the back of the motor, looked like the head gasket.   My suspicions were confirmed when I saw a drop of oil seep out and roll down the side of the block.  I did a little investigating and found out the Rock and Safety brands of head gasket are incredibly cheap compared to the stock or Felpro gaskets ($16 vs. $48).  So I picked up a Felpro and noticed a couple differences right off the bat.  First thing I noticed was the holes for the two large oil passages on the back of the block had a metal ring around them on the Felpro head gasket.  The other two I had tried did not have this.  Also the material was different, Felpro was a light gray vs. black. The Felpro also seemed to have more metal showing on the bottom but I can't confirm that.  Needles to say it looked like better gasket to me.   So far it is leak free after the first test drive (the last two leaked immediately on startup).

In preparation for Moab I built some brackets to get my side mirrors back on the Zuk (needed to be street legal in AZ).   The brackets bolt to where the stock hinges did.  I also picked up an aluminum 15x8 rim for my spare (aluminum to save weight).  I ended up mounting it on the stock carrier but when I tube the back end I would like to get it down low and centered like in the second picture.