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The oil pump is installed next before the front cover is added. Our engine is almost done now.
We used Permatex Ultra Gray on the back of our front cover.
The front cover is installed next.
The bolts holding the front cover on are now installed.
Next the water pump is installed. To see the details of how to assemble the front timing stuff check out our cam install article. When we finished with our engine install we started our engine up to break in the cams and ran into a problem. The engine was making a tapping noise from the top end. After many days of trying to diagnose the problem we pulled the heads to find that the pistons were very lightly hitting the spark plug ground electrodes! It was just enough to make noise but not enough to damage a thing or even close up the plugs gap! We installed some non extended top plugs and the problem was cured!
Next we took our Z to the capable folks at Church Automotive Testing to have the ECU reflashed once again to work with our much higher compression ratio. Shawn Church, bolted our car to their Dynopack hub dyno for tuning. With a Dynapak, the car’s hubs bolt directly to the dyno’s power absorption units. Without a frictional loss due to tires and alignment, Dynapak dynos are more sensitive and can load the car harder which makes them good for tuning.
