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Corvair College #14

My Dad and I attended Corvair College #14 over the Memorial Day weekend in Lowell, MA. (I'm pretty tired, but we got a lot of work done on my engine core.) We really had a blast! Thanks to William, Pramod, Ken, Dave, Mr. Webber, Peter and of course my Dad!

Corvair Loading

I left work on Thursday night and had a couple of kids from the neighborhood help me load my core engine into the back of my little chevy S-10 pickup.  When I arrived at my Dad's house a few hours later, we used a chain hoist to lift the engine up off the bed of my truck and left it dangling from the rafters.  I simply pulled my truck out, and backed my Dad's truck under the engine and lowered it back down.

We (actually I) decided that we should take his truck, since the four hour drive would go by A LOT more comfortably with cruise control, king cab, A/C, and plush seats.  (None of which my truck has!) Wink

Corvair Loading

At any rate, the drive to Boston was fairly uneventful.  We showed up, got checked into the hotel, and made our way over to Nitron Inc. for the start of the college.  William Wynne (shown above) introduced himself, and kicked off Corvair College #14 by saying that one of the most important things we could take away from the weekend, was gathering a list of other contacts to rely upon when trying to finish your engine and/or plane.  We were provided with a list (with e-mail addresses) of everyone that registered for the college. 

The Corvair Colleges are free.  They charged us a nominal fee for meals, which I thought might be a problem.  I couldn't figure out how they could feed us 6 times throughout the weekend on just $30.  But starting that first night, and continuing through the weekend, we were treated to a bounty of catered food!  It was much better than I could have imagined, and the availability of food at the event, meant that we could stay onsite longer to get more work done on our engines.  I want to personally thank Ken Pavlou for organizing the event.  He obviously put a lot of thought into everything, and from my perspective, everything went very smoothly!

 

Corvair Loading

The photo above shows my father talking with William Wynne's father.  (William Wynne Sr.)  Mr. Wynne was in the Navy and worked directly with Admiral Rickover, the "father of the nuclear navy."  I was a nuke electrician onboard the USS George Washington so I told Mr. Wynne that I was very familiar with Rickover's work and reputation!  Mr. Wynne was fun to talk to and it was obvious where William Wynne (the younger) got his spark for life!

By the way, we were all standing outside, waiting to see a finished corvair aircraft motor turn a prop.  (A first for me.)  We were not dissapointed!

{wmv}CC14/corvair_engine_run{/wmv}

 

There is nothing like seeing a runnig engine to get you motivated to work on your own engine.  We headed back inside the shop and began feverishly wrenching on the core motor!

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I wanted to grab a quick shot of the core that we brought with us, before we got working on it.  So I left my Dad wrenching, while I snapped a few shots.  At this point I found it hard to believe that this ball of crud could ever be used in an airplane.

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Once again, here's my Dad working, with me doing nothing but wearing a sh*t eating grin!  (I really did jump in and help eventually, I swear!) Roll Eyes

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Another shot of my Dad doing some "fine tuning" on our engine.  Once we got the baffling and top cover removed, it was apparent that a family of small creatures had once used this engine as a home.  All of the cooling fins were completely packed full of acorns, leaves, animal hair, and god knows what else!

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When we took a closer look inside the business portion of the case though, everything started to look more promising.  Everything was still wet with oil, the crank and cam turned smoothly and all of the pistons moved freely.  In fact, my father said that he thought this engine could probably still run.  The engine still had good compression, even after sitting out in the weeds for so long.

Corvair Loading

Shown here is Ken Pavlou (the organizer of CC14).  That megaphone came in pretty handy when announcing little side "clinics" from William and other Corvair groupies, but it was especially useful when announcing meals  (or in this case the end of the day's events.)

 

Corvair Loading

 Now, if you've read this far, you'll have noticed that I mentioned that everything inside the crank case was still wet with oil.  Apparently, some idiot (me) didn't bother to drain the oil out of the engine, so when we tipped the core up onto the bell housing, about five quarts of "black gold" spilled out onto everything.

Since we were so close to the end of the day, we could only pour some "oil-dry" on the mess and try to clean everything up in the morning.

Corvair Loading

Above is the very last picture I snapped before leaving on the first day.  It shows the host of the event and owner of Nitron Inc. , Pramod Kotwal.  Pramod remained very accomodating and pleasant all weekend.  He kept a smile on his face, even though jack asses like me were making a mess of his machine shop.  I really appreciated having access to his facility, resources, and expertise!  Thank you so much! 

By the time we got back to the hotel, my dad and I were unable to sleep.  We continued to work on the engine in our heads all night.  It was fun to be working with my dad on this, and it was even funnier being so excited about the work we were doing.  We kept waking up all night and saying what part we were working on next! (I guess you had to be there.) Smile

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At any rate, the next morning, we wolfed down a quick breakfast, and jumped right back into working on the engine.  We swept up the oil spill from the previous evening, cleaned up the work area, and got right to it.  We got the oil housing off pretty quickly.

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Next it was time to remove the valve covers, and then begin working on the head bolts to remove the jugs.  I had read horror stories of people pulling the majority of the case studs out when removing the heads.  So I decided to use a cold chisel to remove the nuts instead of trying to unscrew them.

The side of the engine that we began working on, had "after-market" nuts on the end of the case studs.  The cold chisel made very quick work of these, and we had the top six nuts removed in short order.  This really boosted our confidence, and people were coming around to tell us how smart we were!

When we moved around to the other side of the engine, it had the original hardened GM nuts and these were a real bear to remove with the chisel.  After about an hour though, we had them off with no damage to the stud threads or case, and more importantly, with all of the case studs still in place.

We did manage to take out one of the case studs with a rocker arm, but the case was undamaged and the threads on both ends were clean, so we should be able to put it back in with a dab of Loctite.

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Once we got the heads and jugs removed, it was time to get the case halves separated.  Here my dad is scraping crud off the case near the through bolts so that we could get to them with a socket.

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William calls this the "Corvair Core Protective Crud" and you can see in this photo that this core was definitely well protected by a half inch layer of the stuff!  Will this ever look nice?  I was still having some doubts at this point.

Corvair Loading

A quick shot of the business end prior to cleaning things up.

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You can see in this shot that the case "though-bolts" are a tad rusty. Wink  We gave them a quick shot of penetrant and let them soak.  Then we placed the harmonic balancer back into position on the end of the crank so we could play around and watch the crank and cam turn again.  It looked pretty smooth!

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This is another quick shot of the core right before we split the halves.

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Once we got everything separated, I added the cam to the core parts that had accumulated on one of my wife's "guest towels" on the floor.  (Please don't tell her, that will be our little secret.) Wink

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Dad and I did an intial "scrape-down" with some plastic putty knives that I brought to remove the majority of the gunk.  Above is what everything looked like after it had all gone through Pramod's parts washer the first time.  It's actually starting to look like new again.  Only 50 more hours of cleaning to go!

All-in-all I felt pretty good about what we accomplished on the second day of Corvair College #14.  A quick "eyeball" check of all the bearing surfaces was very encouraging also.  There was no marring, on any of the surfaces, so we left for the day, fairly confident that we had a good core motor to work with.

Everyone was commenting about what a great core I had brought with me.  I told everyone that it was my years of experience that allowed me to spot a winner immediately.  In actuality, my careful screening process involved finding a core with the right case code, that was closest to the exit of the junk yard!

My dad is a stock car builder and racer from way back.  He's rebuilt many engines for cars, but this is the first time I'd ever taken one apart.  I was really glad I had him with me as my personal technical advisor.

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Here's a quick shot that I took of both of us at the end of day two.  We were pretty tired, but very happy with what we'd gotten done.  We joked that the process of dissasembly went A LOT faster when we were running through it in our heads, the night before!

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On day three (Sunday) I ran out to the auto parts store as soon as it opened at 10:00 a.m.  I bought a bunch of engine cleaning supplies, and we got to work cleaning some of the tiny crevices in the case and covers.  This is a shot of the engine right before it went into the parts washer for a second run.

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Above is a shot of of William Jr. helping some of the other builders at the end of day three.  The Corvair College was supposed to officially end at 3:00 p.m.  but we ended up staying until four.  Roy Szarafinski was nice enough to stay with us to mic all of the bearing surfaces for us.  We found that out case was in very good shape and was within spec.

I had a six hour drive ahead of me, but we left the college in high spirits.  I need to pour through that Clark's catalogue they gave me, and start ordering parts!  Anyone got a couple thousand bucks I can keep? Tongue out

At any rate, stay tuned.  You'll soon be seeing me putting this thing back together.  With a whole lot of help from my dad!