Video

no fittings

It is a no brainer, absolutely. You learnt early, fantastic

That would be correct but this had a GTR XU-1 cam specs which is 10deg

That might be correct for some but.....EH/HD (149 & 179) were 5 degrees, HR (161 & 186) were 7deg, HK/T/G quotes 6 to 8 & HX/Z can be either 3 or 5 depending on transmission. Yes I have all the factory books.

Yeah there are a few different specs depending on engine/transmission combos. I sold my early books on tuning specs & only have LC torana on, HK on & VC commodore on. Without specifics they range from 3 to 10 deg. I must have fluked the 5 deg spec on this 202 from HQ. But yeah for those following the comments you should just check the specs of your engine. But & there is usually a but. These specs are from the era when we used leaded fuel. 50 yrs on almost all engines built now have more compression thanks to multiple shave jobs. Initial timing may require some tweaking in certain circumstances & centrifugal advance may require re-adjustment. It is a suck it & see these days but if you stick to standard specs for initial fire up, that will be satisfactory until the motor is fully run in, then you can play with timing settings. Thanks for clarification on timing John.

@@mbsoldschool 10-4 that.

it was an old cam put into an old engine that is not going into a car. It will be a test engine for the owner so he can play with different things. The cam won't wear out during it life time of probably 20-30 hrs. What your engine builder told you was 100% correct. If not done correctly the lobes will wear out in 20K

Wrong.

Um, I don't know what to say to that. I had to check that you commented on the right video. I think you need to do some more reading on the subject as that is how most mechanics static time a points ignition system. My mate is hooking up a radiator to the engine & I will return with more videos covering, centrifugal advance & I will use a timing light to confirm the static timing in this case is perfect. How to adjust a carby is also on the agenda. I hope you don't come back with the mixture screw has nothing to do with fuel supply at idle. ha ha ha only joking.

@@mbsoldschool Yes use a timing light , you can crank it over with our spark plugs in, just a lead with a plug on it on the engine, adjust it and the timing will be accurate, iv been doing that for over 50 years of engine building

Each to their own. I have been static timing engines for 45 yrs when the distributors have been removed or after engine re-builds and it is always within 1 deg. On new engines I also primed oil pressure so I don't have to crank it unneccessarily like you have been doing for the past 50 yrs. I like the engine to start straight up & know all is good for 20 mins of cam run in time.

I bring the oil pressure up first, and fit HEI to holden engines that run on points, happy days

I know what you mean. The pin hole in the shaft is centred as it is in the gear, so the gear can go on either way. If it was not centred you would not be able to drive the pin through if the gear was on 180 out. Some other makes of dizzies they are offset & only go one way. Sometimes it is better to mark its position before removing it so it goes back exactly as before. Lets say the gear is fitted 180 out, then all that happens is the distributor body will sit a few degrees out of normal position to get the timing correct. This is not noticeable. If you are concerned about it, drive the pin out & turn the gear 180 & drive the pin back in, it should go in as easy as it did in the other position, so it makes no difference as far as fitting goes, just the few degrees of alignment that is adjusted out in the timing anyway.

@@mbsoldschool thanks mate for the reply! I did mark it but I know the previose owner had it apart before me getting the engine so wanted to check if there was a correct orientation, a weeks time i get the block back fully rebuilt so I've been cleaning and checking the dizzy and sorting the tripples throttle linkage so hopefully smooth sailing. Again thanks for making this good vid man

Yeah, its bad isn't it. Shit camera operator, ah wait that's me. ha ha ha

Most certainly on a new re-build. I used engine assembly lube on this one.

OMG, you still have a Mallory.

Shit yeah, seen that happen with my very eyes at an auto electrical shop I was visiting in Brisbane when I was a 3rd year apprentice. It turned out to be a cracked diaphram in the fuel pump, just filled thew sump up with fuel when it was running. They shut it down as I got there & then re-fired it when I got out of the car & bang. It blew the sump apart. Nice bang. Thank-you for that point as it is something to be very careful of particulalry in the same scenario as what I just did.

When I had my shop in Gladstone I used a pressurised container for just that purpose. It was perfect as you know.

On many engines filling the filter may not guarantee that the oil gets to the suction side of the gears. Filters are always on the discharge side. The suction side requires lube. We fill the filters to lessen the time it takes to get full pressure.

@@mbsoldschoolrighto, I guess I’m going to take off the oil pump then and do as you suggested. Same 202 engine, I’m about to lower it onto the engine mounts so only a week or so before firing her up.

Yes that's a good idea. My mate just came over this morning & we were talking about the oil pressure failure. He did exactly that, filled the oil filter believing that would be primed. So during the filming when I asked him if it was primed he said yes. Well we know that did not work.

@@oo0Spyder0oo Hold the bus! Holden Red Motor has nonreturn valve paper element filter. With fresh (dry) engine, problem is getting pump to suck AIR up pick up pipe against gravity until oil reaches pump. A wet oil filter makes it virtually impossible for "dryish" (unprimed) pump to push air through ahead of oil. Never allow any Holden Red Six or V-Eight to fire up until AFTER you KNOW oil pump is pumping oil or bearing (mostly cam, then big ends) will be scuffed & damaged drastically shortening bearing life. Here's the procedure: Leave spark plugs OUT. Pour 1 dessertspoon of engine oil into each plug hole so new rings don't tear up bore on initial cranking. You can even leave push rods & rockers out... (optional but not really necessary)... Leaving plugs & rockers out takes the valvespring load off the cam, protecting it & it takes huge load off starter motor allowing crank & oil pump to spin faster to help suck that oil up. Get everything else done. Fit oil pump last & just before you're ready to find oil pressure. Use plain engine oil, just a few drops on the two axles in the oil pump. Install the driven pump impellor gear. Mix 1 desertspoon oil with 1 desertspoon wheel bearing grease in a coffee cup until you have a sloppy paste. With pump open face up pour just enough grease slop into pump & rotate impellors by hand until all teeth are coated forming a fairly airtight seal as they rotate. Never add too much grease! The pump has to push that grease out as oil gets sucked up against gravity. You don't want grease ruining the viscosity of your engine oil as a contaminant. The biggest danger is the pump must force the grease through that paper filter element! Too much grease WILL plug your filter! Bolt cover plate lightly onto pump & bolt pump onto block. Wind filter onto pump with fingertips until filter seal meets pump face, THEN BACK FILTER OFF ONE FULL TURN. This leaves an air gap just beyond the pump for that bastard air to escape as you crank that engine. Leave oil pressure swith OUT! . . . Air must escape there too! Get everything above right. Use the best battery you can get hold of. A truck or 4X4 battery with at least 600 CCAs (cold cranking amps) is best. Crank her over until you see oil escape between the pump & the filter... PUMP IS PRIMED! Stop cranking. Tighten filter. Crank again. See oil exit via oil pressure switch hole & stop cranking. Oil is now pumping through galleries. You must see it exiting that oil pressure switch hole to get confirmation everything is OK. Fit oil pressure switch, pushrods, rocker gear, spark plugs & know with absolute certainty your engine is safe to fire up. Have spent over 45 years in bed with Early Holdens. I love 'em. You take good care of them & they love you back a hundred times more. Best of luck with your engine. I hope she gives you maximum enjoyment. Just watch out for clods with dumb ideas. PS: Filling the oil filter on a fresh (dry) engine is a no no. It's damn near impossible for a high mounted Red Motor oil pump to push air through a wet paper oil filter element. Follow the above proceduce & your little motor will love you for it. If you need help to tune it, leave a reply here. I'll happily guide you through that tricky process too. You can easily tune it yourself.

Holly smokes, that is just way to much work for a simple job. I will stick with what I have been doing for the last 45yrs. In saying that though I think a total amateur will benefit from how you do it, they won't go wrong. I am sorry but I don't agree with your PS statement. The air will push through the filter. There is no evidence anywhere that I know of that says any different. Since I was a tuning specialist for the last 45yrs I think I know how to tune most cars but thanks for your offer of help. Very soon I will be tuning that engine so it should be up your alley to make sure I am doing it correctly.

Yep. It is a case of customer knows best, but in this case a mate. Going from what he told me, it was a used cam and I could see that as I fitted it for him and filmed it but the video got screwed up & I hope to somehow salvage it one day. So I say where are the original lifters marked for each lobe. Ah they are in the shed all mixed up. Well best to fit new lifters then which is better than mixing up old ones. At least they are spinning as they should. The engine is a play toy for him so service life is of no concern for him as it is not going into a vehicle, but a fair point to ask the question as it is not within the common teachings to do what I did, but how many people have done it. (plenty) I think I was more interested in the firing up and discovering that the owner through no fault of his, lead me astray a bit to discover a few things that he did not do correctly as you saw, no fuel in the carb & no oil pressure. Simple yet important details that if that was a new motor it would have been considered a very poor start up. It is clear that when a mechanic works with a customer things sometimes don't go as they should but take the customer out and all goes perfectly, funny that.

Oh crap, I did not know that. That's an extra $30 & you get 1698 litres more. Shame that my regulator won't fit the D bottle. Oh well live and learn.

@@mbsoldschoolworth getting an argon regulator from total tools, Bunnings or toolkit depot etc, don’t cost too much. Then get a welding trolley and put the bottle and welder on and you have a complete mobile welding setup. The small bottles are great for one off jobs where you may never do a weld for another few years. Having a setup encourages you to do more, car repairs, sculptures or other creative projects. Comes in handy for making your own tools, I made one to put heavy duty springs in the 202 recently, none of the other tools could cope.

You don't have to but you can prime them. Put some oil in a container deep enough to submerge the lifter. Put lifter in and using a pushrod or something blunt, push the lifter in & slowly release it. Repeat until lifter is close to solid. Then install into engine.

Thanks for your comments. I wish I could make them shorter, but I am always wary of missing something important to say. It is all adlib with no thought or plan so I guess they are a bit to long because of this. I am working on it. Cheers

There is a spring there as per my video. When you turn the engine off, over the next few minutes the lifters that are in contact with the lobe area of the camshaft will bleed down. The valve spring is much stronger than the internal spring of the lifter. Over the next few revolutions of the engine while starting, the lifters will bleed up with oil pressure taking up the clearance created by the bleed down. The ticking noise you hear for a second or two on start up is this process.

I appreciate that!

I got that from cheapautospares in Townsville 20+ yrs ago. Should find one on E-bay I should imagine. they still do scratch a little bit because of metal to metal contact, but if a scratch bothers you then get a small bit of thin rubber mat & glue it to the bottom where it makes contact with the retainer. It should last for 12 valves.

⁠@@mbsoldschoolI should have said gouged more than scratched! But of course, a patch of rubber under it should suffice too. Good one.

Hi, firstly replace the cam & crank gear as a set. The reasons are these. the key should be a firm fit into the cam usuallly requires a light tap in with a hammer. The key should snuggley slide into the cam gear. Should be able to slide it up & down the keyway slot. So the key is not a press fit in either component. The cam gear is a press fit and will take a few tons of pressure to press it on. Taking it off with a screwdriver is definately to loose a fit. If it has creeped forward, then you must have a lot of freeplay on the retaining plate. The clearance between the cam gear, plate & cam should be around .006". Don't quote me on that though, you should find that spec somewhere on the internet. You would have been experiencing a lot of timing variations with the clearance being so big, not to mention that the lifters would have ridden on the wrong area of the cam lobes with it moving forwards & backwards all the time. The second question is definately line up the dot to dots on the cam & crank when the No.1 piston is on TDC. When you line up the dots, you will find that the engine will be on compression/firing on No.1. There is no fine adjustment of cam timing unless you have a crank gear with advance & retard keyways which some of the alloy gears have and they use dot to dot anyway. To be fair the camshaft postioning methods I talked about are for setting tappets not installing a camshaft, but the TDC method can be interpretted for good use to fit a camshaft. The only way to tell if your cam is positioned correctly is to use a degree wheel with the cam specs to check lobe timings are correct. Hope I answered your questions. Cheers Mike

That’s a great response, thank you. Yes I have seen that it usually has to be pressed off and on so it does appear the whole lot needs to be replaced. The engine seemed to run ok for the brief time I had it prior to my restore. I think it was just tight enough to have kept it going though. Looks like some spends to be done there then. Thanks for the quick response, your videos are a great tome of reference for people like me. Cheers

@@mbsoldschoolin my searching I come across the crow cam and gear sets a lot, any opinion on these? I suspect mine is one of these but can’t see any stamp with their name anywhere. Just concerned they don’t match too well as the gear is an item you can buy separately so unsure of how well they fit with their cams. Their instructions do mention making the gear hot to help in putting it on. Know any other brands and dealers you can recommend? I’m in the west and not a lot of manufacturers this side. Cheers.

get any brand you want but must get as a set. Yes heating up the cam gear will help fit it but you must use a press to get the clearance of the retainer plate correct.

@@mbsoldschool They sell a kit which inc HD springs, retainers, seals, pushrods, cam and the gear so I guess I will have to get one of these. I have a 30 ton press so all good there, will have to see what the clearance needs to be. With the current one being so easy to tap on I'm guessing someone removed the old fibre gear and just added the alloy one to the existing cam, probably wasn't a great fit to begin with.

the geometry is different but with the same result. The mark of travel on the valve tip is what you would do for a V8. From my last vid you will know how to tell what needs to be done to correct errors.

Thankyou, I am trying to understand the Yella Terra shaft mount non adjustable hydraulic type. Your knowledge is of immense help.@@mbsoldschool

check out the vid I did on 202 geometry as well to get a better idea of how to proceed

yep, you are correct. In the background I did do a few checks that never made it to the edit table. One of my very first attempts at filming what I do. If I was to do this again today, it would be very different & cover a bit more of the finer points. Thanks for your comments.

To start with, I am not at all familiar with your engine, so have no idea whether you can adjust the lifters or not, but in theory hydraulic lifters all work the same. Oil pressure + the internal spring is what keeps the adjustment at zero lash. So make sure your oil is changed regularly & you use the correct oil for your climate conditions. For a lifter to rattle it is obviously not pumping up correctly. Causes can be as said bad oil or incorrect grade (to thin), check valve in base not sealing off but is OK when oil is thick (cold engine), adjustment (if adjustable) is borderline loose. You could try a oil additive called 'lifter free" or something like that, run it for 15-20 min & then change the oil & filter. If the problem is still there, then narrow it down to which lifter it is or just replace them all.

I was waiting for someone to question the oil in the dashpot. You are correct in that from factory they came out dry but there is a very good reason why the oil should be there in the first place. Admittedly not all engines require the oil. Generally high performance vehicle may get away without oil & some don't. The oil used can be from very fine machine oil to blends of heavier oil depending on the needs of the engine. The oil prevents the piston from raising to quickly, preventing flat spots. It works like an accelerator pump. The throttle opens suddenly, the air flow increases but fuel being heavier lags behind. Stopping the piston raising straight away allows time for the extra fuel to enter to create a richer mixture momentarily. So in essence you have control over the accelerator pump by changing the oil viscosity used in the piston damper.

@@mbsoldschool I remember back in the day that literally no one could tune these set ups properly, even Holden dealers. Looks like you've shone a light on why. That dreaded flat spot!

@@WascallyWabbitt You had to teach yourself. They weren't a bad carby, once you got your head around them.

Glad you enjoyed it!

well you need to check a few things. Firstly you adjusted to zero lash, but did you tighten a further 3/4 turn. If you did & rattle came back, then check the bolt/nut has not unwound itself from where you set it. If all is OK with the first two, then you may have a blockage of oil flow into the lifter which probably may show up as lack of oil in the rocker fulcrum. If there is plenty of oil then it may be the lifter itself. A bottler of lifter free from wynn's or similar may remove any junk blocking the lifters.

You are correct. The rocker I used in the video was an original XU-1 rocker arm.

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks for your comment. If you have a flat spot, then use machine oil & see if that improves. If a small flat spot is still there then mix a couple of drops of engine oil to the damper until the flat spot is gone. Your right not all CD's have the pin but just insert a small screwdriver under the piston and lift it a few mils to achieve the same thing.

Your right they came with no oil in the dash pots from.the factory, it's a XU1 you want them too open fast.😊

Yep, no oil in dampeners as stipulated by GMH service manual.

I know, I know. It was a mate & I was not in business anymore, so reputation was no longer an issue for me.

@@mbsoldschool I to am retired and 74 years old and still do carbies for our local car clubs. Why let your retirement spoil your credibility and name. Then you put it on You Tube 🥴

What a bunch moaners

Thank-you. Pretty much one of my first video attempts from 20yrs ago.