menkio

I know this is more of a GDD topic, but i feel more at home here. Mods, earl, etc please feel free to move if deemed so. Anyways, i'm almost done building my first engine. I have to say this is some of the most fun i've ever had. I've balanced every part, learned to do my own headwork, did my own headwork. Sanded down ever nook and cranky just so i can have a spotless engine. Tripple checked every figure, over and over. So what are some of the experinces you guys have had building your engine. I know most people have a shop do this for them, which is kinda sad in some respects, but shrug. To each his own tree.

redzcstandardhatch

my first engine build was with a buddy of mine, and we just threw the thing together. pretty crap-tacular job. it was more of a "re-build" than a "build". no measureing, cleaning, tolerance checking, etc. needless to say, the rings were toast quickly, as they werent gapped at all correctly, they were actually overbore rings we found out. 10,000 smoky miles later we pulled the engine, overbored it .020, and actually built it correctly. its still running strong as ever, probably has 15-20k on it now. i love building engines.

ComputerJLT

my first atempt at any engine work was on my civic; i bought it with a blown hg on the a6; replaced that and reused the headbolts and the gasket didnt last 3 days :-/ took it all back apart; got the head checked for warpage and bought some arp studs and put it back together; ran that for quite a while until one day i thought i cracked a piston and it turns out the car already had 4 cracked ringlands and i had just finished off the top compression ring on one of the pistons. oops.

so i go to rebuild that motor with new pistons rings; hg; rod bearings etc etc. Well being that i'd never even seen a rod bearing in real life up to this point i had no ****** clue what i was doing so i didnt check clearances and spun the #3 rod bearing in about 50 miles. oops; chalk up another one to experience.

So i retired that motor and picked up a complete z6 longblock in need of a rebuild. put it all together; checked clearances a few times but threw the slightly used rings i had in my a6 in the z6; found out the z6 head had bent valves on all but 1 cylinder; threw my a6 head on there; finally tackled all 60k electrical gremlins and the car was strong as hell for about 2 weeks; made me so damn proud that i had built it. But now that engine is on its last leg the reused rings were never gapped so they expanded under boost and nuked a ringland or two. ooops again; thats +2 for experience. Plus my little td04h turbo is shot.

Now i'm in the process of aquiring all the parts to build a budget "built" z6; .02 over vitara pistons; hasting rings; early d16a1 rods; posted block; all machined balanced and i'm getting the z6 head ported. plus i'm upgradding to a much bigger turbo; i/c; charge pipes and 3" open exhaust.
I ran obd0/turboedit with the a6 on a tuned map (guy had a similar engine/turbo) plus i tweaked it with my wideband then sold the wideband for the z6 longblock. Then I upgraded to obd1/uberdata with the z6 and am going to stay with obd1 and pickup another wideband to tune my car with. i'm probably going to wind up tuning the z6 from scratch with a 3-bar map sensor and take my sweet *** time I think part of the reason this last motor died so fast was i had no semi-tuned maps to use as a base with my a6/z6 wierd bastard engine.