mikew
Member
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- edmond, ok
So I picked up a used engine for an old GSA Deuce with a tired motor that I'm bringing back to life.
One of the Steel Soldiers members was kind enough to find one and deliver it to me.
The motor was delivered strapped down on a trailer, sitting on some old tires. On the last turn into my placed the motor slipped and rolled onto it's side... no damage done other than the Exxon Valdez sized oil spill!
Before installing the engine I thought I'd do some minor checks.
So I started by putting a breaker bar on the crankshaft bolt and make sure it turns. It turned great, and almost a full 360 degrees.... but not quite! It came to a firm stop, something was inside a cylinder.
After stripping some parts and shoving a borescope down the injector holes the problem became obvious.
BUGS
And I do mean bugs!
Even though the intake had been sealed up for storage, somehow mud dauber wasps had built a pretty impressive colony inside the intake. When the motor rolled over on the trailer a hunk of wasp nest fell through the open intake valve of the #3 cylinder. And when I turned the motor over with the breaker bar I squished the mud/clay into a blob of incompressible material, thus stopping full rotation.
I tried in vein to blow out the debris by shoving a tube, hooked up to the shop air, down the injector hole and through the open intake valve.
So I finally broke down and pulled the head.
Attached are pictures of the foreign invaders in my engine. It may not look like much material, but the piston get so close to the head at the top of it's stroke that it doesn't take much to stop it.
The upside to this adventure is that the wasp nest was deep enough inside the intake that I would have never seen it, and who knows what damage would have happened if I had started the engine!
One of the Steel Soldiers members was kind enough to find one and deliver it to me.
The motor was delivered strapped down on a trailer, sitting on some old tires. On the last turn into my placed the motor slipped and rolled onto it's side... no damage done other than the Exxon Valdez sized oil spill!
Before installing the engine I thought I'd do some minor checks.
So I started by putting a breaker bar on the crankshaft bolt and make sure it turns. It turned great, and almost a full 360 degrees.... but not quite! It came to a firm stop, something was inside a cylinder.
After stripping some parts and shoving a borescope down the injector holes the problem became obvious.
BUGS
And I do mean bugs!
Even though the intake had been sealed up for storage, somehow mud dauber wasps had built a pretty impressive colony inside the intake. When the motor rolled over on the trailer a hunk of wasp nest fell through the open intake valve of the #3 cylinder. And when I turned the motor over with the breaker bar I squished the mud/clay into a blob of incompressible material, thus stopping full rotation.
I tried in vein to blow out the debris by shoving a tube, hooked up to the shop air, down the injector hole and through the open intake valve.
So I finally broke down and pulled the head.
Attached are pictures of the foreign invaders in my engine. It may not look like much material, but the piston get so close to the head at the top of it's stroke that it doesn't take much to stop it.
The upside to this adventure is that the wasp nest was deep enough inside the intake that I would have never seen it, and who knows what damage would have happened if I had started the engine!
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Good post!
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