Mini Innocenti 1300 Export

Cylinder head came back, looks nice.....I taped it off and gave it the first coat of POR 15. Once the crank comes back "sometime this week" then I can start building the engine...

 

Cylinder head coming together.....

 

Yeah, I hope to have it back in the engine stand and running by next weekend, depending on when the crank comes back.

 

Paintwork is almost done, just the final cut and polish, then it's ready to come back to me for re-assembly.....

 

They're really light. Dan weighed them and several other sets of wheels he had, they were the lightest by a couple of pounds except for a set of forged racing wheels he had.

 

Yes, he did a beautiful job...he's finishing up the details, installing the door mirrors, painting the fuel tanks and so on. I should see it in about 2 weeks.

I need to get the motor built and into the stand as right now I'm using the lift as a table and a workbench

 

New mirrors and front turn signals too.....

 

I got the crank back today from the cranky guy and have started some basic assembly. Before I go there I took some pics of where he had to take metal off the crank to get it balanced. One of the rods was considerably heavier than the others and it took quite a bit of metal off to get it balanced out. I also made a little video of checking the thrust bearing clearance.....the clearance spec is 3-5 thou, we have 4.




I also did a short video about how to check your thrust washer clearance....

 

Today I put the pistons back on the rods, and put one in the block so I could establish TDC. My pointer lined up perfectly with the TDC notch in the front pulley.



Next I've started dialing in the camshaft, but I need to find the specs on this particular cam....nothing came with it.

 

Thanks, I got the cam specs tonight so tomorrow I'll get it dialed in, assuming I can get the required offset key. The car already had an offset key in it, tho it's not marked as to how many degrees it's offset - so I put a straight key in, then I'll do the measurements and see where it is with that, then I can always try the offset key I have and see what it does.

I don't know if modern auto parts stores carry offset keys or if I'll have to order it. I may need to order some shims for the drop gears and other small parts anyway. The place I usually order from in England has been having server problems which has really delayed getting parts from them, so I my have to go "local" ...

 

Ran into a snag.....as you can see in the pic above, the pistons do not come flush to the deck like they're supposed to, in fact they're 75 thou short.....that's enough to seriously affect the compression ratio.

Doing some research it all starts to come into focus......there were no small big end 1275 GT's, the crank should have had 1 3/4" rod journals.....but it has 1 5/8 - that crank has been stroked 1/8", that's why the pistons were flush with the original crank and not with this one, the new crank and rods were std.

So, I can fix it by simply decking the block.....but before I can do that I need to CC the combustion chambers so I can calculate the compression ratio. If I take it down to within 5 thou, I might wind up going too high in CR and it will ping itself to pieces or I wind up running race gas all the time. Once I know the combustion chamber volume I can determine how far I can cut the block. That will be the cheapest and easiest way to go

Or...…..I could go ahead and fix the original crank, put it and the original rods back in and have everything as it was, but I'd need a new primary gear, new rod and main bearings, and I'd have to have the rotating assembly balanced again.

Or...…...I could just buy new pistons, as when you stroke the engine you have to cut the pistons down so they don't stick over the top of the block. Then I'd have to have everything balanced again.

I'll know tomorrow after I cc the head, but I'm leaning toward simply decking the block.

 

There's more than enough meat to deck the block, just have to know how far I can go....