ABANDONED Dodge Challenger Rescued After 35 Years Part 4 Old Engine Teardown

So last time you saw us completely reassemble the front suspension. So now the time is to put it back in the car. A couple things have happened off camera. I'll go over them here real quick. All I've really done is kind of trim out and undercoat the inside right here just to make it look a little bit nicer. And then I installed our upper control arm for PST. Now these are tubular and they'll be stronger and stiffer for over the factory stamped steel control arms. So that's what we're going to go with. So I've got those just sitting in there kind of loose just a little snug so that way we can pivot the control arm up and down without messing up our bushings. And next we'll actually take and put the entire crossmember back in. So the disc brake spindle assembly is really not all that complicated. Whenever you're going through brakes like this it's really important that you change out your bearings. Your inner and outer and they're really not expensive. They're like two or three dollars a piece. It's well worth it and these are Temkin brands so they're really good. I got all this from Rock Auto. This is from Power Stop and you get your Dorman dust caps. This is a washer that goes on the spindle and then this is the little lock nut that keeps the nut from backing out. And then our inner bearing, outer bearing, and this dust shield. So the dust shield will go on after you install your bearing on the inner side. So the best thing to do whenever you're redoing brakes if you're to reuse the calipers and resurface them then it's a very good idea to go ahead and get a new race. The thing about this thing since I bought new calipers I'm not going to have to do that. So what you do is you drop that sucker in there like that and then our dust shield. Let's tap that in there the way it sits but we need to pack it full of grease first so I just wanted to show you. Then whenever we actually install this onto the spindle it'll be kind of like this. Be careful not to scratch the rotor. On the front side again there's a race but we already have good ones and new ones installed. Then that one pops in like that followed by a washer and then a lock nut like that. And I'll show you again when I install it on the car but I just wanted to kind of go over how simple this stuff is and honestly how important these two pieces are right here because they can freeze up, get rusted, and you can see how smoothly this here rolls. If you ever get one that's stuck then it's always a good idea just to replace these while you're here. They're inexpensive, pack it full of grease, get a new dust shield. I can reuse these parts and you honestly can reuse the dust cap but I wanted it to look nice. These are from the car you can actually buy these new. They're not expensive either but it's well worth it just to replace these two items. All right here's the moment of truth. Let's see if this thing will actually hold itself up. So I think what the issue is is that I turned up the torsion bars a little bit too high. I actually set it to where it should be if it has an engine in it or they're about pretty close. So now I think what's happening is that the suspension can't travel which it's not gonna matter because it has no weight in it right now but I might just set it down just so we can kind of get an idea of what the ride height would be like. Other than that let's take a look at the car. We got our torsion bars turned up just a little bit too high but you get the idea. And that looks really good. Sorry about the shadows but it's nice to have the car rolling again. It's been I guess a little over a month now this car's been sitting over in that nice spot right there. Finally got the car back sitting on all fours rolling around and this is not the final wheel and tire selection. This is just what I put on it to make it roll. So I think what we need to do now is tear this engine apart that we've been talking about. The original 318 that came out of this car. So if you remember from part one and part two we tried to get this engine to run. Tried to unstick it but it never did so I eventually ended up pulling it and now I had it apart. I actually redid the front suspension which is what you saw me just put back in. So now what we want to assess is why this 318 would not run. My guess is that it's not a valve that's stuck. Typically when you have a valve that's stuck you can kind of work it loose but you can feel where it starts and where it stops whenever you're moving the crank pulley. This one will not budge whatsoever. My guess is beyond a stuck ring. I don't believe it's just a stuck ring. I'm starting to think that it might be the bottom end has been frozen solid. Whenever I got this car you might not be able to see it because it's dark but the oil pan was damp. I mean it was soaked so I'm starting to wonder if maybe sitting on the ground where it was it was really muddy it was really damp and it probably stayed that way for all of the 35 years it sat there. Wondering if it was able to creep up into the engine and actually stick it. So I don't know but we'll find out. First things first let's get all these front accessories off. I do need to keep up with these because at least the brackets and the pulleys will be going back on the challenger. Alternator loose. We'll pop the intake off first this way. It's just a little recap in case you haven't watched part one. What I did was let this thing sit for I'd say over a month with transmission fluid and marble mystery oil in each cylinder and I let them soak. I really let them soak for a long time because I had no idea what was going to happen with the engine and it really wasn't any help fortunately. So what I decided to do was actually pull it out. So before you say that I didn't do everything that I could have I mean I really tried. I honestly did what I thought I could do to make this thing run. Even if we were able to make it run it still had to come apart and be fixed because an engine that's stuck this bad really has to have some kind of corrosion or pitting going on in the cylinder wall if it were to come unstuck and run. So I wouldn't really have a lot of faith in the engine and if you haven't watched the other parts as well we've got a 40 over 360 with keith black hyper eutectic pistons sitting on the engine stand over here over there and that's why this thing is not on a stand it's just sitting on a tire because so I got only have one engine stand and this will do the trick. So we'll finish taking off these intake bolts pop it loose and I just wanted to you know make sure that you guys know that I really did try to make this thing run I didn't just pull it just to pull it because it is the original engine and if we could have made it run I would have rather kept it honestly I would have kept it in the car if it ran and that just wasn't the case and some people said that it could have been the belt I pulled the belt off nothing is stuck and I still tried to turn it over with the belt off of it still would not turn it's just as bad so it is literally locked up tight tight pretty simple yeah I see some rtv here looks like somebody's had the intake off before cam is worn looks like they ran it with well oil at some point but it honestly doesn't look bad can't I mean it would have ran at least or should have at least turned and we got some really heat stress cracks right here on this lobe so probably ran low on oil hopefully but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't ran so this valve cover I've already pulled I know it's clean so far just based on what I've seen here the engine should have ran that's what makes me same story brand new over here reeks of gas so honestly these lockers they look brand new little pro tip when dealing with these chrysler locker arms it's best work your way out don't loosen them up all the way out one at a time work your way around that way that the pressure is taken off evenly because if you do that say you were to loosen up all these and you had one left more than likely you can break a rocker shaft I actually had one on my truck break because somebody looked like it tightened down all the way on one side but didn't tighten anything down the other side so it's best to work your way out you can actually feel it tightening up these other bolts as you loosen it up so be careful what you're doing think about it because this pressure it can break things and this stuff isn't meant to bend so the same process goes when you're putting it back on pick them up roll over you want to keep our bolts from falling out here set these to the side that sucker's bent right there look at that probably can't tell I'll roll it on the ground and let you look at it that sucker is bent bet you that might be your culprit that one's bent that one's bent that one's bent that one's not that one's good that one looks good that one looks good let's roll these on the floor and I'll show you what they look like pretty much all of our push rods are bent in some way so I'm going to show you one that's not so bent you can kind of see how it rolls fairly easy let me grab one that is very bent you see that you can see the curve in the push rod there so it doesn't want to roll as easily very bent pretty much all of them are bent to an extent something that's interesting and kind of unique to chrysler is the fact that these are solid push rods they do not oil through the push rod like a gm they actually oil through the head fills in the rocker shafts and the rocker shafts will actually fill in the rockers onto the springs as opposed to a gm one where it actually will fill in through the push rod see the hole in there but these are also hollow which means they like to bend chrysler on the other hand it's a lot harder to bend one of these push rods unless something is sticking and you see on the end of it it's solid so it does not oil through there so for bending push rods on this thing we've got quite a problem you see I soaked these suckers I mean I had it full people said that I hydro locked it but it never changed I mean I had it soaking and as soon as I put this atf in it I still turned it over with spark plugs in it spark plugs was out and nothing changed I mean I never even stuck the spark plugs in I never bolted them in I just had them hand tight so I don't know remember how I said this engine would have to come apart even if it still ran look at this all this is sitting on top of the cylinder that is not good that would have been a it could have been a catastrophe it might have blown out the exhaust but I don't know that's a lot of stuff sitting on top of the cylinder so that kind of makes me wonder I wonder if it was actually burning oil and it was running low so that's why I didn't have any up here but the cylinder walls have they have surface rust on them but nothing crazy there's still kind of some rough spots in there so this thing is full of sediment on this cylinder at least this one over here you can't see it in the camera but it it's it's pretty rough as well so it very well could be stuck piston rings so I brought our cylinder head over here and I just flipped it over to look at it something that I'm noticing though if you look at our intake valves look how these are fairly clean this I mean it's got some oil but it's still pretty clean pretty clean and you come in here this one's got a lot of surface rust on it so that one could be a problem there that could have been a problem cylinder at least on this side and each exhaust valve is pretty shot oh there's our atf build her up man he's coated wow cylinder walls all have surface rust on them they're just junk all in these cylinders I think it's just a combination of a lot of different things that just allow for this engine to be terrible basically look at all that stuff that would be coming out of this engine so the rings are probably just I mean they're just shot look at all this trash I'm getting out of here I see that all that's sitting in the engine right there on top of the cylinders they all have surface rust on them and it's not good could this engine run absolutely if we took it apart and you know actually looked at it because that's the thing about it it's got a ton of surface rust just sitting on the cylinder walls I can you can hear that listen that's me scraping the inside of the cylinder wall that's not good and ring ridge it's got the ring ridge look at this one you might be able to see it you zoom in look at that surface rust is building up on that so this one was probably stuck open it's starting to allow moisture get inside the combustion chamber all right here we go final test see if she'll finally turn without anything holding it I'm just tightening the bolt regardless should not be like that the engine is seized so a lot of you guys will want me to figure out what was wrong with it I'm going to tell you what's wrong with it it's stuck it is rusted shut and there is nothing that is going to make this thing spin without tearing it apart and actually doing some machine work to it and that's not what I want to do it is the original engine I'm not throwing it away I'm not going to get rid of it I'm going to keep it but I'm not going to put it back in the car if I sell the car wherever I sell it to you can have it and they can put it back in there but I don't want to spend a dime on this engine and I've got this sitting over here this is the 360 I was telling you about 40 over with Keith Black hyper eutectic pistons you can see no rust in this one and it rotates just fine I've tested it many times so when I calculate it with the stock compressed head gasket thickness you get around nine and a half to one so if you run a little bit thinner head gasket we could probably get around 10 to 1 and with a relatively mild cam maybe a duration around 225 or 230 at 50 we can have really good dynamic compression this thing and I think it'll have really strong low and mid-range something that you're going to need when you're going around twisties and corners and turns and that's what we want to build this thing for it's not going to be ridiculous check out the how far down the hole this thing is zero so that's why I'm not going to waste any more time talking about this 318 just to reiterate there you go look inside that see all that rust on the cylinder wall same thing over here I have this thing soaking and soaking it's even been soaking for another month on top of the original month so yeah there you go that's it farewell good friend and that's going to do it for today's video guys really hoped you enjoyed this one got a lot done today we got the front suspension and the brakes back on and all bolted in and I'm not going to brag again but man it doesn't look really good and also we took the original 318 brought it in the shop tore it down and found out why it was stuck in the first place and I'm going to assume that it's going to need a lot of work to come back on the road and that's not something we won't do one day but as for right now 360 is going in the car anyways guys hope you enjoyed the video if you like the video please leave a like down below if you have a question for me feel free to leave a comment you can also send me an email to the very end of the video you can send your projects that same email order your t-shirts and your stickers it's straight besides the dense t-shirt sale is about to end and it is a pre-sale so as soon as we get the certain amount of orders in we will release those make sure you're ordering your t-shirts and get your sticker while you're at it so I think for next video I really want to tear into the interior get a part of the trunk see what we have as far as sheet metal wise see what's going on and then we can really dive deep into some metal work interior work and make a lot of cool stuff happen so next week we're tearing that nasty carpet out and make it look good so thanks again and I'll see you the next one about time we get rid of all this wow we've got a lot of work ahead of us