This last Christmas my hubby got me a new engine! It's a 1776 with a 110 cam and 044 heads ( i think that's what they were called lol).
I ended up having an extra day off this week so I put the bus in the garage and began to do the swap. I had to take the old engine out to rob some parts from it. In the process of disconnecting everything, I broke a heater cable. :(
My hubby came up with an idea to fix that.
Since the engine was out I want to figure out a way to make the exhaust heater boxes work on an aftermarket exhaust. When I had my original engine last year, I had great heat. I switched to a dual port engine over the summer with an aftermarket exhaust, so I had to bypass those boxes and run the fresh air tubes directly to the heat exchangers. I didn't have the same amount of heat as last year so I figured I needed those boxes to get the extra heat from the top exhaust pipe. Here is a mock up of what I was going to try to do.
They were actually pretty darn close. We were messing around with them but we had a friend coming over to help me reinstall the engine and tune it up for me, so we stopped and went on to getting the engine ready to go in. Figured we could mess with the boxes after the fact. I then remembered what you fellow sambanites told me about the heat exchangers and the differences in the stock german ones and the aftermarket ones. I had a look at the old ones and the ones from my old engine (the ones I put on my new engine). Wow, what a difference. With that I decided to forgo trying to ad the boxes and just hooked the fresh air tubes up the the heat exchangers.
So here is the engine all installed.
I know, what colors. LOL That's me though, got to be different. :D Hey, it matches my glasses. :D
LOL
I also came up with an idea to hopefully prevent a pesky leak I still have around the windshield area. I tried using that new stuff called NeverWet. I didn't do a very good job at masking it off, but if it works and I need to do it again I will do a better job.
It hasn't rained since, so I guess it works pretty good. Although we are in a drought now. Maybe I should take it back off? LOL
Oh, back to the heater. Although it was a bit warmer then normal outside when I took the test drive, I tried turning on the heater in the spot I used to be able to do it with the original engine, and it was kicking out heat like before. So looks like I can't doubt the sambanites. :D Although I still need to test it on the way to work with much colder temps. :D
