How to biuld Your 440 at home and do it right.
The first thing to do is
remove your engine of course from your vehicle, this is a test of your
ability and your patience. If you get the motor out and onto a stand then
sit there and stare at it in amazement for an hour with a big grin, you
are probably safe to rebiuld your own engine. On the other hand, if you
cut the hood off with a sawzall, torched off the motor mounts, relieved
the firewall with a hammer to get to the bell housing bolts and the engine
is lying upside down on the floor while you smash the mirrors on your truck
with a pipe in frustration, load up the engine and take it to a rebiulder. This page is meant to give you and idea of what
it takes to biuld a fairly healthy engine at home, but because of page space and time, I do suggest
that you buy a manual that is specific to your engine, in this case I suggest
"How to rebiuld Big Block Mopar". Its a decent book that covers tear down,
inspection and reassembly, there are no performance tips in this book,
its just straight stock oem engine rebiulding. Let the fun begin: Assuming that you have
the engine out, during tear down, use ziploc freezer bags with the label
on the bag to keep all the bolts organized. If you own a camera, take alot
of pictures of the engine inside and out, or better yet, use a camcorder
so you can make running commentary, just make sure you do your best Howard
Cosell imitation while doing it. Make thorough notes on rod orientation
and and bracket holes/bolts. Before you pull the pistons and rods out, check
crankshaft end play and rod side clearnance, this will tell you whether you will be shopping for new rods and crank, although
forged cranks can be welded and cut to correct any oversizes in this area.
With the piston at top dead center, measure your your deck hieght with
either a dial indicator or a feeler guage set, this measurement will come
in handy when you are piston shopping. Scrape the piston tops and
look for any oversizing marks, this goes for the crank as well. Generally
if you have a block that is post 75 .030 is the biggest you can take it oversize, 74 and prior will take up
to .060 although the block should be checked for coreshift. Most home mechanice own a dial or vernier caliper,
you can roughly measure bores and journals with this as well as deck hieght using the depth needle placed through
a hole in a straight edge bridged across the bore then the thickness of
the bridge subtracted from the measurement. Keep all the rod bolts and caps matched to their
rod, Chrysler was really bad at visibly stamping rods, so a number set
comes in handy for stamping a number that you can see on the rod and cap
above and below the parting line. The rods must be sent in with caps
and bolts to the machine shop to be properly resized. If you look at the
crank and rods in the motor, you should see that the rod caps have a tab
cast into the bottom that points to the outsides of each shared journal. The cylinder heads should be checked for any
pulled threads and cracks, check the installed hieght of the valves to
see if the seats are heavily sunken, early heads such as 915 and 906 are
more prone to this due to the lack of hardened valve seats. The ideal installed
hieght for BB mopars is 1.86-1.992. Pulling the heads apart at this time
will allow you further inspect the seats for cracks, taking things apart
yourself allow you to save some money on machineshop labour especially
if the parts are no good, and is a learning experience. Measureing valve
guide wear is a waste of time, you may as well just get new guides, its
cheap and will cut down oil loss. Machineshop
steps and parts buying HOME
