Repairing the stroker engine...

[Steve88XJ]

So some of you know the story. I rebuilt my engine a few years back using a stroker kit from Accurate Power (now no longer in business). I pulled the engine, pulled the head, and took the block into a machine shop to be bored and assembled. I picked up the short block, took it home, slapped another head on it (one that I had a friend mill and port), put it together and installed it (with some help).

The thing ran like a bat out of hell, but the distributor would wobble. This ended up being a big problem, and I went through two distributors.

The only logical problem is that the camshaft is bent. I figure either the camshaft was bent during storage or while shipping (which I heard is not an uncommon occurrence), or the machine shop fukked up assembling it (not as likely).

So finally I have time to deal with some of this crap. I spent a good 3-4 hours out in the garage today tearing it apart. Of course I have pictures:









I still need to take off the balancer and remove the camshaft. The balancer was being a pain so I decided to stop for the day and spray some WD-40 on it and try again later.

I'm going to send the head off to get milled more for higher compression, and replace my camshaft with an even wilder one. With the existing camshaft, it passed smog with flying colors. Higher compression and a wilder cam should still allow me to pass, and make it go even quicker.

I'm pretty excited, because I think that the bent cam was part of the problem with it not making as much power above 4,000 rpm as I expected.

Now... I just need to come up with funding for the head machine work, a replacement camshaft, and gaskets, and PRAY that the camshaft journals aren't screwed up.

Oh and just for the hell of it here's a picture of the bar stool kart