Never the Same #79 Kirk’s Bubble Burst #1

Spinnin’ his wheels, Kirk's lookin’ for an auspicious sign. George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

 

            Cue: "Nervous" https://youtu.be/nsVhtWmeqMI?si=kWcLZ50HF03A-21v

            Taking a break from his marathon welding day after day, which seemed to be wearing him down mentally, Kirk just happened to notice that deep winter had been postponed in fact, the weather improved again. Seeing it was November and the little snow that had fallen had evaporated or more correctly meteorologically described, it had directly sublimated into water vapor. For a meteorological explanation to sublimation is when snow/ice is directly converted to water vapor skipping the liquid melting stage. Anyway, this situation wasn’t lost on Kirk. Even though it was still quite cold out, the roads were completely dry.

            Seeing it had been a few months since racing season had ended Kirk bore an itchy pedal foot. He possessed the need for speed. This meant the only outlet he had for this need was the Firebird. Well, he could have taken his motorcycle out, but the Firebird had a much better heater. Firing off the ‘bird, which it did quickly without any problem after he installed a starter from a big block Cadillac after, what, four starters before that? Not the easiest task with exhaust headers that wrapped around the starter, so Kirk had to wrestle starters off and on the engine. The worse time was in the middle of winter while lying in the snow. No fun at all but almost forgotten t this later day.

            Well, that problem seemed to be well behind him now, so he sat there relishing in the rumble of his powerful Ram Air IV engine. He always wondered if the engine had been stolen seeing they’re not many of them available and a hot commodity for Pontiac speed nuts. As he sat there warming up the engine which would eventually warm him up, Kirk missed the tachometer that now resided in the stock car. If he were highly motivated and energetic, Kirk could have changed it out but did he need it? Naw.

            Kirk rumbled out the muddy driveway in first gear with the engine just idling. No reason to get his precious ‘bird all muddy. When he pulled out on the road, he slowly increased his speed so all that mud on his tires wouldn’t get his fenders muggy. Eventually, he got up to speed going through the gears with the Muncie Rock Crusher whining very nicely as he cruised. Heading to his hometown village, he cruised up the hill through the canyon with the outside chance someone would notice his hot, fast car, but being a few years out of high school and the total disconnection with friends no one would know who it was or care. Yeah, it seemed Kirk’s glory days had long since slid by into the bottomless abyss of time.

            Kind of slipping back into those glory days of yore, Kirk retraced those cruises of the past through the state park. Back to highway speeds, he neatly went through the gears only exceeding the speed limit a little. Before he knew it, he went past Dee’s house which brought back those pangs, but of course, Dee and those days were long gone. Her announcement of joining the US Navy lingered and bothered him on a number of levels emotionally and otherwise. Some men are wise, some otherwise. Like Kirk. Anyway, he relished in his long cruised around the main and back roads. He headed toward his destination.

            Back to the country road where he ran a speed run with Mack riding shotgun which remained a legendary occurrence. Pulling up to the stop sign at the beginning of a long, straight, flat stretch of five miles. He wished he had his tachometer, but he assured himself that he could shift by ear with the sound of his loud, powerful engine. Checking ahead, behind, right and left for traffic he saw none and he knew being caught in what he was about to do would introduce him to the feel of handcuffs and a look at the interior of a local jail cell. Naw!

            Kirk revved the engine to mid throttle and quickly let the clutch out while he slammed the throttle to the floor. With the tires squalling and burning, he feathered the throttle to get the maximum bite on the asphalt. The front of the Firebird rose a few inches with the intense acceleration. It was seconds later that his engine sound told him to shift which he did in a split second like a mechanical automaton on steroids. In second gear, the acceleration seemed more intense as the telephone poles seemed to fly by faster by the second. He glanced at the speedometer that read sixty miles an hour. The white dashes on the road center line started blurring. This was real speed baby! Kirk thought with a grin. He slammed third gear faster than an automatic transmission. His vision tunneled to a point on the road about a hundred feet which he traveled past in a literal instant. At that speed, the front of the Firebird began bobbing with the strong air pressure pushing it up. He had wondered on the run before how much weight of the car remained on the road surface at that speed. He wondered if it were possible to flip up and over. He looked at the speedometer still climbing the engine sounding strong in its prime: ninety, ninety-five, a hundred miles an hour! Like that! Time to shift to fourth? What is this thing capable of? He held off another second his hand gripping the shifter knob, his arm tense with his foot hovering over the clutch pedal poised to slam fourth gear�"TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT! A very bad noise coming from his engine!

            Kirk immediately let off of the gas and pushed in the clutch. He coasted to the side of the road without hitting the brake because his mind spun right toward the possibility of an engine demise.  Blown engine, that is. Sitting there a second, he let the engine idle. It stopped making noises and the oil pressure looked okay. From the beginning, he knew these high-performance Pontiac engines couldn’t take excessive revving which he just did. Blatantly. The lack of his tachometer burned deep into his psyche which only made it seem more of a catastrophic event, but preventable event. He knew that he had spun a crankshaft bearing�"or something worse. Kirk rested his head against the cool steering wheel. Should he shut the engine off and abandon the car on the side of the road? Not something he wanted to do with his precious car. Would it be there when he came back? Or stripped out? Back in those days without mobile cell phones, he’d have to hike to a house and use their phone, if they let him, that is.

            He couldn’t let it sit there, he couldn’t just sit there, so easing into first he let out clutch without any throttle, did a 180 and headed back in the direction of home. With the gentlest application of throttle, he went up through the gears eventually getting up to thirty an hour. The irrefutable fact sunk in that he might have literally destroyed his pride and joy, his once fastest street car in town. The fact sunk deep into his soul and began a gnawing at him that would be analogous to a broken heart, ending his muscle car fun forever. With an ear tilted and attuned to any other sounds that would cause him to shut the engine down for good, he just putted along. An old guy in a decrepit pickup truck came up behind to tail him for a minute before he rattled past Kirk, the driver giving him a questioning look. Kirk felt too tied up inside to respond in any way.

            He experienced a mix of emotions: Angry at himself for over revving the engine when he knew better, actually thinking about it beforehand, Embarrassed to be in the situation of limping home at a slow speed, Sad because it meant his high-performance engine would never be the same, and Apprehensive to what went wrong within his engine and the corresponding cost to repair it in his time of low cash flow. He answered his own query that to repair a spun bearing could cost way more than he’d ever want to spend especially at this time in his life. But…

            After a couple miles and turning off of Country Road, he drove even slower on the rough side roads actually taking the route that he had driven the old tractor when he was a preteen. In the car’s wounded condition, he maintained that someone he knew, especially someone he wouldn’t want to see, would most likely, probably see him. Such his luck.

            Well, with a plan firmly set in his mind, Kirk made it to the homestead and immediately shut the engine off. He wasn’t sure driving it all that way, even though low speed and low RPMs, would in the end be a virtuous idea. It hadn’t made too much of bad engine noise like it was about to blow up. Kirk hoped for the best when he got around to taking a look inside the engine. After sitting with a cup of coffee and a piece of coconut pound cake from his always eager to please mother, Kirk had already decided that he needed to fix, or at least find out, what had happened to his precious Firebird’s engine. Of course, he didn’t mention what had happened to his engine as his mother had no clue to his personal automotive challenges. As usual, she just took all things Kirk did in stride without question.

            First, he had to make room in the garage. The skeleton bones of his stock car still sat on its side. It would have been much easier with another able body to help, but Kirk took on moving the frame with the partial roll cage by himself. By twisting the whole thing from side to side he “walked” the heavy assembly as far as he could into the back of the garage. Over stressing his back, he felt the pain of what he did with a sharp twinge. Carefully nursing his back now, he set up the garage ramps and pulled the Firebird inside. He probably could have dropped the oil pan off with the engine in the car to cast an eye on it, but he knew something wasn’t right and to fix whatever that might be he’d have to pull the engine later anyway.

            Kirk gazed at the hood which he knew would be a heavy, awkward thing to move by himself, so decided to do easy stuff first. He got to slow steady work by unhooking the battery first, which was a safety precaution drilled into him at Vo-Tech school. Then, he disconnected all the wiring and fuel lines. He drained the antifreeze and pulled the radiator and hoses, and then the alternator and power steering pump. The slightly warm antifreeze proved a comfort with his fingers beginning to feel the cold. He knew he’d have to get underneath to undo the driveshaft, clutch and transmission cross member, but he needed to tackle the heavy, overlong hood before he jacked the car up.

            First, a few words about Kirk’s mechanical abilities. As George Bernard Shaw’s had said, “Those who can, do; those who can’t teach.” Kirk had heard those words early on in high school or perhaps at Vo-Tech school, but where ever he heard that, the idea behind it haunted him ever since. For instance, in automotive training at Vo-Tech school, Kirk consistently scored the highest in written tests among his classmates, but during hands-on, practical testing, he didn’t do so well compared to his classmates. As mentioned, he lacked the hand/eye coordination needed for mechanical applications, and so he required more time to do certain tasks explaining why he didn’t fare too well when he worked at the dealership. Because of the saying, Kirk thought that he missed his calling in being an automotive teacher, but then again, his interpersonal communication skills pretty much sucked. Back to the job at hand.

            Of course, with his current Firebird malfunction, which gave him a little sore tummy, Kirk wasn’t in any mad rush to get the engine out and torn apart. He called it a day after wrestling the hood off, which he did without damage to neither himself nor the car. Anyone else probably could have persevered and got the engine out in one session, but with Kirk’s slow approach and encroaching cold on his extremities he called it “good enough” for the time spent.

            Seeing Kirk didn’t have anything else to do, well that’s untrue because he had the stock car, he got back to work on the Firebird the next morning. He could see his breath as he began. Like mentioned, Kirk wasn’t a fast worker and seeing he didn’t have any time constraints, he took his time getting the engine out. Not to bore you with the “nuts and bolts” of the process, Kirk worked slow and steady on said process with the cold bothering his dirty greasy fingers. As always, he kept a shop towel handy in his back pocket to wipe his hands off and as he scrubbed the mess off his hands they began to hurt. He recalled how his Firebird came into being.

            Background: He originally bought the car without an engine from Jeff at the dealership and then Jeff “found” him the powerful Ram Air IV engine with headers no less. Because he had no background on the car, Kirk always thought the car and engine might have been sold from Midnight Auto Supply, if you get my gist. The paperwork seemed okay to register it, but the engine? Anyway, the point here remains is that he put the engine in by himself, but it hadn’t been out since. As with most high-performance installations, the exhaust headers always provide a bit more difficulty and the Firebird remained no exception. With a leisurely lunch in the farmhouse and a long afternoon break with coffee and another piece of his mother’s signature coconut pound cake, Kirk still got the engine out in one day and he called it a day. Truthfully if you asked him, he just wasn’t all that eager to pull the oil pan off and take a look at those bearings. Tomorrow’s just another day for that difficult to accept reveal.

            Well, the next day came and with a mix of excitement and dread, Kirk pulled the intake manifold off and turned the engine over. He took the multitude of tiny oil pan bolts out (twenty-four to be exact). Revealing the inside, bottom ‘guts’ of the engine crankshaft assembly, Kirk was relieved, very much so, to see the parts appearing pristinely clean with no worrying metal shavings to be seen. Kirk felt a little better, but a whole lot of bad could be hidden away.

            Taking a lesson from auto school, Kirk had to mark the bearing caps so there'd be no mix up during reassembly. Each bearing cap and its mate got corresponding identification with a center punch and hammer. Starting in the front, on the right side, he tapped a single dimple on the bearing cap and its mate. Punching two on the next one, he continued on down the line until they were all marked appropriately and clearly. Okay. With a deep frosty breath cloud and a long breaker bar with a socket, he broke all the bolts loose. Then using a lighter socket and ratchet he spun off the nuts and the bolts on the main caps. In his numb fingers, he dropped two nuts down into the undersides of the pistons. He fished them out with a hooked-end coat hanger that he used for welding, in fact. He had a handy container so the nuts wouldn’t get lost.

            With cold fingers getting number, one by one, he carefully pulled the caps off and set them on a clean piece of cardboard. They all looked immaculate until he pulled number five. The previous caps came off with the bearing attached. Not number five. On this one, the bearing inserts remained on the crankshaft and he could see the seam between the two bearing inserts. Kirk knew this was the bad news he expected. Carefully, he pushed the inserts around so he could remove the top one. Holding his breath, he picked off the insert to look at it. Yeah, it had gouges in it made when he over revved the engine and it spun instead of staying put. Running his thumbnail across the crankshaft journal with relief he found it wasn’t bad. If it had been bad, it would mean it had to go to the machine shop. That possibility remained until later. He pulled off the remaining caps and they all looked good. They were not as bad as he imagined when he continued to drive it home after making the scary noise.

            Kirk knew how the repair would pan out and his knowledge, his experience told him that it would be worse than he hoped. Always expecting the worse, he was. He headed to the trusty parts place, one of those places he had submitted his application for employment. There he picked up an engine builders’ tool, if you can call it a tool, called “Plastigage.” He also picked up a small roll of emery cloth.  A few words about Plastigage.

            Technically called “plastic precision clearance gauge," as it is used to measuring clearances on engine bearings. Interesting stuff, useful, yet cheap and diminutive in construction, Plastigage is used to measure bearing clearances within a modern engine. Plastigage comes in a long, skinny envelope about one inch by twelve inches. The outside of the envelope has different width stripes with corresponding decimal measurements. Inside the envelope is a thin, fragile thread-like filament made, unsurprisingly, out of plastic. The following might sound labor intensive, but here’s how you use it.

            Like Kirk’s engine status right now with the bearing caps removed, and the surfaces of bearing and crankshaft clean and dry, you take the Plastigage envelope, cut a piece of the envelope with the filament inside about the width of the bearing. Carefully removing the filament from the paper, it is placed across the bearing. Then, the bearing cap is put back on attached with the nuts or bolts and carefully tightened down to exactly the specified torque specifications. Then it is taken apart again to see how much the Plastigage filament has been flattened out. Using those stripes on the envelope, you compare them with the width of the squashed filament which gives the decimal clearance of the bearing. All engines have specific operating clearances for the bearings. such as 0.0020-0.0025 inch which isn’t very much, right? Anyway, yeah, kind of labor intensive, but a cheap and accurate way to figure out the wear on the bearings, like Kirk did at this time. Seeing they almost all looked good, he primarily worried about number 5, but he started with number one and did each one, one by one with cold, numb fingers. 

            Surprising him, all the clearances were within tolerances including the number five which Kirk thought surely needed machining. The crankshaft was basically just lying there in the journals of the upside-down engine with the caps off, so he carefully pulled it out and set it on the workbench on clean cardboard.

            Examining the offending number five journal, he decided to rip a strip of emery cloth long enough to wrap around the journal and give him enough length to grip it with two hands. He worked the emery cloth around and around the journal for several minutes. With numb fingers gripping the gritty cloth, he had to stop now and then to stick his hands in his pockets to warm his fingers. Finally satisfied with how it looked, he set the crankshaft back in and rechecked it with Plastigage. He found the clearance literally did not change, so he just had to change out the number five bearing.

            Back at the parts store, he told the counter guy the make, model and size of the engine and that he needed one bearing. Kirk was afraid of what would come next and so saw it coming: They only sell complete sets. So he bought the set, bearing assembly grease that helps lube everything up to safely restart the engine, and he needed a gasket set. He worked an entire day on putting it together making sure everything he assembled was perfectly torqued to specs and when all assembled he gave it a quick turn over by hand just to make sure. He put the oil pan on with new gaskets which wasn’t all that easy to ensure there wouldn’t be leaks, and called it a day. He spent another day putting the engine back in the car. To say the least the engine started and ran just fine, but he didn’t take it out for a drive. Kirk would always worry about the engine after his little bubble busting problem which he caused while knowing better.

            To say the least, his pride and joy muscle car, the 1967 Firebird 400 convertible was Never the Same in Kirk’s mind.