Next we changed the oil from fancy stuff to bog standard engine oil, and after discovering an oil leak apparently from the head gasket, decided to change that. We'd never done a head gasket before, but how hard could it be? It took an entire Sunday, with Alex meticulously dismantling the engine. We sweated over getting the valve caps and shims off without dropping them everywhere, and I made a specially designed cardboard tray that wedged in under the cam cover ready to catch everything. While I popped out to mow my parents grass, Alex cleaned up everything and applied the new head gasket, and measured the thickness of all the shims and made a note of them.
We eventually got it all back together only to discover - no compression. None. Zero. Zilch. In any of the cylinders. I think we both wanted to just sit down and cry - what had we done??
Much internet research ensued, after which we had come to the conclusion that the shims must not be seating properly on the valves, and basically we had to take the cam off and the shims/caps, and put them all on again. This time, we cleaned all the oil off, and glued the shims on with grease, and the caps into the cam so nothing was slithering about all over the place.
Cylinders 1, 2, 3 all ok. Cylinder 4 - no compression. ****
We decided to double check the list of shim thicknesses, and came to the conclusion (after converting everything to 64ths) that the two shims in cylinder 4 had accidently been swapped over.
So, it all came off again, cleaned up, greased, back together. Everything else back on and the key turned. And she started!! better than she had in the last 3 weeks.
By now it was 9.30pm on Tuesday night, so with 4 days until our first hillclimb, the relief was palpable!
The irony was, that there was still an oil leak.... and it wasn't from the head gasket after all. It was seeping out around a tapered screw in the head, which wasn't tapered. Some PTFE tape seems to have fixed that, for now anyway.
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