Zanzer's 1986 B2000

Damn bro you weren't lying when you said you can type! LOL, worthwhile read though. I look forward to more progress.


Fred

Welcome to the sickness called mini truckin.

I appreciate the offer, but right now I don't have the money or the space to put a spare motor. Same goes with pulling the motor out to try and just replace the seals, though I'd love to stop dropping so much oil in it.

I hit LKQ one last time Friday and pulled 2 more heads. I have a usable head but I would like to find one that's a little better. Plus with the cracking issues I've seen with the 2.0 and 2.2 FE heads I figure it's a good idea to have a rebuilt spare on the shelf.

It rained on me all day...(well, at least up until the time I went to checkout at which time the clouds parted, the sun came out, and the birds started to sing. (Murphy is my co-pilot). I got absolutely drowned and I had to dump the water out of my wheel barrel 5 times and later I had to dump my toolbox on the floor and let all of my tools dry out.

The first head I pulled...2 cracks. Went over to the next truck to pull a second head. Someone had already been there and removed the cam caps and taken the HLA rocker assemblies. I guess the idiots didn't know there's a bolt behind the cam gear and tried to beat the front rocker cap off which busted it. And for some reason they also took the cap bolts? They left the caps but took the bolts. Really? Just the bolts? WTH?

Anyway, I said to heck with it and pulled the head anyway. I have extra caps and such so I figured at this point anything was better than nothing. After removing the head and inspecting it everything looked pretty good. I saw one little spot that may or may not have been a crack. It was hard to tell and it could have just been a casting anomaly. LKQ has a good return policy so I figure I'd chance it. On the way out I knew of one more B that had been stripped pretty well but I thought I'd stop by just to check it out one more time. Well, it was still stripped LOL but after looking around the other cars near it I saw a carburetor that I noticed and sure enough it was attached to an intake, head, and exhaust manifold for a 2.2. What luck! Whoever stripped the crank out of the bottom end didn't need the top and and just laid it on a Volvo a few cars away! I said a small prayer and flipped it over, but unfortunately it too was cracked just like 99% of the previous heads. I guess I know why they didn't take it. But at least it had all the rocker assemblies still in tact so at that point I figured if I was going to pay for a full cylinder head I was going to get a full cylinder head and swapped all the rocker assemblies to the (hopefully) good head I had pulled previous to this one. I took my parts and checked out, fired up the truck, cranked up the heat, and tried to dry out some on the way home.

Later I disassembled the head and dye checked the chambers, and although the spot I found that could have been a crack checked out ok I did see a couple of other spots that did bleed through a little. These could just be porosity or rough casting so I wiped off the dye and circled all the suspect spots with a Sharpie. I also had to chase the threads in plug hole #2 where someone had ran in with the spark plug half installed and there was a huge buildup of carbon and other crud in the threads. Luckily it chased out ok. In the next day or so I plan to smooth the suspect spots in the chambers with a carbide bit and dye check them once more. I know it may be overkill but I've seen so many of these heads that are cracked that I want to be 100% sure it's good before I put any work into the head or at least return it to LKQ before my 30 days are up so I can get a refund. At this point I have pulled ever single head at LKQ and PAP, so if this last head is bad all I can do is wait until they get some new trucks in or hit a few other backwoods yards that I'm familiar with.

There are no B's in the yards here. Im envious of you

Do you drive to the Charlotte PAP and LKQ or do you have ones closer to you?

I go to Charlotte. It's only about a 40 minute drive for me.

Last night I worked some more on the newest junkyard head. As I mentioned in a previous post, when I initially dye checked it I discovered a few areas that I wasn't sure about so I identified them with a Sharpie for closer inspection. Last night I cleaned up the casting in these areas with my carbide bits I use to port and polish heads so I could see just what was under the horrible casting.

I've ported a lot of aluminum heads over the years and one thing I immediately noticed about the FE head was how soft it was. I had to use a much lighter touch with the FE than most aluminum heads I work with. Another thing I noticed was terrible porosity. Many Mazda B series engines have horrible casting quality in the combustion chambers, but once you cut off the top layer you have nothing but nice clean aluminum underneath to work with. Not so with the FE head, if there was a pore in the head it went deep. So deep in fact that I had to leave them in fear of removing too much material. I was not impressed.


So, after cleaning up the casting as best I could, I dye checked it one more time and found this little guy. It's isn't huge but it's definitely cracked and they usually don't get smaller with prolonged use






And here's an example of the porosity I found. Notice how it's located in an area of the chamber that's notorious for cracking.





At this point I'm tired of trying to polish these turds and I think if I even found a good head I wouldn't trust if for very long. I'm going to continue to drive it with the current engine while a think about my options and work on some of the other upgrades and repairs it needs.


This could get interesting

I got a pile of parts yesterday. Luckily a friend owns a junkyard and lets me go on shopping sprees about once a month

I got some extra tails lights, 2 grills, tach cluster, radio surround, heater controls, speaker grills and some nice Pioneer speakers, a couple of surround panels for heater controls, and I found a B1800 and 82-84 B2000 rear end I'm going back for later.

I also picked up a couple of master cylinders and a cylinder head for some R&D work

Pics later...

Pics of the "new" head.





I also did a thermactor tube delete last night and installed an RX7 alternator.

Woah, wait just a second... Are you trying to put the 2.6 12 valve head on a 2.0/2.2 block?