Hi everyone. I have been working on 60-63 Falcons for many years now. It is pretty easy stuff and I have learned to do all sorts of things to these cars. However, I have never torn down an engine and rebuilt it (with the help of a machine shop.) I usually just find an old 200 or 170 on Craigslist and drop in in the car and hope it runs well. Surprisingly, it usually does because the Mustang guys are all upgrading to 302s and they take really good care of the engines they pull out. I have a decent but unused 170 laying around and I decided to learn how to do an engine rebuild. No rush, just something I want to learn. I have watched a ton of Youtube on how to tear down the engine. But I ran into a lifter problem. Almost all the lifters popped out using a magnet. But the 2 farthest outside lifters appear to be blocked by the actual engine casting. They get very close to coming out but they are blocked by the engine itself. They are not damaged and the engine was tired but running fine when I pulled it out. Do I have to take out the cam and removed the lifters through the bottom? Is there a trick to removing these 2 outside lifters. I have checked the web and I can't find anything related to this situation Everyone implies ALL the lifters just pop right out. I am kind of on hold because I don't want to damage anything. Is this a common thing or did I run into something unusual (or am I, as usual, over my head).
Lifter problem/question for 170
- Thread starter Tcrudo
- Start date
relax, with a magnet stick the lifters should be able to be moved to adjacent galley and removed easily from from top of block. Sometimes lifters are very difficult to lift up if varnished below galley. I've had to use a slide hammer with a large washer hooked on reluctant lifters.
It sounds like a problem in which I don't know what I am doing. I ordered a special lifter tool off of ebay that is supposed to expand inside the top lip of the lifter. I am hoping that once the lifter gets far enough out of it's lifter hole I can tilt it toward the center of the block and not hit the casting from the engine block. Someone got those 2 end lifters in those holes so there has to be a way to get them out. I was thinking that maybe the lifter HAS cleared the lifter hole but I can't get any purchase on the bottom of the lifter to slide it out from under the roof of the cavity. Maybe I should wrap a string around the lifter and yank on it once the lifter is as high as it can get. Is this a crazy idea?
If the lifter is still in the hole and moves up down really easy part way when its base is on the camshaft lobe chances are good X2 it's quite common that there is a varnish build up or some baked on sludge / crude at the bottom section of the lifters keeping it from coming out easily. If that's the case there is this spray penetrating oil that I picked up the other night at NAPA to work on getting some very tight spark plugs out of my 5.4 3 valve engine (Lincoln pickup) just yesterday afternoon I was quite impressed with how quickly it worked. It's called "Free All" it worked really great at cleaning off the carbon build up on the extended reach area of thes spark plugs and in a very short time. In the second picture you can see how clean the two plugs are that were sprayed with the penetrate oil. The third shows how well this penetrate traveled all the way down to the plug tip. One other low buck what i also often used was to turn the lifters back and forth as I was pulling them up this will also scrape clean the crude that's at the base area of the lifter then the lifter will finally come out. Best of luck.
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