It is inevitable, you know. If you play with cars and engines and push them hard enough – something’s gonna break. As a car guy, you accept those risks that sometimes you have to buy the parts twice – because you broke the first ones. What is doubly frustrating is when you supposedly do everything correctly and you still fail. My most recent embarrassment is worthy of a story because it was so odd.

I was working on a 502ci big-block Chevy motor. We were adding cylinder heads along with a more aggressive hydraulic roller camshaft. So there I was with a bench full of parts. I wasn’t in a hurry – I’ve learned that bad things happen when I get rushed. So unlike every reality car show I’ve ever suffered through, I was not under some fabricated time crunch that demanded a psychotic breakdown to occur to make the otherwise boring story more interesting. Nevertheless, there was drama!

Aftermarket big-block Chevy heads can produce their own unique set of frustrating requirements. In order to improve the exhaust flow, most aftermarket Rat cylinder head companies raise the exhaust ports. This requires a unique set of head bolts with three bolts per side longer than the originals. In order to get this head on the engine, I had to borrow some bolts from a previous project. The result of all this was an outbreak of extra head bolts and washers spread out on the bench next to the engine.

I carefully assembled the heads, torqued the head bolts, and installed the intake manifold. I then pressure lubed the engine, installed the distributor, and timed it so the engine would start the moment the starter motor cranked. In this particular case, Westech’s Steve Brule had asked me to deliver the engine a day ahead of time so they could install it on the dyno the evening before so we’d be ready to go first thing in the morning. This meant I didn’t have to arrive really early so I rolled in about 8:00 a.m. ready to make some noise.

As I walked into the dyno cell, I could immediately tell something wasn’t right. Steve looked at me and said “It’s locked up. It won’t crank.” I said, “That can’t be – I cranked this thing over a dozen times the other day setting lifter preload and setting the distributor.”

“Well, that may be, but it still won’t crank over – watch.” He backed the crank up with a breaker bar and then rotated it slowly clockwise and sure enough it went “clunk” and stopped. We ended up flipping a coin as to which piston had something in it – and guessed wrong of course so we ended up pulling both heads. Under the second head was two pieces of steel that took a few minutes to figure out what they were. It turned out these two nasty pieces of steel were originally one very hard ARP head bolt washer that had somehow found its way into this cylinder,  where it was vertically pinched between the piston and the head, which flattened it and broke it into two pieces.

Standing there with a disassembled engine and a piston that now was questionable, I was trying to figure out how this happened. The piston didn’t look that bad so we gambled and ran the engine anyway and it was fine – although a subsequent teardown revealed the top ring land was lightly pinched enough that the ring no longer moved. It was time for a new piston. The more worrisome part was that I could not figure out how this head bolt washer ended up in the engine. We looked to see if all the head bolt washers were still with the bolts and they were. So this was an extra one which had been on the bench during the reassembly. It took a reenactment of the engine’s final assembly moments, to figure out what happened. While I didn’t have any grainy 8mm movie video to show what I did wrong, it certainly pointed to assembly error.

Because I had more than one set of head bolts and washers, there were plenty of extra parts laying on the bench not intended for this engine. That was mistake Number One. After dropping in the distributor, I had two last steps to perform. One was to bolt on a pair of aluminum exhaust plates over the open exhaust ports so that when I transport the engine in the back of my truck, the plates keep dirt and other debris out of the engine. The last step was to drop on the carburetor lift plate onto the carb pad on the single plane intake manifold.  In re-creating these final steps, I think what happened was there was a light film of oil on the washer and perhaps on the bottom of the carb lift plate. I set the plate down on the bench and at that point, a head bolt washer must have stuck to the bottom of the lift plate. I didn’t notice it and simply dropped the plate on the intake and bolted it down. Sometime during the trip to Westech, the washer fell into the intake and then found its way into Number three cylinder. Ugh…

Now when I work on engines, I try to keep the bench clean of anything that is not intended for the engine. And you can bet that I also carefully sweep the bottom of that carb plate with my hand every time before I bolt it down. I also now look into the intake manifold before I drop the carb in place. Of course, the damage could have been much worse if the engine had started before the washer jammed itself in between the piston and the head. That might have been really nasty and even broken the block. So I guess I should count myself lucky. It just didn’t seem like it at the time!