Having completed the preliminaries and with the winter of 2000/2001 approaching, I decided that the next logical step was to start the assembly of the engine. After all, if the engine was not viable, then it’s unlikely that my restoration project would be.

I started by cleaning up the two halves of the crankcase and the crankshaft. I could see no sign of cracks or other significant damage to the crankcase. The main bearings and, (after a little polishing), the crankshaft looked to be fine -- at least to my inexperienced eye. As expected, the crankshaft did not bear marks indicating that it had been reground and it was clearly one of the old “Phase 1” crankshafts.  Early Javelin crankshafts are well known to be prone to breakage and new more reliable ones are available.  In fact the Jowett Car Club’s booklet on rebuilding a Javelin engine advises that “Phase 1 crankshafts should never be used no matter how good they look”.  I nevertheless decided to proceed with assembly, since I was not at the point where I was prepared to invest a large amount in what may soon turn out to be an aborted project. A new crankshaft will have to wait until my second engine overhaul!

So the first step was to assemble the two halves of the crankcase with the crankshaft in position.  I thought I had the ideal approach to this by positioning the two halves on a Workmate and then using the Workmate to bring them together. This I did, using a silicone liquid gasket as the sealant and then torquing as per the manual. However, I found that even before fully torquing, the crankshaft seemed too tight. I therefore decided to start again, this time assembling the two halves in a vertical orientation -- as I was doing that, I realised that that was what the manual was telling me to do!  That all worked well and after fully torquing the bolts, the crankshaft rotated easily.

The next step was to clean up the cylinder liners, pistons and connecting rods. Number 3 cylinder was clearly the source of the problem that lead to the dismantling of the engine. Its piston was all gummed up and the exhaust valve was stuck open.  However, I had a new piston, liner and con rod to play with!  There were no new piston rings though, and therefore, as soon as I broke my first ring while removing them, I decided to buy new ones. I ordered them from Deves in California who impressed me by saying that they didn’t have them in stock, but “we will make them tomorrow”!

In preparation for assembly I had the four cylinder liners honed.  I also found that I was missing one big end bearing bolt and Eden Lindsay who runs the Jowett Javelin register was kind enough to send me two.  The next challenge was that I found that the new con rod that came with the car was about 40 grams lighter than the other three. Having no good ideas how I might safely add weight to the con rod, I decided to take it to a local restoration company who do many vintage and post-vintage restorations. Of course, I took the light con rod along with one of the heavier ones as a reference and asked that they add weight to the light one. After a couple of months of nagging, they said it was ready. As you might anticipate, when I went to pick them up, I found that they had ground down the heavier one! I could understand that this might be the only practical approach, but I was disappointed that I hadn’t been consulted!  Then obviously the remaining two con rods got the same treatment.

The liner, piston and con rod installation was straightforward, except that it wasn’t clear to me which way round the big end bearing caps should go.  My initial approach was to orient them so the tabs in the bearings were 180º apart.  However, after assembling everything and before fully torquing the big end bolts everything was so tight that I sheared off the starting handle dog while trying to turn the engine over with the aid of a monkey wrench! I then back tracked and bolted together each big end on the bench and checked for smoothness of the bearing surface. That’s when I realised that the caps were in fact marked to show their orientation! The reassembly was straightforward and after full torquing, the crankshaft rotated nicely.

I cleaned up the cylinder heads and ground in the valves.  I probably should have installed new valve springs, since they were measured as being about 2 mm shorter than nominal. There was a new valve supplied with the car, but the groove for the retaining cones on it was wrong and so I couldn’t use it.  Anyway, once everything had been cleaned up, the valves moved nicely in the guides, with no signs of any bending of the valve stems -- even for the one that had been stuck.

Other items such as the oil pump, water pump and valve gear were overhauled mainly by just disassembly, cleaning, inspection and reassembly.  An exception was the fuel pump which clearly needed a new diaphragm and other parts. Fortunately A/W Enterprises (Al Kiernan) in Milton Ontario (about 50 km away) were able to do the job. The carburetors seemed to be in good shape and were just overhauled with the aid of gasket kits purchased from Gower and Lee in the UK. Three starter motors came with the car and all seemed to be serviceable.  I picked the one with the least worn commutator and overhauled it. I was able to test the starter motor both under no load conditions and when mounted on the engine. It was the the first item that I could conclude actually works!

I had no real problems with the completion of the engine assembly; but it was done in short steps with lots of thought in between steps. New gaskets were on hand for critical items like cylinder heads and exhaust manifolds.  I used silicone gasket for the sump and fabricated gaskets for items such as the timing case rear cover. I managed to find new Champion sparking plugs L-87YC’s at Canadian Tire which I think are OK.  There were eight plugs that came with the car, but they were longer reach plugs (3/4” as opposed to 1/2”) than those specified in the manuals that I have!

By December 2001, the engine was almost at the point where it could theoretically be bench tested.  In January, I purchased a new coil and did a brief test to see if sparks were generated.  Somewhat to my surprise -- they were! In early March, it dawned on me that there was nothing to stop me actually checking  the compression while cranking with the starter motor (I had only done it with manually cranking earlier), and I got excellent readings (115 psi) on three cylinders and 100 psi on the other.  I think that my compression gauge is perhaps reading a little high! The next step was to find some way of connecting a fuel supply to the fuel pump, and move the engine into the garage to see if it will start.  It would have to be a brief test since I didn’t have a silencer!

I made the first attempt to run the engine over the 2002 Easter weekend, when help was on hand to both move the engine from my workshop to the garage, and to witness the momentous event! The result was that while the engine fired, it wouldn’t run. Perhaps it would have done so, with a bit more cranking, but I fully discharged my small (18 Ah) battery unit, partially I think because things were stiffening up due to a lack of oil circulation.  In the subsequent days therefore, having established that oil was not reaching the oil filter, I removed the front and rear timing covers to investigate.  I concluded that the problem was that a) the oil pump needed priming, and b) I really should have had more oil in the sump. After having primed the pump by adding oil at the port at the top of the crankcase while cranking the engine backwards, I got what seem like reasonable oil circulation. I also took the opportunity to fabricate a cork gasket for the front timing cover, since on inspection, I’m not sure that my silicone “gasket” would have held up. With the lubrication improved, the engine did seem to spin more freely on the starter motor -- I just hoped I hadn’t done any damage!

One part that had been missing from the engine was the throttle rod that connects the two carburetors. By a somewhat amazing series of coincidences that unfolded in April 2002, a throttle rod was found about an hour’s drive from my home. It was owned by a former Jowett maintenance mechanic who used to work in the Toronto area. It was the only Jowett part that he still had, and he generously gave it to me!

The engine was again moved out into the garage on the weekend of May 18th. On May 21st a second bench test was attempted.  Much to my relief and some surprise, the engine did start and ran for a period of about 10 seconds!  There were no obvious problems and the oil pressure switch operated, indicating that I had oil pressure.  The engine stopped as I attempted to open up the chokes and I couldn’t restart it; but this was primarily due to my small battery running out of power. I then felt a lot more confident that there wasn’t a significant problem; but I did not make any further attempts to start the engine.

After acquiring the second car, the first major task was to determine if I should use its engine or the one that I had overhauled. So, I removed one cylinder head for an initial inspection. I found that the liners were in good shape, but that there were a lot flakes of rust within the cylinder block and also some decarbonizing was merited. Amongst the spares that came with the car, there’s an almost complete set of new crankshaft and big end bearings as well as some used bearings.  So, I wondered if possibly someone had changed the crankshaft on the car, which would make it considerably more desirable than my other engine.  I removed the sump only to reveal a Phase 1 crankshaft -- so no advantage there!  Thus, the decision was made to remove the engine and gearbox -- after all I had better get used to the idea of removing engines, and I have to clean up the engine bay anyway!  So the engine was quickly removed using a jack cradle I constructed as per the original Jowett manual.  Then with the help of a neighbour and a hand truck it was moved down to the basement.

Having made the decision to use the engine from the first car, I decided that since it had been over a year since I ran it on the bench, another bench test was warranted.  Again, the engine ran; but only relatively briefly.  However, it was enough to give us confidence that it was OK, and so once the engine bay was ready to receive it, we went ahead with installing it together with the gearbox. The installation went relatively smoothly except for minor glitches like struggling to connect up linkages to the some of the pedals and the gearchange. We realised that a factor in some of the struggles was that the car had been designed for Right Hand Drive, whereas with Left Hand Drive, the presence of the starter motor, makes access to the linkages from the pedals much more difficult.   We got it done though, and by early September 2003, we were in a position to run the engine in the car for the first time.  Everything went reasonably well, with no major glitches. The ignition timing was found to be quite far off, and the idle speed had been set too high.  The engine was then run for periods of up to about half an hour, after which overheating occurred -- which indicated a possible problem.

The final step in checking the engine was to be to re-torque the cylinder head nuts and readjust valve clearances and timing.  The problem arose with the difficulty of re-torquing the nuts without pulling back the rocker arm assembly. This is because the clearances around the nuts adjacent to the push rods are such that you can’t get even a ground down thinner wall socket on to them without pulling back the rocker arm assembly to move the push rods aside. Also, to further complicate things, the rocker arm assembly is mounted to the cylinder head by the cylinder head nut that’s designated as the first one to tighten in sequence!   I’m sure this conundrum must be familiar to other Jowett owners! My solution has been to pull back the rocker arm assembly and torque the nuts in reverse order to that specified in the Jowett manual. So that's what we did. The only problem then was that I forgot that you really need to see the push rods in order to correctly seat them back into the cups in the tappets as the rocker arm assembly is put back in position.  As a result attempts were made to start the engine with only four valves functioning as they should!  After we realised what had happened we of course had to take the take the two tappet covers off.  We also took the opportunity to check all of the (hydraulic) tappets and found that the pistons did not positively click back into position as they should.  So all of the tappets from this engine were replaced by those (also hydraulic) from the second engine -- which seemed to be OK in this regard. The push rods were adjusted to provide slightly negative clearance, and while the engine seemed to run well there was still a problem of some sort in that the exhaust pipe adjacent to the manifolds glowed cherry red after running the engine at higher speeds for a short while! So, we then worked on a technique of adjusting the clearances based upon the valve timing diagram which resulted in some minor adjustments. At the same time we also had some problems with getting the distributor advance to move freely which served to confuse the situation. After all that, the engine did seem to run a little cooler, but we didn’t do a very extensive test that had to wait until next summer!

The engine was not run again until mid-August 2004.  This was when the car was ready for the road, after it was painted and the wiring had been installed.  In fact, nothing further was done to the engine except for remedying a tendency for the ignition timing to slip and installing a new condenser. Once the car was on the road, it was apparent that the power was somewhat below par. My first suspect was the improvised foam air filter element made to replace the original horsehair one.  Thus, I found some air filter material in Canadian Tire that is designed for use as a reusable furnace filter.  I used it to replace the horsehair and while I haven’t pushed the car hard yet, the performance now seems to be as it should -- I think the top speed will be well into the 70-80 mph range.

 Updated: October, 2004      

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