30 - Getting Ahead

I'm not breaking new ground when I say that over time, it becomes harder and harder to finish anything sufficiently complicated. There is a lifecycle to these projects. Professionals have employees, materials, and a profit motive to inspire them to work towards a completed project. The rest of us do not. If you've got a project, I guarantee at some point it will look like this:

One project becomes many projects. The most-expensive, probably lowest-priority project you have (which is inevitably going to be your Land Rover) will become a table for other projects. 

Yes! That's a welder. And yes! That's some boat parts. Whatever, none of that is germane to this story. Suffice to say, nearly a year can pass between major updates and you won't quite know where it went.

No matter. Progress will continue in fits and starts, and we will find things advancing despite ourselves. And so it is with this. I titled this year's efforts as "demotivation," which was intended to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. Indeed, it took me more than a full year to get time and space to work on Duffy again. Demotivating, for sure. But it is also true that the next task for disassembly was the also last major thing to tackle. The 'motivation' for this project: the engine. 

As you know from last year, I removed the head on the 200tdi to see if the powerplant was even a viable option. Because it's an old unit, critical parts like the head, manifolds, and so on are no longer available.

It was now time to take a deeper look at the engine and start the restoration process for it. Where should we begin?

Let's start by finishing the disassembly of the head and getting it professionally looked at, shall we? I wasn't able to take the valves out, because I don't own a valve compressor. But, I hoped to have the head pressure tested and inspected to really see if the head was serviceable, so I sent it away to the Lordco machine shop, where they cleaned the whole thing and checked it for cracks. Result:

It looks like there are some small, hairline cracks near the injector and glow plug holes. 

I asked around on the local RoverLanders forum, and it appears that these are not too bad. I sure hope so, because I decided then and there to put in a parts order from Turner Engineering for all the bits I'd need to rebuild this engine. 

Next thing I did was finish stripping the head, or at least as much as I was able to do. The manifold studs needed to come out, using the two-nut method. It was an annoying task, but not much more work than an hour or two. 

Into a box it went so that it'll be ready to go to the machine shop when it's time.