Cam Bearing Tool

I stopped up to my buddy Fazz's shop today for some help making the camshaft bearing tool.  It turned out really nice - many thanks again Fazz!  For some VW/Tool/Fab related insanity, check out his blog:  http://wrinklered.blogspot.com/.

O-ring glands cut - the size 137s I bought were a bit too big to be able to slide the bearings over them, I'm going to need to pick up a couple 136's.  So if anyone is in need of some #137 Buna-N o-rings let me know, I've got about 20 million of them.

Facing the bottom of the driver.

The Wizard himself at work

We actually ended up using an ole crusty 1" spade bit to hog the bulk of this hole out, then bored the rest of it to fit the steel rod.  Pretty sketchy but it worked pretty damn well. 

Finished, aside from the o-rings.  The fit on the wooden ball is really snug, which will help to keep the rod parallel with the bearing bores as I'm hammering the f*ck out of it.

And the best part.......it works!  No in action shots - no heat in my garage and it's 20 degrees outside.  Had a bit of difficulty on bore #3, as the OD of the shoulder was probably +0.020" of what it needed to be but a couple minutes on the bench grinder fixed that.  Aside from that little bit of rework, all the bearings came out in about 10 minutes.  For bores #4 and #5 the end of the rod was inside the block, so I fit a socket+extension of the end of it to add some reach for me to get a hammer on the end of it.

Cylinder Heads

I also finished porting/polishing the combustion chambers on the driver's side head and started leak checking and measuring chamber volumes.  First step is leveling everything up in two directions using my high precision digital level (lol).  

 Close enough.  No pics of additional progress because I discovered some leaks - had to do some more lapping / leak checking / lapping / leak checking / etc.  Chamber 7 finally sealed up and came out to be around 68 cc, bumping it up marginally from the stock volume of 66.67 cc.  I'm using a 60 cc syringe to measure out volumes, so it's not ultra precise.  Estimates to the +/-0.5cc is about as best as I can do.  More progress to come.