11 | Disassembling an engine with a seized rotating
assembly requires a little mechanical gymnastics.
Because you can’t spin the crank over to better
access the connecting rod bolts, you will need to
use a box-end wrench to get to some of them. We
didn’t have any extra-long wrenches so we used
the old wrench-on-wrench trick to gain enough
leverage to get the rod cap bolts off. After that it
was as simple as yanking the crank and using an
extra-long drift (actually a cut-down axleshaft) and
mallet to punch out the pistons.
12 | Four of the pistons and rods came out easily
enough, but the other four were galled to the
cylinder bores and put up a fight. The collateral
damage was high, but we weren’t planning to reuse
either the pistons or connecting rods again anyway.
13 | Even if we hadn’t absolutely destroyed four of
the pistons during disassembly, we honestly didn’t
plan to keep them anyhow. The flat-top pistons do
help bump up compression for a little extra power,
but they are cast and limited in terms of how much
power they can handle—especially if the engine
gets into a little detonation. The powdered-metal
6.098-inch connecting rods are a little bit stronger,
but they are very hard to bring back to spec. The
cracked-cap design means you can’t clip the
caps and re-hone the big ends. Plus, the weird
0.9429-inch wristpin diameter limits your piston
choices. Generally, it’s just better to replace both
the pistons and rods with quality aftermarket pieces
any time you are rebuilding one of these engines for
performance.