How-To: Cam Install
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How-To: Cam Install
Here's my go at writing a fairly comprehensive how-to for installing any aftermarket cam, without having to take the cylinder head off. This specific project was installing a Comp 400 cam into kc2002acr's car, replacing his '02 mag cam. I didn't get as many pictures as I should have, so will probably forget a few things, and have to come back and revise this later.
1. Break the lug nuts loose on the right front wheel, because it's going to have to come off.
2. Jack the front of the car up at so you have at least 8 inches or so between the tires and the floor. Support the car well with jackstands, because you're going to be cranking around on stuff pretty good later on. I prefer putting the jackstands right under the main sway bar bushing brackets. The weight is all being held by the frame of the car, and most jack stands are cupped perfectly to fit around those bushing brackets. Having the jack stands there holds the car steadier than putting them on the "jack points" of the floor pan, imo.
3. Remove the right front wheel.
4. Remove the TB from the intake, so the intake can move around. You don't have to take the whole intake off.
5. Remove the battery and battery tray.
EDIT. Remove the coolant overflow bottle and line. (the neck is in the way when you have to raise the engine). You can also wait to remove this unitl you have the engine free and can lower it. It comes out easier that way.
6. Take the fuse box loose. It won't be able to move as a whole very much because of the wiring harness, but it will move enough. The plastic locating pin that goes into the fender is the hardest part because it is stiff, but it will just pop out, especially if you can get something thin in there to help pry.
7. Remove the splash shield from the right front wheel well, and remove the pencil strut (that vertical bracket between the frame and lower torque strut)
8. Remove the exhaust header bracket and heat shield. Remove the 4 nuts on the exhaust header flange. You don't have to take the exhaust completely loose, just taking the nuts off allows it to slide on the studs and lets the engine move enough for later. Trust me, you need to move the engine A LOT.
9. Remove the the upper motor mount, then the lower motor mount. The engine's not going anywhere, because there's still a big old bolt holding it to the frame.
10. Now you need to put a floor jack under the oil pan with some blocks on it. The blocks do two things: allow you to jack it up high enough, and protect the metal. This is a picture once the engine is completely free (and pretty high actually)...as you can see, the top tilts backwards alot. This picture shows about as far back as you should let it go. As you're jacking, simply make sure you're forcing the jack under the car farther...this keep the engine centered on it as it goes up.
11. Get just a smudge of pressure on the jack. Then remove the plastic plug in the wheel well and insert a Torx T-55 bit into that bolt that you might not have ever known was there. Remove that bolt. The engine will now be free to move up and down as you so desire.
12. The next big goal is removing the engine mount plate. (The thing with the blue x on it)
To do this, you'll need to remove the power steering pump. There are four bolts, three that you reach through the pulley, and a fourth on the other side that goes in the slot of the bracket for the pump.
NOW, you need to remove the three long bolts holding the plate to the engine. Argh. The lowest one can be taken out by lowering the engine as low as you can. The other two have to be taken out by raising the engine up pretty much as high as you can. Now, you'll note that there is a wedge shaped protrusion where that T-55 through bolt goes through the mounting block and into the engine. Lowering the engine is easy enough, but to raise it, you have to get past that wedge. This is where two people comes in real handy. One to jack, and one to manhandle the engine, keeping it: 1. Squarely on top of the jack and 2. pushing it towards the drivers side to clear that wedge.
Once you weasel those bolts out, the mount plate should come free with a little coaxing. It's sits into a recessed part of the timing cover, so you have to pull on it a bit.
You should be looking like this ^^
13. Now. If you (like us) decided to not take your crankshaft pulley off, this gets a little interesting. If you did take your pulley off (which I would recommend doing if you have the proper puller available. It just makes everything easier) then you're good to go. Smply remove the outer timing cover.
If your crank pulley is still on, then you have to find a way to get the outer timing belt cover out of the way enough to access the cam gear. Problem is, it's not extremely flexible, so you can't simply bend it out of the way enough without breaking it. Here's what we did, and what happened:
-Loosen the two screws at the bottom of the timing cover, they're kind of tucked behind the pulley.
Once those screws are loose you can unsnap the cover from the rear cover, but it's still in the way. We tryed to trim the cover in a fashion similiar to the mod for being able to use an adjustable cam gear, shown below
Problem #1.....that's hard to do when the cover is still on the car. We ended up breaking the cover, and it looked like this...broken at the circled points.
Not the end of the world at all, because the important bottom half of the outer cover was still very intact. But, if we had been doing this in warmer weather, we might have found a way to successfully get the cover out of the way without breaking it. Don't forget to tighten those screws on the bottom of the cover back up.
So, the cover is out of the way. Just not quite the way we planned. Next step!
14. Take a marker and mark the timing belt on the tooth that sits next to the timing mark. Turn the engine (using the crank pulley bolt) to line up the notch in the cam gear with the notch in the timing cover.
15. Stick an allen wrench in the hole designed for an allen wrench in the timing belt tensionor, and then loosen the bolt on the tensioner. Note what position the tensioner is in, so you can put it back in the same spot when you tighten it back up.
16. Loosen the cam gear bolt. DO THIS BEFORE YOU TAKE THE BELT OFF. The belt helps hold it in place, it's already tricky enough to get that bolt broke loose, don't make it any harder. Easiest way I've found after doing two of them is to use a long breaker bar on the socket, and then hit it with a hammer to break it loose. There's not quite enough room to get my impact wrench in there, or it would work great instead.
NOTE!!! This is the point where we dropped the engine off the jack. OOPS!! We had gotten carried away with trying to get the timing cover off, and when we whacked the breaker bar with a hammer to loosen the cam bolt, the whole engine moved enough to fall off the block. Very avoidable if you simply check to make sure the engine is still sitting squarely on the block and you have someone hold onto the intake manifold or something to steady it while you whack with the hammer.
17. Put the gear back at TDC, cause it probably moved while you were banging on it to get the bolt loose. Now slide the belt off the cam gear, without moving the gear away from TDC. If it moves a little it's ok, cause you've marked the belt, so you know which tooth goes where.
18. Lower the engine to close to original position and remove the coil pack, plug wires and valve cover. It's much easier to get the VC off if you also remove the fuel rail cover and unplug the harness from the injectors.
19. Remove the rocker arm bolts, and lift the rocker arms out of the car. Set them in their original orientation on a towel or something, so you don't get the shaft's flipped upside down when reinstalling them.
20. Remove the bracket that holds the hoses and harnesses there on the drivers side of the head.
21. Remove the cam position sensor, circled in red.
You can see we also removed the coolant lines running to and from the heater core and stuffed some rags in them. They seemed like they were going to be in the way, so we went ahead and just pulled them. A moderate amount of coolant with disperse if you do so. Have rags. It does make it quite a bit easier to move those heater lines when they're not hooked up...and as you can see from the picture, they're in the way pretty bad and you will have to pull on them pretty hard to get them out of the way when sliding the cam in and out.
22. Wiggle the cam gear off the cam.
23. Lower the engine as low as you can.
24. Slide the cam out of the drivers side of the head. It takes two hands on the cam to get it out, and you also need someone to pull the heater lines out of the way, and lift the fuse box up and towards the headlight. This will let you barely slip the cam under and behind the fuse box enough to clear the head, and then you're out.
25. Take the positioning magnet out of the old cam and put it in the new one. It's a Torx head screw holding it in, I forget which size.
26.Lube the new cam up real good. Engine oil works, I prefer actual engine pre-lube. Much thicker and stickier, more protection.
27. Slide the new cam in carefully, while someone is again holding the heater lines and fuse box out of the way. There is no way to replace the main cam seal at this point, without removing a bunch more stuff and taking the inner timing cover off. Your old cam seal should be fine. If you're doing a high mileage engine, you should make this a big project and replace the water pump and cam seal. In this picture (my car) you can see the cam seal...obviously not accessible unless the inner timing cover is off.
28. Reinstall stuff. Make sure you use a torque wrench on the rocker arm bolts and torque them to 25 ft/lbs. I think it might technically be only 23, but 25 floats my boat better.
29. When reinstalling the cam gear bolt, the only way I know how to do it without any special tools is to use a long hefty screwdriver to pry against the gear the opposite way that you are tightening it.
30. Everything else should be pretty straightforward, hardest part is getting those 3 long bolts that hold the engine mount plate back on. Once you get the mount plate back on, reinstall the big T-55 through bolt, so the engine is secure once more.
I dunno what else to say...I'm sure I forgot a couple little things. When I reread a week from now I'll probably remember.
Hopefully this is helpful to someone!! Good luck, and let's all make more horsepower!!
1. Break the lug nuts loose on the right front wheel, because it's going to have to come off.
2. Jack the front of the car up at so you have at least 8 inches or so between the tires and the floor. Support the car well with jackstands, because you're going to be cranking around on stuff pretty good later on. I prefer putting the jackstands right under the main sway bar bushing brackets. The weight is all being held by the frame of the car, and most jack stands are cupped perfectly to fit around those bushing brackets. Having the jack stands there holds the car steadier than putting them on the "jack points" of the floor pan, imo.
3. Remove the right front wheel.
4. Remove the TB from the intake, so the intake can move around. You don't have to take the whole intake off.
5. Remove the battery and battery tray.
EDIT. Remove the coolant overflow bottle and line. (the neck is in the way when you have to raise the engine). You can also wait to remove this unitl you have the engine free and can lower it. It comes out easier that way.
6. Take the fuse box loose. It won't be able to move as a whole very much because of the wiring harness, but it will move enough. The plastic locating pin that goes into the fender is the hardest part because it is stiff, but it will just pop out, especially if you can get something thin in there to help pry.
7. Remove the splash shield from the right front wheel well, and remove the pencil strut (that vertical bracket between the frame and lower torque strut)
8. Remove the exhaust header bracket and heat shield. Remove the 4 nuts on the exhaust header flange. You don't have to take the exhaust completely loose, just taking the nuts off allows it to slide on the studs and lets the engine move enough for later. Trust me, you need to move the engine A LOT.
9. Remove the the upper motor mount, then the lower motor mount. The engine's not going anywhere, because there's still a big old bolt holding it to the frame.
10. Now you need to put a floor jack under the oil pan with some blocks on it. The blocks do two things: allow you to jack it up high enough, and protect the metal. This is a picture once the engine is completely free (and pretty high actually)...as you can see, the top tilts backwards alot. This picture shows about as far back as you should let it go. As you're jacking, simply make sure you're forcing the jack under the car farther...this keep the engine centered on it as it goes up.
11. Get just a smudge of pressure on the jack. Then remove the plastic plug in the wheel well and insert a Torx T-55 bit into that bolt that you might not have ever known was there. Remove that bolt. The engine will now be free to move up and down as you so desire.
12. The next big goal is removing the engine mount plate. (The thing with the blue x on it)
To do this, you'll need to remove the power steering pump. There are four bolts, three that you reach through the pulley, and a fourth on the other side that goes in the slot of the bracket for the pump.
NOW, you need to remove the three long bolts holding the plate to the engine. Argh. The lowest one can be taken out by lowering the engine as low as you can. The other two have to be taken out by raising the engine up pretty much as high as you can. Now, you'll note that there is a wedge shaped protrusion where that T-55 through bolt goes through the mounting block and into the engine. Lowering the engine is easy enough, but to raise it, you have to get past that wedge. This is where two people comes in real handy. One to jack, and one to manhandle the engine, keeping it: 1. Squarely on top of the jack and 2. pushing it towards the drivers side to clear that wedge.
Once you weasel those bolts out, the mount plate should come free with a little coaxing. It's sits into a recessed part of the timing cover, so you have to pull on it a bit.
You should be looking like this ^^
13. Now. If you (like us) decided to not take your crankshaft pulley off, this gets a little interesting. If you did take your pulley off (which I would recommend doing if you have the proper puller available. It just makes everything easier) then you're good to go. Smply remove the outer timing cover.
If your crank pulley is still on, then you have to find a way to get the outer timing belt cover out of the way enough to access the cam gear. Problem is, it's not extremely flexible, so you can't simply bend it out of the way enough without breaking it. Here's what we did, and what happened:
-Loosen the two screws at the bottom of the timing cover, they're kind of tucked behind the pulley.
Once those screws are loose you can unsnap the cover from the rear cover, but it's still in the way. We tryed to trim the cover in a fashion similiar to the mod for being able to use an adjustable cam gear, shown below
Problem #1.....that's hard to do when the cover is still on the car. We ended up breaking the cover, and it looked like this...broken at the circled points.
Not the end of the world at all, because the important bottom half of the outer cover was still very intact. But, if we had been doing this in warmer weather, we might have found a way to successfully get the cover out of the way without breaking it. Don't forget to tighten those screws on the bottom of the cover back up.
So, the cover is out of the way. Just not quite the way we planned. Next step!
14. Take a marker and mark the timing belt on the tooth that sits next to the timing mark. Turn the engine (using the crank pulley bolt) to line up the notch in the cam gear with the notch in the timing cover.
15. Stick an allen wrench in the hole designed for an allen wrench in the timing belt tensionor, and then loosen the bolt on the tensioner. Note what position the tensioner is in, so you can put it back in the same spot when you tighten it back up.
16. Loosen the cam gear bolt. DO THIS BEFORE YOU TAKE THE BELT OFF. The belt helps hold it in place, it's already tricky enough to get that bolt broke loose, don't make it any harder. Easiest way I've found after doing two of them is to use a long breaker bar on the socket, and then hit it with a hammer to break it loose. There's not quite enough room to get my impact wrench in there, or it would work great instead.
NOTE!!! This is the point where we dropped the engine off the jack. OOPS!! We had gotten carried away with trying to get the timing cover off, and when we whacked the breaker bar with a hammer to loosen the cam bolt, the whole engine moved enough to fall off the block. Very avoidable if you simply check to make sure the engine is still sitting squarely on the block and you have someone hold onto the intake manifold or something to steady it while you whack with the hammer.
17. Put the gear back at TDC, cause it probably moved while you were banging on it to get the bolt loose. Now slide the belt off the cam gear, without moving the gear away from TDC. If it moves a little it's ok, cause you've marked the belt, so you know which tooth goes where.
18. Lower the engine to close to original position and remove the coil pack, plug wires and valve cover. It's much easier to get the VC off if you also remove the fuel rail cover and unplug the harness from the injectors.
19. Remove the rocker arm bolts, and lift the rocker arms out of the car. Set them in their original orientation on a towel or something, so you don't get the shaft's flipped upside down when reinstalling them.
20. Remove the bracket that holds the hoses and harnesses there on the drivers side of the head.
21. Remove the cam position sensor, circled in red.
You can see we also removed the coolant lines running to and from the heater core and stuffed some rags in them. They seemed like they were going to be in the way, so we went ahead and just pulled them. A moderate amount of coolant with disperse if you do so. Have rags. It does make it quite a bit easier to move those heater lines when they're not hooked up...and as you can see from the picture, they're in the way pretty bad and you will have to pull on them pretty hard to get them out of the way when sliding the cam in and out.
22. Wiggle the cam gear off the cam.
23. Lower the engine as low as you can.
24. Slide the cam out of the drivers side of the head. It takes two hands on the cam to get it out, and you also need someone to pull the heater lines out of the way, and lift the fuse box up and towards the headlight. This will let you barely slip the cam under and behind the fuse box enough to clear the head, and then you're out.
25. Take the positioning magnet out of the old cam and put it in the new one. It's a Torx head screw holding it in, I forget which size.
26.Lube the new cam up real good. Engine oil works, I prefer actual engine pre-lube. Much thicker and stickier, more protection.
27. Slide the new cam in carefully, while someone is again holding the heater lines and fuse box out of the way. There is no way to replace the main cam seal at this point, without removing a bunch more stuff and taking the inner timing cover off. Your old cam seal should be fine. If you're doing a high mileage engine, you should make this a big project and replace the water pump and cam seal. In this picture (my car) you can see the cam seal...obviously not accessible unless the inner timing cover is off.
28. Reinstall stuff. Make sure you use a torque wrench on the rocker arm bolts and torque them to 25 ft/lbs. I think it might technically be only 23, but 25 floats my boat better.
29. When reinstalling the cam gear bolt, the only way I know how to do it without any special tools is to use a long hefty screwdriver to pry against the gear the opposite way that you are tightening it.
30. Everything else should be pretty straightforward, hardest part is getting those 3 long bolts that hold the engine mount plate back on. Once you get the mount plate back on, reinstall the big T-55 through bolt, so the engine is secure once more.
I dunno what else to say...I'm sure I forgot a couple little things. When I reread a week from now I'll probably remember.
Hopefully this is helpful to someone!! Good luck, and let's all make more horsepower!!
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^^Nay - same exact thing, AFAIK.
Also, tonight I am sending Dave some more pics from the install. this is NOT that bad, really - and there was only ONE bolt left over!!!
The one thing I suggest, have lots of time!!! Started at 9-930am, and ended at 6pm. With a lunch in there, btw. Plus, most of the stuff we had to improvise and figure out. Getting that mounting plate off took longer than ANYTHING else. Just an FYI, it really is not that hard.
Also, tonight I am sending Dave some more pics from the install. this is NOT that bad, really - and there was only ONE bolt left over!!!
The one thing I suggest, have lots of time!!! Started at 9-930am, and ended at 6pm. With a lunch in there, btw. Plus, most of the stuff we had to improvise and figure out. Getting that mounting plate off took longer than ANYTHING else. Just an FYI, it really is not that hard.
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- kc2005ptgt
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^^^ All of you ^^^
WIMPS
Best thing I ever done was dive into the internals and do it myself It is fun!! All you need are sockets and screw drivers and a few jacks
j/k y'all, thanks for the compliments
WIMPS
Best thing I ever done was dive into the internals and do it myself It is fun!! All you need are sockets and screw drivers and a few jacks
j/k y'all, thanks for the compliments
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I could not agree with you more, but some of us cant have the downtime if something goes wrong, thats why I have not done any internals just yet...Best thing I ever done was dive into the internals and do it myself It is fun!! All you need are sockets and screw drivers and a few jacks
Granted I got an experimental cam coming shortly and I have a new adjustable cam gear waiting to be installed
- kc2005ptgt
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I like the new Cam, it has improved my top end significantly - not a big fan of the butt dyno, but I must say that it has significantly shortened the amount time I spend rapping out the engine what I mean is that it pushes through the top end a lot faster, so I know the power is there, just need to find the money and time to dyno it. Only one place here in town that I found so far who does dyno's, like 30 minutes away (if you know anything about KC, that is nothing, this town is SPREAD OUT!)... Anyway, downlow I feel it too. When I am in low RPMs and cruising in a higer gear I no longer have to downshift to pass. I used to do this when on the highway, and now I get same boost of speed. I am really happy with it and can tell it has worked well with the other mods. Now I need to open up the exhaust a little. That is next mod - I keep saying.phenomeneon21 wrote:damn good write up...I want to get a comp 400 cam, but I think I'll take the easy way out and pay someone to install it, hahaha. So how does it feel with it in? I know the comp 400 makes more power at the top end of the Magnum motor, did it give a little down low too?
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Also don't forget to break in the cam per the manufacturers recommendations.
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Yes, for a new cam, don't go nuts on it right away. This was a used cam swap....so it was fine. I have a little card that came with my Comp 200 somewhere that says how to break it in. Any new cam you buy should have break in procedure info with it. And any used cam won't necessarily need that break in.racer12306 wrote:Also don't forget to break in the cam per the manufacturers recommendations.
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If you are ever on the MS gulf coast and want to install my cam, i will be happy to help/learn. There are a few guys down here who I might try and bribe into doing the install with me...but like somebody said, this is my DD and if something goes wrong or there is significant down time...kc2002acr wrote:^^^ All of you ^^^
WIMPS
Best thing I ever done was dive into the internals and do it myself It is fun!! All you need are sockets and screw drivers and a few jacks
j/k y'all, thanks for the compliments
Jerome
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i have a question about this,
a while back i did the same procedures to change to change my passenger side engine mount (the one with the torx-55 bolt going through it), the same nasty work raising and lowering the engine..everything other than touching the cam, any how, by far the hardest thing to do was removing the engine mounting plate bolts, especially the bolt in the back side of the engine.......
my question is, when i removed that bolt, it had traces of engine oil on it....i was baffled by where this could be coming from, i changed the timing-belt, pump, tensioner, timing belt cover last and engine seals year and everything in the area looked brand new while doing this job, except for the oily bolt..... isn't this screwed right into the block? it should not have any contact with engine oil...right?
any ideas?
good right-up, but man the wooden blocks on your jack don't look very stable
a while back i did the same procedures to change to change my passenger side engine mount (the one with the torx-55 bolt going through it), the same nasty work raising and lowering the engine..everything other than touching the cam, any how, by far the hardest thing to do was removing the engine mounting plate bolts, especially the bolt in the back side of the engine.......
my question is, when i removed that bolt, it had traces of engine oil on it....i was baffled by where this could be coming from, i changed the timing-belt, pump, tensioner, timing belt cover last and engine seals year and everything in the area looked brand new while doing this job, except for the oily bolt..... isn't this screwed right into the block? it should not have any contact with engine oil...right?
any ideas?
good right-up, but man the wooden blocks on your jack don't look very stable
- kc2005ptgt
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I can't imagine why you would have oil on it
And yes, they were not the most stable, but it worked. Oh yes, and we did drop the engine once No biggee, nothing broke.
And yes, they were not the most stable, but it worked. Oh yes, and we did drop the engine once No biggee, nothing broke.
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The only way to avoid the block problem is to have an even bigger floor jack that would only need one thin block to cushion the oil pan. But even the fairly good sized jack we have doesn't reach high enough (with the car jacked up in the air already) to move the engine enough without bolstering it with a big chunk of wood. That said...it's very easy keep the jack and blocks under the engine....you just can't forget about them like we did.
And yes, I freaked out a bit and somehow cut my fingers pretty good trying to catch the engine. I don't know what I grabbed, but it was just instinct...needless to say, I didn't do much to hold it up.
And yes, I freaked out a bit and somehow cut my fingers pretty good trying to catch the engine. I don't know what I grabbed, but it was just instinct...needless to say, I didn't do much to hold it up.
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Good times, good times... Oh yeah, and Dave I lost some of the pictures we took! I am looking all over, but I can not find em
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SOLD 7/09- 2002 Dodge Neon ACR | Flame Red
The Offical: Sold My Neon Even Though I Swore I Never Would Club | Member #777
SOLD 7/09- 2002 Dodge Neon ACR | Flame Red
The Offical: Sold My Neon Even Though I Swore I Never Would Club | Member #777
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- Former Moderator
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lo intentare! y le dire a Baal haber si quiere hahahaquicksilvr wrote:You're kidding right? I don't think there is a single person on this board that could translate and retype that whole thing. Baal could have, but he hasn't been around in a LONG time. Copy and paste into an online translator, and that's the closest you are going to get....
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- Former Moderator
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- Joined: Fri Jul 30, 2004 7:19 pm
- Location: St. Joseph, MO
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- Junior Admin
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A quick suggestion: Before breaking the cam bolt loose remove the valve cover, then rocker arms so all your valves seat into the head out of harms way. You can spin the cam all day and it wil not hurt anything. I used chain vise grips to hold the cam gear while breaking/torquing. Worked great didn't leave marks or any damage to cam gear.
Bill
1999 neon coupe 2.4 swap
2021 Forester
2000 Neon MTX swap with '02 R/T PCMOlha Koba, a psychologist in Kyiv, said that “anger and hate in this situation is a normal reaction and important to validate.” But it is important to channel it into something useful, she said, such as making incendiary bombs out of empty bottles.
1999 neon coupe 2.4 swap
2021 Forester
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and for those of you who are scared to do this, it's surprisingly simple if you have a good friend and just enough beer to take the edge off, but not enough to impair you. Be patient and work methodically, and you'll be surprised how easy this is. It only took me about 10 hours total, and I only had help for 2 of those. almost 2 more of those hours were spent wrestling with the remains of the timing cover that I broke spinning around the end of the crank.
If my buddy didn't have to work it would've taken 6 hours.
And I'm the guy that took forever to do an UDP install, and almost a week to do a clutch swap.
EDIT:
Wow, dead horse. oops.
If my buddy didn't have to work it would've taken 6 hours.
And I'm the guy that took forever to do an UDP install, and almost a week to do a clutch swap.
EDIT:
Wow, dead horse. oops.
"If you haven't bled on it, it's not your car"