XinnKoda

A couple people have been following my 3.8 rebuild so I wanted to give an update. The piston rings completely seized and it required a teardown. I replaced everything except crankshaft/camshaft and the journal bearings. I assembled everything back together and so far I am very pleased with the results. I only have 50 miles on it so far but already I can tell the engine has much more power and runs very smooth. I'm anxious to see if I make it all the way through the break-in period without any troubles. I'm waiting to get about 500 miles on it before I do a compression test and leakdown test. I had an interesting dilemma with the headers coming into contact with the spark plug wires. On the driver side, I had to cut/crimp my own plug wires using Accel high temp wires and put a 90 degree boot on them to re-route them away from the headers. I also am using a fiberglass boot protector to protect from radiant heat. The passenger side has no problems with interfering with the headers but I'm still using the Accel high temp plug wires with the boot protector just in case. According to the owners manual, I should drive "moderately" until I hit 60 miles, and then I can go up to 50 - 55 MPH. I don't quite understand why they put a MPH limit on it instead of a RPM because I can be going 40MPH in 4th gear at 2k RPM but if I choose to shift into 5th gear I can be going 55 at 1300 RPM (approx.). Do they add this because they're assuming people are driving automatics and the computer will auto shift into a lower gear at those speeds? Anyway, so far everything has been great. I took video of the entire assembly process and hopefully will have them uploaded within a few weeks (I'm not the best editor so it takes me a while to do.). Thank you everyone so much for your continued support and suggestions on what to look for and giving me some good advice along the way!

karls10jk

That's awesome that you've got it back together and things seem to be running well. Do you have a complete parts list.....maybe with pn's and prices that you could upload? I'd be curious to see what my rebuild cost will look like when I get there.

Four Low

Thank you for sharing , your Attention to Detail all but guarantees a strong, long lived engine. Something that the Factory Mass Production missed.
This will be a great Rebuild Reference article.

XinnKoda

Thanks for the replies! I was able to finish the Part 1 video which is the teardown and dissassembly. I don't have a very good editing program so there's lots of moments when it would have been helpful to play it at 4x speed but people will just have to fast forward if they get impatient. This video covers from popping the hood to having your first piston pulled out of the block. The assembly videos will be much longer and I will cover more detail in them. For now, here's part 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDXXm3o73Jk&t=3s Thanks!

DJ1

Awesome man. Thanks for posting the vid. Even though I have the 3.6, I've bookmarked your vid in the hopes I can pick up a thing or 2.


Congrats on the successful rebuild!








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