Mistakes.. we all make 'em

Running in was going great, but I had made an awful mistake one late night during an oil change / fixing a minor leak – I started it very briefly without remembering to refill with oil... oil light on, an "oh shit!" moment... and yeah... that hurt...

Figured I might as well "wait and see".

It ran perfectly fine but I found some very fine coppery flakes in my oil on the next change after ~100km. Ran it another 100km or so and dropped the oil again to check, same thing.

I pulled the oil pan for a look. No evidence of damage to the crank or main/rod bearings, so that probably means the (old) balance shaft bearings took the brunt of any oil starvation, spinning as they do at double the rpm. Nothing of note in the pan.

Anyway, I'm going to pull the motor, inspect, clean, and possibly delete the balance shaft chain. Bit of work in it because ideally the head has to come off to remove timing cover. I haven't quite found the time to get into it yet..

Obviously pretty gutted I made such a dumb mistake but I have every hope that it'll come good.. just got to muster the enthusiasm...

Onwards... fix it again, Tony (err, Dan)

First i had to pull the engine back out, strip it, remove the balance shafts.

These looked like toast to me, and having now decided not to delete new ones were ordered from Maptun along with the bushings, and in the interim I had to work out how the hell I was going to install them.

Luckily @Tboy on SaabCentral had been through this before and had drawn up plans for the tool, which he shared with me. 

Over on OzVolvo, the mighty leader @jamesinc had just got himself into metalwork and was happy to have a crack at the tool for a small sum. Not much later he came through and delivered the tool to me – what a bloody legend!

With tool in hand, measurements taken and parts in stock, the old bushing were pushed out and new ones pressed in without much fuss at all. The tool worked brilliantly.

Now to build it all back up..!