SABB Story

Colin made a boat call this morning to look at the engine.

He soon established that there was no fuel problem.

Although he could not do a compression test because he didn't have the proper fitting he could tell by feel that compression was very weak. He lifted the rocker cover and after a good look around commented that I had done a good job of reassembling the engine. (Great Colin, so why won't the engine start?) The only fault that he could find was that I had been too gentle with the feeler gauge and the tappet gaps were bigger than they should be, but he said that this would not have caused a problem other than noisy tappets.

We tried starting the engine using more and more starter. Although the starter bank was reading 12.3V he said that voltage under no load means little and the batteries were run down and not turning the engine over fast enough. Then I got the bright idea of combining the house and starter banks (for the first time ever) and we got a bit better performance.

We cranked and cranked and soon I could hear the bang of preignition of the starter gas. We got to the point where the engine was just about to sustain itself but not quite.

At the end of the effort the engine definitely had better compression. I asked Colin if that was because the engine was warmer but he said that the engine had not gotten warm enough to make that a factor. He says one possibility is that some of the rings had gotten stuck in their piston grooves and were not expanding out to meet the cylinder. He thinks that our effort may have loosened some of them. Both cylinders had some compression, one slightly more than the other.

He talked about lifting the engine up to get to the lower end of the con rods but I shook my head and told him that it was not going to happen. "It's easy" he said. "Colin", I repeated, "it's not going to happen."

I then told him that I had been on a parallel track of replacing the engine and he nodded in agreement. I had not told him about my repowering plan for fear of demoralizing him to the point where he would not help me with the engine, but this seemed like the right time to tell him and maybe it took some pressure off of him.

I asked him about the prospects of selling off bits of the SABB and he wasn't aware of many SABBs in La Paz but suggested that I sell it on Ebay. Colin had received $1,000 for a used head from a Volvo engine about the same age as my SABB. He was the second person to suggest Ebay.

He left me with the following plan:

- Let the batteries charge up for a week or more (meaning no refrigerator and relying solely on ice, which is not a problem)
- He left both pistons half way up the cylinder so that I can keep the top of the pistons flooded with WD40, which I will inject through the cigarette holders
- Rig up a switch so that I can control the starter at the engine rather than from the cockpit (He showed me which poles are involved, and the current load will be low.)
- When the time comes drain the WD40 from the cylinders by turning the flywheel while the cigarette holders are out (This is an attempt to free up the rings.)
- Have another try at starting the engine.

Colin thinks that if I can get it running things will snap into place and the engine will run better. Maybe, but even if it does I suspect that it will be very weak.

I'll be doing this as an afterthought expecting a bad result, which won't bother me because psychologically I'm done with the SABB engine.