The greater part of the motor assembly procedure was behind us and it was time to consolidate these many parts into an automobile.  On December 2, 2017, Janet took some time out from learning about very hot glass to help me swing the motor onto the frame and align the motor mount bolts.

Over the next couple of weeks I attached the water pump, magneto, carburetor and muffler. It was ready to attempt to start the engine.  In-laws, Clarence Davis and Janet’s sister, Sally, were in California following a cruise on February 20, 2018, so we thought we would give it a try. We got one crummy “pop” and I messed up my back trying to crank the tight engine.  Very disappointing.

My back was so messed up that I didn’t want to touch the car for a while.  As I recovered, I worked on different methods to start the car without using my back.

The first method was some sort of heavy duty drill that I could attach to a bolt in the place of the hand crank.  To that end, I built a new spring loaded crank extension.

I bought a nice low RPM high torque half inch drive electric drill from Harbor Freight ($50 or so) and chucked in a welded up 3/4″ socket and hex shaft.  With the spark plugs out and priming cups open, the engine turned easily. With the spark plugs in, it strained and smoked, but turned. With the spark plugs in and priming cups closed, it simply made bad noises and smoked.  Bummer…..

I tried a pneumatic drill…  That did even less.

Time to reflect and form a different plan.

Various types of “bump starters” or “paddock starters” might work.  These are motors that turn a tire or roller with friction applied against a fly wheel (in the case of stationary oil field engines or large hit & miss engines) or rear tire (in the case of starter-less motor cycles. As soon as the engine / motorcycle is started, the bump starter is backed away.  I searched (without any luck) for a temporary starter such as this for use with antique autos.  I found none.  Theoretically, such a starter could be used on an exposed fly wheel (such as our Michigan has) or on a jacked up rear wheel on a car that doesn’t.  The commercially available bump starters were prohibitively expensive and frankly didn’t look like anything I would want to own.  Some were powered by electric motors. Some were powered by small gasoline engines.  I wanted a battery powered starter.  So I set about building one. The final result is shown below.  It’s basic configuration was dictated by the platform it is mounted on — a rolling cart for a power washer (removed) that I obtained with wheels and all for $5.  It consists of the following:

1. a 1970’s vintage Dodge pickup starter with functioning solenoid and 10 tooth pinion gear.($25)
2. a jack shaft that takes the 10 tooth to a 21 tooth sprocket.
3. a mini-bike wheel with a slick tire and 72 tooth sprocket.
4. a 12 volt battery ($50) and Harbor Freight remote starter button ($10).

The overall cost with gears, sprockets, chains and some specialized tools was less than $300. Not including EDM (Electric Discharge Machining) of a keyway into a 10 tooth pinion gear needed on the jack shaft. ($75).  This cost might have been unnecessary.

Here is what the gadget looks like:

The good part about this gadget, is that it works. I was able to use it to turn the engine over on July 1, 2018. When jammed against the bottom right side of the fly wheel, the engine turns over…. rapidly.  Just like starting a car.  The main issue is getting it in the correct position and exerting enough upward pressure / friction. Once the sweet spot is found.  It spins things easily. HOWEVER — if the cam shaft gear is in the wrong position, you can turn the engine over indefinitely and never have the engine start.  Unbeknownst to me, that was EXACTLY the problem on July 1, 2018, when Janet, Tori & I tried for 2 hours to get the car to start. All to no avail.  But my back didn’t hurt from cranking! It was time to ponder the reasons for lack of any effective internal combustion.  Dang! No Bang.

 

 

The “MotorRotor” engine stand was a blessing and really made the assembly process easy. Part of the process of reassembly was started by Jim Blair in Tucson. In addition to re-babbitting #3 connecting rod, he re-seated the crank in the case. In the process he removed and re-arranged some of the thin shims on the main bearings. This tightened up the engine, but the bearings still needed to be lapped (or scraped) into a better fit. The crank turned, but not as easily as I would like.

In my work on our Model T Ford engine, I had used a really nice product to lap in main bearings & connecting rod bearings. The product is called TIMESAVER Lapping Compound. It is a non-imbedding grit that apparently cuts the babbitt for a while and then breaks down. Supposedly the stuff is made from feldspar, but I cannot confirm that.

IN any case, I used TIMESAVER on our BUDA motor. Specifically, I used the #100N Very Fine grit Yellow Label material. The engine was rotated to upright position and I dripped a mixture of 10W-40 oil and TIMESAVER into all the main bearing oil holes while turning the crank with a pneumatic drill.  And oh what a difference.

 

After getting a nice fit with the TIMESAVER, I opened up the bearings and washed out any remaining grit, then re-assembled the main bearings.  The next step was to attach the fly wheel and check for runout.  The flywheel had a thin paper shim when I disassembled the engine and sure enough…. it needed it back in when it was reinstalled.

During the later part of November of 2017, my Dad came down to visit from Fresno and we made major progress on putting the engine back together. We created new gaskets for both the head and the oil pan and then proceeded to put everything back together.

The jug style head went back on first, and then the engine was flipped over so we could install the piston & connecting rods from the bottom of the engine (while upside down).

Once the head was securely bolted on, we flipped the engine over (Oh — I do love that Motor Rotor) and installed the cam shaft & timing gear where we thought it should go. (More on this later) Please note that there were no witness marks on the gear, contrary to verbiage in some of the later (after 1912) Buda Motors service manuals that I have. So, the install was a “guess”. When I originally removed the cam gear & shaft from the engine, I was relying on the existence of witness marks for aligning the crank and cam gears.  Because the gear housing was loaded with gunk, I could not see that — ahem — there were no alignment marks.  DAMN!  And believe me, the air turned blue when I discovered this a year before. So, you’ve got to start somewhere, even if it is wrong (and it was). In the cam went — right, wrong or whatever.

We were rolling now, so next the piston rings were compressed and pushed into the upside down cylinders.

Once the pistons and connecting rods were all in, I placed in the oil level float and prepared to put on both the front gear cover and the oil pan. All while the engine is upside down in my favorite Motor Rotor engine stand.

With lots of supervision and help from my Dad over the Thanksgiving holiday,  the engine was mostly back together. It was time to reinstall it on the frame.

As soon as we got home from picking up the re-babbitted rod & crank case from Jim Blair, I thought about what engine stand I would need for “simple” re-assembly. The two BUDA manuals (one from 1915 and another from 19??) both contain phrases like “put engine on floor & turn over”. YIKES! This thing is big & heavy. I’ve done Model T engines and two 6 cylinder Mercedes engines and those weren’t “light weight” like a VW engine (which I’ve also worked on.) Those fit on a standard Harbor Freight 1000 lb. stand. The stand complains a bit and spinning the engine around sometimes takes 2 people, but this BUDA engine is much bigger. And the fly wheel is a beast. So, should I fabricate a stand? There were several choices for stands of the 1910’s that were depicted in the literature. See below.

However the Buda Manuals both mention “turning the engine over” at several points in the re-assembly process. I also worried that if the stand did not provide for an easy way to invert the engine for assembly, I’d be struggling to flip an engine that is pretty close to irreplaceable. A cantilever set-up that only bolts the motor on one side or an end seemed too risky. I opted for a really nice (and pricy) engine stand rated at 2000 lbs. that would flip the engine end for end with a mere crank of a geared handle. It arrived in a big wooden box that required a fork lift to unload.

When assembled, it was a nice blue & grey with a crank.

So, with a beautiful new engine stand, I hoisted up the crank case with the crank seated by Jim Blair up and onto the stand.

With the new stand, I could get our engine to do headstands & back flips. Very cool!

As previously discussed, our Buda engine tried to kill itself by destroying the #3 connecting rod bearing and then trying to knock the engine apart. All this happened on January 6, 2017 (see prior posts). I checked with numerous folks in the antique auto community about who and where to have our engine looked at and the #3 bearing replaced. Some locations, though highly recommended were very far away (like Minnesota) others were close by, but health and other issues of the business owners’ mitigated against that choice. We eventually chose to take our engine (and all the bearings, gears, crank shaft, cam shaft, connecting rods, pistons & wrist pins) to a highly recommended fellow in Tucson, Arizona — Mr. Jim Blair. Jim had done some very nice bearing work on several cars for some of our San Diego area Horseless Carriage Club members. While Tucson isn’t close. It isn’t 2/3’s of the continent away either. We have since discovered that we can make the trip one-way in just over 6 hours. So, on July 29, 2017 we delivered the lower half of the engine to Tucson, where Jim & I went over the condition of the various bits to see what needed fixing and what looked pretty good.

The upshot was that Jim’s initial reaction was that other than the disintegrated #3 bearing, the engine was in remarkably good shape and the bearings and other bits should be just fine — as is. He would go through everything to make sure and check the shims for each of the bearings and pour a new bearing for #3 connecting rod.

And……. that’s exactly how things went down when we picked up the motor on October 21, 2017. Jim was at the shop to meet us and we examined the rods & re-set crank. Everything looked very nice and ready to assemble.

And now it is time for Craig to get busy and put it all back together. Our several month hiatus on the restoration is over.

After showing my bearings to several groups of folks that knew more about antique motors than me, we came to the conclusion that the BUDA motor I have does indeed have “insert bearings”. Modern engine bearings in automobiles almost universally have “inserts”. These are generally thin half cylinder pieces of metal that snap or press into aluminum or cast iron engine blocks and/or connecting rods. They are the surface material that rubs against all the hard steel “spinning bits” in an engine – like the crank shaft, cam shaft(s), connecting rods and other parts that go round and round very fast when the engine is running. Oil lubricates the babbitt to hard steel interface in a very tiny space between the spinning and stationary parts of the engine. An example of a modern type engine bearing is depicted below.

Most of these modern bearings have a “shell” or backing material onto which is deposited a very thin layer of “magic white metal”. That’s my term, because I understand that many of the alloys are trade secret or otherwise proprietary. When our BUDA engine was built (probably 1911 or 1912) the “magic white metal” of the day was called BABBITT. Babbitt was named after its inventor, Isaac Babbitt, who came up with the stuff in 1839. The alloy is generally composed of 80-90% tin (Sn), 7-8% antimony (Sb), 1% Copper (Cu) and assorted other metals in very small percentages. The babbitt in our BUDA engine is composed of the following percentages as determined by an X-ray fluorescence test done at Decisive Testing, Inc. of San Diego, on May 4, 2017. My thanks to President Michael May for assisting me in discovering the composition of our car’s bearing material. The hand-held XRF (x-ray fluorescence) gun they used is a cross between a Star Trek phaser & tricorder. It zaps a bit of X-rays into the alloy and gives a read-out of the full spectrum of metals that are present. Very cool gadget and its completely non-destructive of the test specimen.

I strongly suspect that some of the trace elements showing up in the list of metals is the result of contamination somewhere in the 100+ years the car has been around and that it is unlikely that titanium and some of the other metals were really part of the original alloy mix. That’s a guess – I have nothing to prove it.

On April 10, 2017, Clarence convinced me that we really should look into the oil pan and see what happened when I had started the engine back on January 6th. I reluctantly agreed, knowing full well that what we were going to see was something between ugly and really really ugly. Um…… it was ugly.

And it got uglier when we pulled off the oil pan.

The #3 rod bearing was gone. It had been ground up into crumbs and small chunks. Sally & Clarence left for home the next day and I was left with the knowledge that I had properly guessed a rod issue. But that didn’t make me any happier. I removed the rod cap on #3 and pulled the rod and piston down and out past the crank shaft journal.

This is what a rod bearing and rod bearing in a cap are supposed to look like:

That was the “before” photo. This is the “after” photo:

Oh dear – what to do next?

On April 4, 2017, Sally & Clarence Davis arrived for a visit. Clarence & Sally had the Michigan stored at their barn in Hobart, Indiana for a year after we purchased the car in 2011 and they helped us move the car from our garage to our work shop in 2013. Sally (Janet’s sister) is also a great grandchild of Michael Fleck, the original owner of our car. Clarence has been a great help in working on the car and has extensive experience with the care & maintenance of very big power plant machinery. He & I commenced work on April 5th, going over the entire differential and drive shaft.

We got the adjustment of the ring & pinion gear to the smoothest operation so far, tightened up the torque tube adjustments of the depth of the pinion, closed up the differential and added the very viscous gear oil.

Maybe that will be the last we need to deal with the differential for a while.

In Mid-March I worked for a steady 4 days to correct issues with the thrust bearing adjustment mechanism on the torque tube. It involved hours of attempting to get better access through the little adjustment door. I had to rig a torque tube support to the rafters so that I could get the best angles for work. The photo does NOT show the straight up and down orientation that was required.

The thrust bearing was trapped in the torque tube. There was no way to get it out through the ends of the tube and it was clearly meant to install or remove through the adjustment door. But it could not be removed because of restrictions in the torque tube casting. I spent DAYS carefully grinding, filing to open the area up without damaging the threads in the tube or on the bearing race. It was very fine work with magnifying lens goggles & Dremel tools with tool steel burrs. Finally the casting was opened up enough to fully unscrew the bearing race and remove it.

An unforeseen problem presented itself next. The bearing would fit nicely back through the little door,but would NOT thread back into its correct position. I fought with the little #%$#&* for a solid 8 hours (over 2 days when you would NOT want to have visited me.) It had been in there. It had threaded out nice and smoothly. But it would NOT thread back in without starting to cross thread. I tried every trick I knew about getting this thing back in. NO DICE. So I slept on it. Not literately, but I did walk away and didn’t deal with it for a day or two. In thinking about the problem it occurred to me that the torque tube was a combination of steel tubing with some cast iron and bronze inserts. The thrust bearing race was bi-metal. The outside edge was steel (where the notches were cut and the threads were located and the inside (the actual bearing race) was some bronze alloy. Bi-metal pieces tend to be a bit “flexy” or “bendy”. And this flexy or bendyness is increased with changes in temperature. Could this bi-metal bearing have expanded or sprung bigger when I removed it from the torque tube? Hmmmmm. Why not cool this thing and see if it shrinks?

Off to the local Albertson’s supermarket where they sell dry-ice. I packed the bearing in the stuff and got it really cold, inserted it into the little doorway and gave it a spin. BINGO! No muss, no fuss — It went in LIKE THE LITTLE $%*&^*(&^ WAS SUPPOSED TO GO IN. Problem solved – lesson learned. Everything’s cool.

My Dad headed back to Fresno and I took a some time off from working on the Michigan… letting the issues before me sink in a little. The differential was becoming a real frustration. “Correcting” the mistakes in the rear end was not improving the operation of the gears. Eric & Kristie arrived for a visit on January 24, 2017 and Eric was ready to attack the problems my Dad & I were encountering. When in doubt, call in the engineers from M.I.T. And so we did.

We took the carrier out of the mounting and went through it to work out the adjusting mechanism.

The entire drive shaft had a lot of components, some of which were not original. At least one Hyatt type caged roller bearing had been replaced with a modern sealed bearing and spacer. I annotated the arrangement as I found it:

Eric & I checked forward & reverse play / looseness in the drive shaft pinion gear and tried to get it to adjust where there wasn’t too much fore & aft slop while adjusting the ring gear left and right to get a nice mesh without binding or clatter.

We were less than completely successful. Improvements? Yes. Wonderful? No.

Some of the adjusting mechanisms didn’t want to cooperate very well. Most especially the rear thrust bearing adjuster that was accessed though a little door on the torque tube.

By the time Eric & Kristie had to leave, we had still not sorted out the actual proper (or best) adjustment of the gears, but we could see what needed to be done.

We started the car 4 times on January 6, 2017. Each time the engine ran very fast and I was unable to adjust the carburetor to slow the RPMs down to anything approaching an idle. On start number 3, I started to hear a faint rapping noise. On start number 4, it was a very noticeable knock… I shut the engine down immediately and and knew that we had something bad going on. It was simply a question of “how bad.”

So, for the time being I chose to ignore what had happened with the engine and my Dad & I concentrated on the differential which we knew had some issues. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing we didn’t have a “happy” engine, because if we might have tried to DRIVE the car. That would have been – not good. It seems that
when we opened up the back of the differential the ring gear was on the RIGHT side and not the left side. I noted this discrepancy back on my July 8, 2016 Post.

In any case, the ring gear was installed on the wrong side. We eventually determined that someone (Phillip Dickey? or kids at a Portage High School shop class?) flipped the entire torque tube / drive shaft / ring & pinion assembly — upside down. Was this a prank or were they trying to get a different wear pattern on the gears? I think we may never know. The result was that the thrust bearing adjustment door was on the bottom of the torque tube instead of the top and the ring gear was on the right side. So why would this matter……… well, in doing a little research, I now understand that the gearing in differentials is dependent upon whether the engine turns clockwise or counter clockwise. This, in turn, (sorry – for the pun) will dictate which side of the pinion gear the ring gear is placed so the car has 3 speeds forward and one in reverse. OR…. if you flip the ring gear to the other side, 3 speeds in reverse and one speed forward. YIKES! That could have been a very unpleasant discovery. My Dad & I confirmed this problem by jacking up the rear wheels and manually cranking the engine over while running through the gears. Sure enough 1st, 2nd & 3rd gear ALL IN REVERSE. “Reverse” gear rotated the wheels forward.

My Dad & I worked on the differential (man it is heavy) and managed to get the carrier & ring gear flipped around to the left side, but we had yet to discover that the torque tube was installed upside down. This meant that when we flipped the carrier over to the other side of its mounts, we were actually installing it on the wrong side. Oh dear.
The gears didn’t want to adjust and it was obviously not happy. It would require more work to get it to something approximating “properly adjusted”.