Another sludge building factor not mentioned here, is plugged up crankcase ventilation. Unfortunately, the only crankcase air intake on original Y-Blks is thru the Oil Filler Cap screen. Early engines had large filler caps with an air intake deflector. Often they were discarded at some point & replaced with smaller filler caps. I believe that later engines may not have even come with that style of deflector cap. Anyway, dirt entering under hood quickly tends to plug the screen in the cap, and since it faces downward, it tends to go unnoticed. Then, there's the "road draft tube & canister", which is on the lower drivers side of the block on most engines, & was intended to drag out moisture & fumes from the crankcase. This canister contains a horse hair filter, which needs to be serviced occassionally. Often they went unserviced for years & thousands of miles. The result, cobious accumulation of moisture from the fumes, resulting in heavy sludge buildup..

Paul

We had quite a bit of snow overnight and this morning so after plowing the white stuff I took some time off to completely disassemble the block the rest of the way. All of the cylinders checked out very well and actually have very little wear in their STD bores at 3.75. This should be a good candidate for a rebuild. There were only a couple of rod bearings (4, and 8) that had a lot more wear than the others... why that is I don't know. But all of the mains looked exceptionally well, and I would think that this would clean up easily at .010.

I will probably take the works down to Felt's Machine down in Suffolk, Virginia. Lyn uses them pretty regularly with good reports, and another Y blocker I know just took them his 292. Felt's did a C2AE block for me about a year and a half ago and I was impressed by their work.

Daniel Jessup

Lancaster, California

aka "The Hot Rod Reverend"
check out the 1955 Ford Fairlane build at www.hotrodreverend.com

I earned my share of $$ unplugging those. On the SBF the valve seals would start to crumble about the same time the drain holes would plug up. New valve seals & unplug the overhead paid pretty good although quite a messy job. Occasionally a piece of valve seal would find its way into the oil pump & shear the pump drive shaft. That paid good too if the owner was smart enough to shut the engine off in time. I recall one sludge-bucket I had use pliers to get the pushrods out of the heads.

Dan      Kingman Az.      86409

this is common if you live in a cold place like i do.ive seen engines smoking so bad you couldnt drive them the drain holes in the heads were pluged and heads were full of oil.you just got a coat hanger and drove it down the holes until it let go.whatever was handy for a ream.stop and go driving and cold are the ruin of an engine.several people i know got good deals on cars because of this.they knew what it was by the amount of smoke.you dont see it anymore.

Interesting story Daniel. Maybe its in the air but yesterday while you were taking your engine apart and while my 292 is in the machine shop getting enlarged, I decided to break down a 272 that came with my 56 Mercury pickup so I would have more room. I have had it for about 20 years and when I couldn't start it because the starter was shot I stored it in the corner of the garage. I didn't get as far as you but there is zero sludge in the oil pan and none under the rocker covers. There were, however, about 50 brand new looking sunflower seeds stuffed in the #1 exhaust port and the #6 exhaust port was virtually closed off with carbon. The other thing, which is very disconcerting is that every tab for the bell housing (on the block side not on the bellhousing) had been broken and re welded, including the dowel pin tabs. I'm not a welder but the welding was below my standard. They also have studs in them and I strongly suspect that the studs might be welded in. The lower drivers side stud is broken off and I doubt that you could remove the remaining piece without breaking the weld. The odds that you could dial in the bell housing are slim and none and I am definitely leary about hanging the block on an engine stand. I'll see what tomorrow brings.

Mark

1956 Mercury M100
1955 Ford Fairlane Club Sedan
Delta, British Columbia

Daniel: A short story about that sludge....My dad owned a service station and had a '66 f-100 with a 6cyl. He changed oil

every 3000 miles and used a detergent oil. Well, it got to using oil, so I told him I'd rebuild it for him (only had 60.000

miles on it!) When I pulled the valve cover, surprize! It looked like a loaf of bread...the rockers were covered and looked worse

than yours.....The only thing we could come up with is he only drove this truck about 4 mile a day, most of the time.We figured

it never got "hot" enough to even open the thermostat and the oil never reached a decent temp. Lessons learned...I told him he

to drive it 20-25 miles once a week so it would heat up enough to let the oil do its job.

Your engine was probably treated the same way....Back in the day WE didn't drive the miles people do today...

Bill

Bill

Pelham,Al

I decided to drain the block and surprisingly someone had installed brass petcocks on either side. They both turned with ease and before too long it was empty of coolant. When I pulled both of the heads, I didn't find anything too weird in the chambers and they looked to be virgin without ever having been removed from the block itself. Everything was standard FoMoCo issue.





The three cylinders with crud in them actually had piles of loosely packed unidentified bug remains. Cylinder 6 had the most with 1/4 cup! I had to laugh when I thought about my buddy telling me to just fire this thing up. That would have been fun to see all of this crap blown out the exhaust pipes.

The bores were all standard 292 and as it turned out when I flipped her upside down, so were the rod bearings. From the overally looks of things, this engine has never been opened up and the oil has never been changed!

"Just add another quart, Harry, and top 'er off."

Everything in the crankcase was covered with a nasty goo kind of sludge but nowhere near as thick. Talk about "non-detergent" oil, what gives with all of this sludge?



I am almost done with the tear down, and will use some of the block parts on my C2AE build. Since this thing is STD, I think I am going to keep the block and find out what the crank specs have. The first rod bearing I pulled showed quite a bit of wear, but I would think this crank may turn out to be ok, all things considered. Although it has a ton of sludge, it looks as if oil was getting to every nook and cranny that it needed to over its lifetime.

What is anyone's take on those ECZ-B heads? Are they close enough to being like the ECZ-C's to make them worth saving for a naturally aspirated 292, .030 over, looking to get 230-250 horsepower out of the engine?

Daniel Jessup

Lancaster, California

aka "The Hot Rod Reverend"
check out the 1955 Ford Fairlane build at www.hotrodreverend.com

The 292 is an EDB block and it seems to be in decent shape. The heads are ECZ-B, and they had two good ECG 6564 rocker arm assemblies that had good oil to them... there was very little wear on the pads. I was surprised to see that but just figured that most probably in this engines' lifetime those had been replaced. The drip pans were still under the rocker stands, but the Sludgefest was on...



a closer view...



The sludge was so caked up on the drip pans, I have no idea whether or not anything ever dripped out of the pan, maybe these were "overflow" pans after a while. You can see from the tops of the valve stems though that rocker arms were getting pretty good oil delivery. Next I went to the oil pan and the timing cover. You can see what opening all of that up revealed. I would imagine that this block weighed a few more pounds than normal because of the sludge. The timing chain was so loose, I only lacked 1/2" from completely removing the camshaft gear without moving the crank gear at all... you could move it back and forth that far. From the looks of things, I don't believe that timing cover had ever been off the block from the factory.





I think I need a bulldozer to take care of this stuff, a putty knife or a scraper just ain't gonna do it!

More to come from THE 292 Y Block Sludgefest 2013 lol

Daniel Jessup

Lancaster, California

aka "The Hot Rod Reverend"
check out the 1955 Ford Fairlane build at www.hotrodreverend.com

Last summer a buddy of mine gave me an extra 292 he had because I had done quite a bit of work on his teapot carb and helped him tune some things... no big deal. Didn't expect the gift but certainly appreciated it. He wanted the 292 out of the way so I gladly accepted. My friend had "hopes" that it would not take much to get the 292 fired up again and running. The engine was not stuck and there was "green water" in it he told me.



(THE 292 IN QUESTION IS THE ONE ON THE RIGHT...)

I brought it home, stowed it on engine stand, and put it under a shelf.... until today. I recently the sold the engine on the left so I thought, "Y not? Let's see what's inside this thing." The exterior had the usual sludge and oily base, and it looked like someone had tried to repaint the engine while it was in the car. The paint was peeling in places and you could tell where someone had just simply painted right over the crud that had accumulated over the years. The spark plugs did not look too bad, and even when I pulled the valve covers I was greeted by a little bit of the old "paraffin sludge" from quite a few years of build up but thought that things were salvageable as they were. The top end was oiling pretty good at any rate.

Then I pulled the Valley Pan...



I have disassembled quite a few Y blocks over the past several years, somewhere in the neighborhood of 13-15 or so, but never have I encountered one this bad on sludge. It was caked up all over the place. Wasn't just the lifter valley either. The underside of the valley pan has more than 1/4" on the surface!!!! If you look closely in the above photo, that volcano looking structure is the buildup of goo that surrounded one of the bolts that hold the valley pan down, lol! Here's another view...



More to come from the Y Block Sludgefest 2013...

Daniel Jessup

Lancaster, California

aka "The Hot Rod Reverend"
check out the 1955 Ford Fairlane build at www.hotrodreverend.com