318 first trip!!!


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Posted by Dylan in Lewiston on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 20:05:47 :

Well I got the 318 conversion running finally with just enough time to do a pretty good ring seating trip and some town driving to get the basic bugs worked out. The three of us, one lunch box bronco and one fullsize Cummins bronco made our annual run to the mountains. The first sixty miles of pavement were OK but a bit loud (engine and gearbox whine). We got off the pavement about 9am, and the amb. air temp was about 75Deg. We immediately had to air down for flotation purposes. Nearing about the third corner I (running in the middle) decided to pass the leader just for fun, first time I'd really stood on it so far. Worked out good engine wrapped up and sounded pretty good. Shortly after this, the temperature started to go up. My buddy looking back in his mirror said that my elect. fan wasn't running. After pulling over and doing a quick check I discovered that the inline fuse holder under the hood had gotten hot and lost conection, so I reconnected and tied a zip tye around it. The temp came back down to right between 160 and 212 (original 48' gauge, which I checked right after I got it running with a laser temp gun) Later on the air temp probably reached 80Deg and I could hardly keep it cool. We had made it approximately 5 miles off the pavement when the fullsize Bronco lost the alt and killed both batteries. And to compound problems he was sitting with one side in a very deep tree well with the passenger side resting on a couple small trees. So I lined up behind him and tried to winch him back to higher ground. I ended up tying my back bumper to a tree before I was able to pull him far enough forward (I was using a snatch block for direction change) to get him out of the hole and then I had to winch him back up the road roughly 50 yards so that I could jump start him again (we would have turned around earlier but we thought we only had a bad battery). At that point we did some more diagnostics on his charging system and figured out he had a bad alternator. So back towards the pavement we headed. The broncos went on ahead, while I took it easy so that I didn't overheat my new engine. When I got back to the pavement I tried to use my onboard air (Chrysler RV-2) to inflate my tires, but, for some reason this compressor isn't nearly as fast as the York I had on the six, luckily it took quite awhile to charge the bronco back up to where it would make it home.

So next on the list I think is to try a little harder to fit the mechanical fan on the motor and only use the electric for back up. So far I've had the rad. cleaned and sealed proffessionally,they also converted it to a pressure system, I mounted a perma cool 2500 CFM electric fan, the motor got a new water pump and a new 170Deg thermostat, and was a stock re-ring, new bearings, cam and polished the crank 71' 318.

I'm pretty sure I can get the other fan on there if I switch back to the york which has a smaller clutch, and since it's faster any way it seems like the best route

All in all it ran better than expected for what little time I had to work out the bugs.

Dylan




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