I too had to replace a piston on my 52 TD. When replacing it I had similar
difficulties so set the con rod up on a journal blank and swung it on a set
of vee blocks. Put a new gudgeon pin in place and got out the Last Word
indicator and voila!! I discovered a slightly bent con rod. No point in
trying to save it so bought a new one. Reassembled the items and she worked
like a charm. One other thing of note - it's a good idea to torque all
bearing caps only once to their spec. Once done they are stretched a bit
and will never re-torque precisely to the shop spec when rebuilding. I
always put in new bolts when re-fitting bearing caps. I used old bolts for
test set ups as described. This latter tip was highly recommended by the
folks that ran the local crank and cam shaft grinding shop. Their specialty
at the time was foreign cars, especially LBC's.
Hope this helps and maybe saves someone some money.
Cheers,
Ron
|