The Big F Project: Final Assembly #2: Oil Pump Install

In the first installment of the final assembly I prepped the block and installed the rotating assembly. Now the work continues in finalizing the oil pump, installing the head and test fitting the manifolds.

This will serve as the second part of the "oil pump porting" post. Click the link to catch up if you missed it.

I still had some tweaks to make on the outlet side of the pump. Let's have a look:

The grey stuff is the aluminum epoxy. It has similar properties to the Devcon aluminum epoxy but was available in much smaller quantities more suitable to my needs. I prepped the surface with dimples from a center punch and some brake parts cleaner to remove any other residue.

I had some concerns with using this product in such a critical area of the engine. Those have been put to rest now that I have over 20k miles on a similarly modified D16 pump.

Here is what it all looks like after plenty of cure time and a little more work with the Dremel.

Some other small modifications were made to the housing, outside of the pump area. you can see some of them in the picture below.Two holes that can be seen near the outlet in the upper left that have been filled were supply and return feeds for the balance shaft gear hosing. There is a third that was plugged from the other side. I drilled and tapped each hole to accept a 1/4 NPT socket hex plug. sealed the threads with RTV and then covered them in RTV for extra measure.

The elimination kit I installed from KaizenSpeed included a really slick looking CNC machined billet cover plate for this area. As nice as it is, it still relied on the factory o-ring-style gasket to seal it up. This gasket would need to be replaced occasionally. The plugs seemed like a simple way to eliminate all of this.

Cover is on and torqued to spec using flat-head socket cap screws in place of the Philips screws that come from the factory. this makes torquing much easier. It goes in the oil pump shaped space on the front of the block as seen below.

Flipped it over on you. The pump is in place here just before all of the bolts go in. If I took a picture after this but before water pump and belts and head go on, it's lost in the nether regions of my hard drive. I'll give you this though as a preview of Assembly #3.