Alfa Tear Down

Jun 13, 2007 update to the Alfa Romeo 2000 GTV project car

Last night, we unbolted the head to fix a few things, including an oil leak from the head gasket. We tested the compression before the head was removed, and with all four cylinders between 200 and 210 psi, we know the pistons, rings and liners are fine.

There’s a pretty good oil leak coming from where the head and timing cover meet. We think it’s due to a lot of oil being slung around the timing chain at high RPM. We’ll use a gasket sealant on this portion of the head gasket this time.

With the head off, it’s pretty easy to get at the passenger side engine mount. We’re putting a few shims under it so that the engine is canted slightly at an angle, giving more clearance for our intake tract.

After some discussion with Ric at RML, we realized that the culprit for our oil leak is an inadequate breather system for the crankcase ventilation. The stock breather uses a gasket at the valve cover (seen here) that severely restricts the expanding air’s flow out of the engine, essentially pushing oil out of other spots where it shouldn’t be (like the headgasket) We’re going to remove this gasket and re-engineer the breather to take care of this.

We dropped the head off at the machine shop so that we could have some material skimmed off to raise the compression ratio. The head was already skimmed 10 thousandths during the rebuild, so we’re taking another 25 thousandths off to raise the compression ratio about .7 or so. We’ll be breaking out the die grinder and cleaning up the intake ports while we’re at it. We’ll be doing that at home.