Seized Flavia Engine

[viiking]

I have a '68 1800 Flavia Coupe with a seized engine. I purchased this many years ago knowing it was damaged. On disassembly the tops of a couple of the pistons are corroded and therefore no good.

I am looking at leads where to buy new pistons, rings and maybe liners. I have searched on line and these appear to be unavailable. Are there aftermarket suppliers? Or alternatively do other cars use the same piston? I saw one post that said some Fiat parts were interchangeable.

It would be a shame to trash this car because of a lack of spares.

[LanciaFin]

Just about everything is available, but sometimes hard to find, if you are not living in Italy. I got my engine parts from here:
http://www.franzheilmeier.de/html/lancia_flavia.html
This company will also produce new set of pistons:
http://www.pistonispeciali.com/EN/index ... z-UGTVS-Uk
And a vast source of spares:
https://lancia.co.za/

Your liners can probably be bored to oversize, up to 89mm using 2-litre model's pistons and head gaskets (biggest oversize for 1800 is 88.6mm, when 1800 head gasket can still be used), unless the corrosion is too severe. New liners are available somewhere, I know. Note that liner's bottom seals provided with gasket sets are probably too thick, so proper ones may be needed to cut from thinner paper.

BR,
Miika

[viiking]

Thank you for the leads Miika. I live in Australia so it will be a little more difficult for me. I do know of the one in South Africa.
Thank you

Priit (Australialainen-Virolainen)

[brian long]

Cavalitto has all this stuff and will get it to tou within a week or so!
Brian

[tim stansmore]

Hi, I build these Flavia engines day in day out and also live in Oz and am based in Melbourne. The Lancia reg calls me Mr Flavia!. Cavalitto is the place to go for all parts. Please feel free to call me any time 0418130642. Look up the Australian Lancia Register.

[viiking]

I have disassembled this motor. Luckily the camshafts and crankshafts are in perfect condition. The bearings too almost look good enough to reuse (but I will change them obviously). The water pump is not salvageable with significant corrosion of the internal body parts. I believe the car did not suffer any catastrophic engine problem causing it to sieze. Rather, it appears that the engine had a water leak internally and was not driven for some time by the original owner and then would not start. That is when he sold it to me.

After two months of soaking in various solvents, heating and cooling the block and pistons, gentle and not so gentle hammering the pistons with blocks of wood the pistons would not budge.

Given that the piston crowns had showed some level of pitting I bit the bullet and removed the pistons by drilling.

The pistons were certainly well and truly seized and the rings were solid with what looked like dried up rust/mud.They would never have been salvageable, so I was satisfied that my butchering of the pistons was justified. I guess water had been sitting in the bores for some time before I bought the car many years ago, so I was not surprised. The rods look OK but the piston pins show a small amount of pitting where the pin has been stationary at the oiling hole on the top of the small end.

Now I am left with the liners which are also pitted around the point where the rings were sitting. I need to remove the liners and replace. I don't think they can be bored out to remove the pitting. I have had a bit of a tap with a dead-blow hammer but they are well and truly stuck too. I read in the workshop manual that the liners have some sort of bolt holding them in place to prevent them falling out, but I can see no evidence of this.

I intend to replace the liners. I will make a puller to remove the liners. Are there any tricks to this I need to worry about? Some people say to heat the block with a propane torch on the piston area being worked on to help free up the liner. When I look at the water jacket it just looks very thin around the liner area and don't want to break the area.

Once the liners are out, I will chemically clean the water jackets and check for damage. I just hope that there are no cracks in the water jackets, otherwise the engine is junk.

[viiking]

Oh, also after disassembling the engine and rechecking the engine number I realise I actually have a '66 not a '68 as it was originally sold to me.

[LanciaFin]

Tere!

In my engine the liners were very well seized in engine blocks as well. I had them pressed out in a shop, and they initially succeeded with only one liner. They gave up when 5 tons on pressure was applied without any movement, in fear of breaking the blocks. Then some older chap over there told them to use leak detector fluid as lubricant, because it crawls further between the liners and blocks. That obviously helped a lot and the liners came out.

If ever possible, I suggest to keep the engine halves firmly bolted together during the detaching of the liners. Separately they seem to distort quite easily, which will cause issues with crankshaft main bearings (mismatching halves of beds.) In my engine this happened, and it took MANY tries to hammer with a heavy rubber hammer, bolt together, careful measurements of beds roundness, dismantle, hammer a bit more, bolt together etc... And lots of thinking where to hammer and how much. Got it back ok, it sure was a good idea to check the roundness of main bearing beds.

Also check the protrusion of liners when in place with seals. I cut new seals from wax paper (võipaber, valmistatud Soomes ), which is probably close to original material, and thickness 0.05mm (seals provided with gasket set were 0.25mm, way too thick.) Just for additional sealing I put also very thin layers of non-setting Würth DP300 sealant.

BR,
Miika

[viiking]

Aitäh!

I also am restoring my father's 1968 VW beetle so am very aware of the problems of distorting alloy engine blocks. I learned to drive on this when I was 16 so it has much sentimental value.

It is so interesting that the VW and the Lancia are backwards of each other. Both 4 cylinder opposed, but one with engine at the back driving the back wheels and one with the engine at the front driving the front wheels.

With regards to the liners, do you know if they are just a straight cylinder i.e. the same diameter all the way along the height of the cylinder? I have seen photos of other Lancia liners and they seem to have a "bulge" in the centre and are not a straight cylinder. I thought that the liners may have been "wet" liners but they must be "dry" liners then.

I have also seen a You Tube video where the "mechanic" breaks the cast iron liner using a screw driver slowly and hopefully without scoring the inner block. I am really worried as you have said that taking it to someone to press out the cylinders may end up cracking the block.Especially as not too many people here have the experience to work on Lancia.

Thanks for the input.

Priit, aka viiking

[viiking]

Well I answered my own question.

When looking at the top of the liner I saw what looked like two concentric circles. It looked like there was a thin liner inside an outer body. Inside the block was what I thought was the red cruddy looking water jacket for the liner.

I have now learned that the whole thing was the liner. So no it isn't straight and the picture of a new liner I saw with the bulge was in fact correct. What threw me was that the two concentric circles on top really did look like a liner inside an alloy block sleeve like I had seen on other engines I have worked on previously. Stupid me!

I attempted to press out the liner using a hydraulic press and a home made liner puller. I gave up after applying 5 tonnes of pressure on the liner for fear of cracking the alloy block. There was no way it was going to move. Even a little bit.

Given that I had already indicated that the liners were too damaged to get bored out, I decided to use the "butcher's method". I had previously successfully removed a damaged liner in an Alfa 1600 GT many years ago. Some people will shudder to think what I have done, but it works. But obviously only for a completely trashed liner. I had rung around a few machine shops to get these machined out but not only was the cost ridiculously high, most said that they would still have to remove the last little bit using a chisel anyway in case the liner was out of round.

NOTE: WEAR EYE PROTECTION and support the bottom of the liner with some timber.

I used an angle grinder to cut a number of slots in the top of the liner, well away from any of the alloy "posts" that stick up from the bottom of the engine. I then used a wide metal chisel and struck each slot hard until the liner cracked. I continued to do this until as much of the liner that sticks up from where the liner sits in the block, or as close as possible to this.

Why do this? To reduce the width of the liner that needs to be cut in the next section.

I then laboriously used a hand held hacksaw blade in a little saw attachment (not the normal one but one where you can insert broken blades into a little saw) and started to cut a slot in the width of the piston in a convenient spot - usually the bottom of course. I used a 24 tooth blade. You can use just the blade but it hurts your hand after a while. It took maybe 15 minutes of sawing and checking to cut almost through to the alloy. You have to be careful of course and need to check often. Shining a light back from the cut gives you a good idea of how deep you are.

At first you can start cutting at an angle to get the slot going and then go more horizontal to get the slot close to the alloy. You can see from the swarf whether you are cutting cast or alloy and you can certainly hear the difference in sound if you go too far. I marked the alloy in one spot but that should be OK.

You could use an air hacksaw if you have one, but it would be too easy to over cut. Perhaps you could cut 3/4 of the way with an air hacksaw and then do the last bit by hand.

I then proceeded to stick a chisel in the slot cut and bang away until the slot cracked open. Yes you have to give it a bit of a hard hit to get it to crack. The less metal you have left, the easier it is for the liner to crack there. If you are brave and cut close, you have to hammer less. Once the liner breaks, you can lightly tap the liner out with a chisel or screwdriver or punch. You'll hear the change in pitch of the liner when it does break. But first remove any burrs that you have on the top of the liner because if you don't they will gouge the inner alloy as you push the liner through.

This worked really well for me, except on one liner. After smacking away at the slot it just would not crack and I was worried about giving the liner too much violence. So my solution was to cut a second slot parallel to the first one about the width of my small chisel apart.Once I got the slot deep as I thought I needed, I tried again to smack the new slot but it wouldn't again crack. So I then proceeded just to "chisel" out with my sharp small chisel like you would using a wood chisel to make a mortise. Bits of cast would crack off and then about 1/4 way down the whole thing just gave way and the liner came loose.

I know this is not good engineering and with a full engineering workshop at my disposal I would have done differently, but I managed to get the thing done with little damage to the mating surfaces (which will smooth out with some emery paper).

The liners themselves were just covered in 30 odd years of dried coolant which had made a very stubborn cement to hold the liners in place. But I did not really see any evidence of any paper gasket, unless it had disintegrated over the years.

Now to find some new liners and pistons. I will try the dry ice method to cool down the liners and perhaps heat the block to allow me to slip the new liners in place.