At this time I turned my attention to the engine.
These were taken before pressure washing, shortly after removal of the entire power train. On the right side, you can plainly see the mickey moused
1/4" studs on the exhaust. This was only the
first of many mickey moused "repairs"? I found. There was no thermostat, just a brass rod holding the door closed permanently. There were more than several nuts and bolts missing from the shrouds, there was a shop towel in the blower fan. There were several vibration cracks in the baffle in the blower housing due to missing fasteners. The stud holes in the valve cover were pulled down into a funnel shape in an attempt to stop leaks, I guess. Might have been easier to replace the missing gaskets that are supposed to be under the nuts. After removing the valve cover, I found the wrong head nuts had been used. The acorn nuts are supposed to be on the studs inside the cover and the regular nuts are outside. They were reversed which left me short two acorn nuts. Boy are they hard to find! I removed the spark plugs and noticed they were two different brands, I don't know if they were the correct heat range or not since I knew they were going to be replaced. One did look a little odd----no wonder, the poorly installed thread insert came out with the plug. Never seen one like this, it had a knurled edge around the top like it was supposed to be finger tightened. Needless to say, it was replaced with a Big-Sert. With the valve cover off, I could see great gobs of silicone around the tops of the pushrod tubes. I knew the head had to come off just for peace of mind. After removing the carb (and scraping off the silicone) and the head nuts, I pulled the head. Gee, what a surprise, silicone everywhere. I pulled the tubes and found the reason for the silicone, half the o-rings were missing. Shit!! The head was de- greased, bead blasted and examined closely. There was a broken off bolt in one of the holes, which I removed. All threaded holes were chased using the proper size taps. The valves were removed and cleaned on the wire wheel .The head was given a good blow off with high pressure air to make sure there was no grit . The valves were lapped in, re-cleaned and installed. I removed the starter and generator, set them aside for re-furbishing and started to blast and paint all the shrouding. When I got to the generator pulley, I discovered that sometime in it's life, the center had broken out and the ace mechanic brazed it back in place and it only had about 3/32" run out. Good thing I had previously bought a pulley kit just to get the spacers (which were missing). Get to use my new pulley now. A complete engine gasket kit was ordered along with a diff/trans gasket kit, a carb kit and a timing chain kit. The box full of Fiat parts arrived on the same UPS truck that delivered two boxes of Corvair parts. Aargh, guess I have to work on the Corvair, It's a paying customer.