Products in this Video:

Video Overview:

We've had this video planned for and finally got to it, although based on the struggles Sam had while building this engine, perhaps we should have waited a bit longer! Either way, Sam got the engine built after a few mistakes during the build process. Follow along and watch the steps Sam takes, and the mistakes he makes while building this all new, EMPI Unassembled Long Block 1600cc engine.

EMPI's Stock 1600cc Engine Kit comes with everything you'll need to build your own Type 1, 2 or 3 VW long block. The engine kit includes a new aluminum Universal engine case, a 69mm 4140 Chromoly Crankshaft, forged stock connecting rods, a stock camshaft, dual port cylinder heads, chromoly pushrods, solid shaft 1.1:1 rockers with swivel ball adjusters, a 26mm Schadek Oil Pump, chromoly head studs, Mahle Rod Bearings, Silverline Main Bearings, Cam Bearings, a complete Elring Engine Gasket Kit (although ours was missing the sump plate cap nut sealing washers), 12 Volt Flywheel, valve covers and bales, and most all the hardware needed to assembly your new 1600cc VW long block engine.

A few extra pieces will be needed to complete the engine, such as flywheel shims (available in a kit here - https://www.jbugs.com/type-1-1300-160...) but you'll use only 3 pieces to set the crankshaft end play. Also, our engine gasket kit was missing the sump plate cap nut sealing washers, but that is not typical and Elrings mistake in packaging the gasket kit.

Video Transcript:

Hi I'm Sam with jbugs.com, and today we're going to get started on building an empty, unassembled long block. So, this unassembled long block comes in 1, two, three, four, five boxes: box one of five, two of five, three of five, four of five, five of five. It just so happens that we got this kit back because it's an aluminum case, and the case was actually damaged in shipping. The customer decided they didn't want it; I don't blame them. It's a brand-new engine—they spent a whole lot of money on it—but as you can see here, we've got this nice chip missing off of this case where it was damaged. So we brought it back, sent them out a new kit, and we're going to take all these boxes, open them all up, set them all out here, and go through all the parts and pieces, and then we'll start building this engine. Oh, look at that—there's the chunk that was missing.

And, truth be told, we also did some work on this, test-fitting some intake manifolds, so it's not normally covered in blue tape, but it is normally all together. They got some Molly pistons and cylinders, and I guess this is a crankshaft—and indeed, a crankshaft it is. Crankshaft installation kit. One of the first couple things we're going to have to do is heat this up, heat this up so we can install them on our crank—dishwashers, lock ring, and distributor drive gear. We've got some general hardware, new valve covers, bales, studs—that's a big box for a little screen. We've got dowel pins, distributor drive washers, gland nut—that should be over there, ’cause that goes in between those guys—oil pump cover, gland nut washer, cylinder deflect tin, distributor drive pinion trying to make a run for it, sump plate. Got some engine case hardware, some studs, more studs, crush washers, uh, hex head with/ qu mm drive, uh, oil relief springs—or oil relief plugs, rather—and stuff like that. We got some main bearing dowel pins, some valve adjustment studs, lifters, cam bearings, flywheel seal, rod bearings, main bearing, oil pump, connecting rods. I’m guessing—yep—camshaft is my [Applause] guess; camshaft indeed. And that looks like a flywheel—indeed it is. Push rod tubes, rocker assembly, engine gasket kit—very handy when you're building an engine—chali push rods, and cylinder heads.

All right, so this might seem like it is a lot of parts, and in reality it is, but if you've built a Lego set, you can probably build an engine. You've just got to follow a couple key instructions. This video is by no means going to be an end-all, be-all, you-know, watch-this-and-you-can-do-anything video. This is going to be just a general overview, more for entertainment purposes, but there will be some education along the way. You'll get to see how all this stuff goes together. Unlike the last engine build we did, where I had to do clearancing the case, clearancing the rods, setting up rocker geometry, this is going to be a pretty much straight, bolted-together kit. There shouldn't be much modification, um, or anything fancy needed. This literally should be just bolted all together. We might run into some pitfalls along the way, and we're going to show you everything that we go through, so you'll have an idea of what you would have to go through at home. But again, this is something that anybody with, you know, some average mechanical experience should be able to do relatively easy. There's nothing fancy here; there's no, you know, machine work required. There really aren't many specialty tools required. It's just a simple, bolted-together kit. So let's get into that.

We're going to start by taking these, these over to our solvent tank, rinsing off some of the debris, and we've got some either dried-up cosmoline or stuff in here, but either way, we're going to rinse all these things off so that we can go through and get our in-play preset. We're going to verify it later, but for now we're going to bolt these together once they're clean.

All right, we're not going to show this step for every single product that we put together, but just know that virtually every single piece that we bolt on this engine is going to be thoroughly cleaned, dried. Main areas we're concerned about are obviously the journals where the rods and the main bearings will sit, and then everything else is just getting it generally clean. These cranks are drilled with what's called a cross-drilled P pattern, so the oil pressure comes in and gets pushed everywhere. And hit it some hearts cleaner, but she'll be good to go. All right, all right, uh, guess I'll take these outside and hose them off. All right, we got ourselves a nice little, uh, rinsing—rinsing station over here. Apparently I'm go blow these out, spray them down.

This step we are going to temper temporarily install our crank bearing to our flywheel and check for endplay. Saddle bearings—these will eventually go right there. Snout bearing will go right there. Full-circle bearing will go right there. Most importantly, and what we're setting now, is our thrust bearing, which goes at the back and actually, if you look at the surface, just happens to match up ever so nicely with that diameter right there, and that's what we're going to work on right now. And you know what, while we're doing this, I might as well get our crank gear warmed up. This is kind of like planning three steps ahead, so to speak. This is our cam timing gear; it's got two notches here—these face out—but if we look at this right now, it cannot fit onto the snout. It's got to be heated up. Same thing with our brass distributor drive gear. Now, this guy actually spins that guy with those heel C gears—same thing—and there's no indicator on this, but it can't fit on either. These both have to be warmed up. This one goes on first, that one goes on second, so we're going to put that one in bottom, that one on top, cover them with oil so they warm up evenly, and generally, as soon as this oil starts smoking, that means that the gears are ready to install. So hopefully, by the time I'm done doing all that, those are ready to go—and hopefully not sooner. Not that it matters at this point, but on all of our main bearing dowels, they're always going to point towards the flywheel.

We'll get some of my favorite assembly lube—contains zinc Molly, that's the most important part. We're just going to tighten this guy temporarily so that we can come through here and measure how much play we have in that surface right there. What we want is that much play, but we need to have the rest—that space—taken up with shims so that the crank doesn't move forward and N—that's our end play on our crank. 25 and 11, so what we need again is 4,000. So 25 and 11 gives us 36, right? Yeah, so 25 and 11—2511—gives us 36, but we need to have 4,000, so we need to have 32,000 of shims when we build up our engine. So we're going to remember that number: 32,000. Remember that, people—32,000.

All right, we'll get ready to install our gears. Lots of assembly lube. That main set—that bearing, or that dowel pin rather—needs to be on the side of the flywheel. Now we need to install our timing gear, and if we're lucky, that won't pop out like it did last time, but just like last time, I'll have a hammer and punch ready. And I don't have gloves this time, so this might be harder than it should be—woo. And I don't have gloves. And same thing as last time—hopefully this thing doesn't heat up too much in the meantime—and dang it, I may have screwed this P all left and right. Am I even close? Nope, I'm not even close. Turn that off, unplug that. We're going to have to do a redo on this, but hopefully I have the gear puller.

Round two, try two. First time the gear wasn't hot enough and I dropped it. Now I've got gloves, so hopefully… you get back out of here. There we go—boom—and we've got our notches up. All right, that guy just installs right around that, and our brass timing gear. There are no indicators on this thing—it's helical, so not a big deal. And just like that, let's turn this guy off and unplug him, remove that, and yeah, you can see where I spilled and we made lots of smoke. Smells like a state fair in here now, though.

All right, snap ring pliers are next—one of those fancy tools you're going to have to have, I'm sorry. There we go. Now we've got to get over that lip and down to the next section. There we go—that's one side. There we go—boom, there we go, got it—ever so cautious because we don't want to damage the brass down below. And then that will sit right there after this bearing, but for now we're going to work on connecting rod, connecting rod, connecting rods, so let's do that now.

These guys aren't so filthy as these were, so I'm just going to hit these, these with some brake clean, just because there is some packing oil in them. Really important thing to note on stock connecting rods: one side has a nub—raised nub—one side doesn't. This raised nub needs to face up, so this one will sit here, this one will sit here, but either case they're both going to be sitting up. These two are going to be facing this way; these two are going to be facing that way, so both those cylinders are out at the same time while both these cylinders are down. And they came with their own specific torque sequence—even though it doesn't match Volkswagen's—we're going to follow their sequence.

Now we're going to prep our connecting rods and bearings. Keep these guys matched up; they are paired alike, but they do have bearing tangs. Both those bearing tangs go on the same side, and like so—generous amounts of assembly lube. Coat all of our journals. While I'm at it, we'll install here. Make sure that your bearing tangs match up face to face when you're installing the caps—and I didn't check that over on this guy, but that one's good; that one was bad, so it's a good thing that I checked and I reminded you all, and I reminded myself at the same time.

All right, everything moves smoothly. Next torque sequence: 25 ft-lb—that's 30 foot-lb—and everything moves freely. Nubs up, nubs up, freely, nubs up, nubs up.

Yeah, dishwasher facing up. This we're going to give it a full flush on in the parts cleaner, in the hose, with carb cleaner; then we'll mount it on our bench stand thing. I think I'm going to put the case savers in first and then wash it—that way any threads or debris or otherwise that we push out of the threads once we're pushing everything in, all that stuff will be rinsed out once we rinse everything out, ’cause some of these holes in the case savers, they go all the way through. So if that means something can go in this way, it can come inside the case. So yeah, let's do that.

So I've got to install a whole bunch of these guys. This is just Aviation sealant; you could also use red Loctite, anything of that nature. Like that, and like that. Oh, that one's deep-studded. All right, that's going to be a fun one—we're going to have to use a stud on that. Perfect—that's what we're trying to do. All right, now we can get to cleaning out our engine case. Just lightly tapping it out, and there's our K tabs. This has got one, two, three, four dowel pins. The opposite side only has one dowel pin and also has the oil pickup, and the studs are already installed, so that's handy. That's there, that's there—oil pickup tube pressed in place—good there. Definitely things like that is what we're going to have to flush out: all these journals, make sure that everything is cleaned, there's no debris. Obviously now we've got a little bit of our Aviation sealant in there—it's better than metal shavings, I say—inside this bore here and that bore there, those lifters get oil from this cam bearing. So journal—one of the most important ones—is of course our oil pump pickups and out inlets and outlets. Clean that guy out. And since this case is aluminum, we ain't got to worry about it rusting, so that's good. But either way, we're still going to give it a rinse with a hose after all this.

From our main bearing down to this cam journal, and one from that one to that one—that's all those little ports and passages inside the engine are all connected. There we go: so out of the oil cooler, we go into bearings, cam bearing, cam bearing, cam bearing. Inlet from the oil cooler—hi, sorry—oil pressure relief. Make sure that guy's all cleaned out. Don’t rust anything you can't confirm yourself. I mean, yeah, it had a gasket, seemed like it was a good stick, but I don't care, apparently.

Couple things we'll be doing here: we've got main bearing dowels to put in, cam bearings, lifters, distributor drive shims, distributor drive gear—uh, at which point should be able to drop our, uh, crankshaft in. So let's get to it. Main bearing dowels—got one of our two saddle bearings. Distributor drive gear, and this is going to install with this small C lining up this way, so that groove is going to be offset towards the crank, not towards the flywheel. Offset groove towards the crank, straight up and down as we're installing it into the engine. After I can tell you this, it's probably a snug fit—oh, okay, good, not too bad. Little assembly lube, and so you want that guy in line with the case that way. I'm going to pull off our flywheel, and then we can drop the crank in.

This is one, but this is three, so I need to hold one up when we drop it in, so it's going to go in this way. All right—nub, nub, nub, nub. This is number one, that's number two. Let's do our best to align these bearings. Since you guys—what I see, what I'm talking about—we want these guys, that, that, and that—we want all those bearings to align up with this pin, this pin, and this pin once we drop her in place. Am I right or am I wrong? Can't be right and backwards. I might be completely bass-ackwards, and I am—yep, I'm backwards, dagging it. Where are we? Are we more lined up now? Yes… no, I've got everything upside down. Monil.

All right, so I've got my rods on backwards. Oh, now I've got to take all of our rods off and redo all that, so hold please. As we can see here, I don't build engines every day, so I've got all my rods 180 out, so I'm going to have to go back and flip this, this guy 180 that way, this guy 180, that guy, this guy 180 that way. I forgot that number three is our offset closest to the flywheel, so it goes 3, 1, 4, 2. So anyway, I'm going to pull all these up here, throw them up here real quick, flip all my rods around, retorque them, and then we'll reset and we'll drop our crank in. Hold please.

Now let's try this one more time. Oh, let's make sure our distributor drive gear's fully seated—and that one's good, that one's good. This guy is being a stinker—there we are, just felt it, I just felt—I hope you saw it. One final test will be to just temporarily set this guy in place with the dowel lube—make sure… yeah, no, we're not all in place, ’cause that guy is rocking, and if that guy's rocking, we're not set. This is for our cam thrust—that's why it's got that face right there—and this is our back bearing over here, which gives us better room for our cam plug here we go. Even if you don't know, you can still figure it out, and then that will allow that guy to sit in there much better—perfect.

This is a new case, so these are going to be relatively tight. Things will be tight—not like dropping lifters into a used magnesium case; they just kind of fall right in ’cause those cases have plenty of miles on them. These guys don't. Oh wow—no oil, no gunk, no grease, no junk—just a good old stock camshaft. So we're going to go clean it up real quick, just in case, and then we're going to put it to use. So we're going to rotate this guy in place like so, a little bit more luby-lubs. Cam feels good, doesn't look like it's jumping. Say we are good to go there.

Normally we put O-rings on these guys—it does not look like there's spots for O-rings. Like we're going to put them on one main bearing dowel goes on this side, along with this main bearing saddle bearing. I just redid the rear main seal on it—it actually had Aviation sealant—we still got a good amount from the last time we did. You put some of that on our lifter bores, get those guys ready for tap-tap-tap. Ring in some new lifters, two from here. Let's go through and clean up a little bit of oil off of our case halves as much as we can anyway. This will give our sealant a better chance of sealing. The same thing over here—a little bit easier ’cause we ain't got much in our way. Let that sit and tack up for a minute. Uh, did I do this backwards again? Monil—I did. Oh, your little knobs—my knobs—’cause that's the bottom, huh? Yep.

Well, guess what—now I'm going to do it on the engine. Remember I had my rods backwards before? Well, apparently either I put them on backwards again or I had them on right the first time. Either way, you guys probably saw that the entire time and were sitting there screaming and yelling at me. Why didn't you tell me? I couldn't hear you—that's why. Wouldn't have mattered anyway. So now I'm going to pull these off again.

Oh—a shuffle pin. I didn't realize we had shuffle pins. My shuffle pins right there. Shuffle pins—you don't use O-rings right there and right there—so let's get those guys out of the way. I was wondering what those big grooves were in there for. I guess now I know. There we go—much better.

Make sure the case—the crank—turns over, which apparently it does not, which is not good. So what happened is the question. Did the main bearing fall out? Maybe—that's my guess. When I was tapping it around to get the shuffle pins in, perhaps that main bearing saddle bearing got dislodged. And again, we're locked up. Dude, what? The bearing's good, bearing's good, bearing's good. Everything's happy still—that's good. We're getting somewhere—finally. We still spin.

You get a washer, you get a washer, you get a washer, you get a washer—but you don't get tightened yet. You're going to get a bolt, but you three are not going to get tightened yet. Is it overkill putting Aviation sealant on every single bolt and nut and washer? Yeah—but you know what? I don't like oil leaks. It's a Volkswagen—still going to leak—but whatever. At least we gave it our best shot.

That's good, that's good, that's good—not tight yet. Long side points towards the center of the cam, so then our pickup side, which goes to our tube, lines up. Follow that with our drive gear, now engaged to our cam. And even though there's these little alignment marks on these things, they literally mean absolutely nothing—but we'll still make them line up. There—thin coat—and hopefully we've got some sealing nuts in there. More Aviation sealant in lieu of sealing nuts, and at least these have nylocks, so that'll help seal the threads as well.

Crank—she still cranks over nicely. He doesn't like the way that sits—D-nab it—nice try. And there's no point in putting sealant on these because we're going to run this thing to a break-in run and drain the oil, so if it leaks, it leaks. Note: supply your own sealing washers for your sump plate. Is it going to leak? Probably—but that's one thing this thing is missing, is apparently sealing washers for the acorn nuts for the sump plate, and then I'll have to… it went out aluminum com back.

So that's going to do it for day one. As you can see, we've got the engine done. Uh, I struggled a little bit—and I'm not going to lie—definitely wasn't on point. These are the only instructions I had, which was basically the endplay sequence without the engine assembled, and then our torque patterns and torque specs—that's all the instructions I had. I was doing everything off memory, but I was on one side of the bench working on the crank, trying to show you guys, the audience, how the engine should look, so I was completely backwards through most of that build. Uh, but anyway—it's assembled, it's done, and right now we're working on getting aftermarket engine tin fit to an aftermarket engine case, which isn't fun, but that'll be in an upcoming video.

In the meantime, we hope you guys have enjoyed this. Next week we'll get the top end put on—and I struggle there a little bit too—but stay tuned.