A car came into my shop a several months ago that needed some tuning. The owner had the carburetors restored, but could not get them to work properly on the car and sent the car to me to investigate further. Unfortunately, I found low compression on a few cylinders and more alarmingly, no compression on cylinder #9.

When I performed a leak down test, I could hear air pressure leaking past the exhaust valve. Unfortunately, further testing using cameras is only going to tell us that the exhaust valve on cylinder #9 is bad. It could be a bad valve seat, it could be burned valve, or it could even be a dislodged valve seat inside the head to cause all the air to leak out of the cylinder. Although I have pulled one head leaving the engine in the car, I found this car had low compression on cylinder #6 on the opposite bank, along a whole slew of weak numbers. Fixing one bad valve on one head was a band-aid fix to an engine needing a complete engine rebuild.

After speaking to the customer and giving him the bad news, I had to wrap my head around embarking on another engine rebuild. I’m currently putting another 330 engine together, and it is currently occupying one of my engine stands. I built a second one to accommodate a 400GT engine I’m sealing some oil leaks, and I refuse to take a third one apart until I put at least one of these two engines together! I’m not complaining about the work, but it seems lately, all I’ve been getting is difficult repairs on old Ferraris!

To move this project forward, however, I could at least remove the engine from the car and that started with disconnecting it from the chassis. On SI 330s, I recalled the angle drives to the distributors would get hung up on the coils mounted diagonally on the fire wall. The best way to avoid damaging something was to either remove the coils, or remove the angle drives.

Always looking for the easiest solution first, I decided to remove the angle drives, but I was met with my first problem. The previous person who worked on this engine replaced the original shouldered bolts with plain M6 bolts to secure the angle drives to the back of the engine. They also managed to round off the edges to the head of the bolt making it very difficult to get purchase of the bolt head with a wrench. The position of this particular bolt is hard to reach, so getting a 6 point socket on the head is nearly impossible and I didn’t have a shallow socket with a hex head to get this job done. It’s a good thing this engine is coming out to fix issues like this easily, because it could have made getting the valve covers off this side a real problem!

Here’s a picture of what the shouldered bolt should look like, and you can see how easy it would have been if these were correctly installed on the car I was working on.

There were a lot of rubber parts on this car that were on their last legs of service. Trying to disconnect the upper radiator hose made the old rubber crack and crumble. This hose was not long away from failing completely.

I made mental notes to ask the customer what he would like to do about some of the components around the engine. The fuel rail was pretty rusty and missing most of its original industrial chrome finish, and some of the yellow hose looked original.

Once section of yellow hose looks like it was replaced, and replaced poorly. I was surprised it wasn’t leaking!