How I Took Apart and Rebuilt a Small Engine

The picture above shows what my next project will be, disassembling and reassembling an engine. Since I wanted to major in mechanics and be a mechanical engineer, my teacher decided to give me this project.

This picture shows the engine with a part taken off since it needed to be reattached to the engine since it came off when we tried to run the engine to see if it functioned in order from me to work on it.

This picture shows the engine outside on the ground to see if it would work and to our surprise it worked without any problems which meant that I was going to take the engine apart and put it back together.

The picture above shows the first step of taking the engine apart. The engine was placed on an aluminum mat in order to keep all the screws together in order to successfully put the engine back together when i’m done.

This picture shows the engine with the top removed because from here we can remove the piston and the valves. This step will bring me a lot closer to finishing this project correctly.

This picture shows the case of the engine empty and cleaned. The interior is clearly missing the piston, camshaft, timing gear, and tappets. The case was noticeably lighter than before since the case is made up of aluminum and other light metals.

This picture above shows the engine without the cap on being checked to see if everything is alright and everything seemed to check out. This meant that I could run a test run on the engine. Sadly, the engine did not run correctly.

This picture displays the engine with the cap off and the big gear back on. However, a new problem has appeared and that was the pulley clutch wasn’t turning correctly. So we had to take it off.

The picture above is a picture of the engine with the cover off, this lets me see inside the engine and look at the gears and the tap its. I did this because the engine was not working and I feared that it was a problem from the inside, so hence this course of action.

This picture shows the engine with it's cap back on because I did not find any problems with the gears, the tap its, or the piston. I have concluded that the problem was with the fly wheel.

This picture displays the engine with the fly wheel off, after the removal I noticed that the problem was not with the wheel, but with the aluminum case that collided with the wheel during its rotation. This did not let the fly wheel spin properly and therefore not creating a powerful enough spark to combust the compressed air and fuel.

The picture above shows the problem which is a bit of the case was interfering with the fly wheel whenever it would turn. We would have to cut off the excess with a hacksaw and file it down so that no one would cut themselves accidentally and so that the fly wheel could spin properly.

This picture shows the corner cut down to a point where the corner would no longer interfere with the gear turning. There is a big difference between this picture and the picture that was shown before.

This picture shows the pulley clutch off, but fixed, and ready to be placed back onto the engine. The reason for this action was because the pulley clutch was working when it was moving in one direction, however not in the other. In order for the engine to be successful, the pulley clutch needs to move smoothly in both directions.

The after picture shows the engine placed on the ground ready to test one more time. The test was a success and the engine worked completely fine which meant that this long journey off taking apart the engine and putting it back together was finally over.