tap. clean. tap. clean. tap. clean.

I spent most of the day in this position, cleaning out the bolt holes for the head bolts:


I used a combination of q-tips and a tap borrowed from work to clean 'em out. I got most of the big chunks of crud out of there, but the tap keeps coming out dirty. I finally gave up for the day around 8 pm, after the tediousness got to me. My friend Travis suggested sticking a magnet on the top of the tap to get the metal filings to stick to it, so I'll try that next time. But as for the tediousness...

I accidentally dropped a q-tip down one of the pushrod holes. This caused me to briefly consider panicking, until I remembered that there's a side access panel that I can remove. So I did. But first, I had to pull the distributor and the road draft tube.
The road draft tube wiggled out pretty easily. I'm going to leave it out for a while for when I re-seal the oil pan, as it gets in the way when installing the oil pan. The distributor removal involved cranking the engine (again with the fan blades as leverage) until the rotor was perpendicular to the block, then scratching a mark on the distributor body where the rotor was pointing. I then loosened the clamp screw, and pulled and twisted the distributor out of the block.
With those out of the way, I was able to remove the 10 screws holding the pushrod cover panel on, then break the gasket seal holding it on. Once the side panel was off, I removed the runaway q-tip, and set the side panel aside. I also noticed that three of the lifters had been pulled up somehow and become unseated. That must have happened either when I was vacuuming out the inside of the block, or they could have gotten stuck onto the pushrods when I was removing those. Either way, the q-tip saved me some trouble installing the pushrods!

I also noticed some deposits inside the intake manifold when I removed the carburetor (which I did to make installing the head easier). Not sure where that came from - maybe it was from blowback when there was a bunch of coolant in the oil.

Most of this work was done with Peanut out of the garage entirely, but before lunch I pushed her back in enough so that the engine compartment was inside the garage, in case it rained. And rain it did. It started coming down during lunch, and hasn't stopped yet. But I and the engine compartment stayed nice and dry inside the garage. After giving up for the day around 8, I cleaned up and pushed Peanut all the way back into the garage. I will pick up again cleaning out the bolt holes soon.