Welcome back to legit street cars, and today is a day i've been waiting for for a little while i'm excited i'm nervous, i'm anxious today is the day we fix the cylinder head on the v12 engine, i'm being very optimistic here, because right now, everything's kind of Still up in the air, but if you guys saw the end of the last v12 engine video, you know that we found a pin hole in one of the cylinder heads and obviously everything is all reassembled. So the heads were ported and the theory that we've all come up with from looking at the comments section from speaking with a lot of people, a lot of people from around the world emailed me that were experts in either porting or welding stuff. Like that, we came to the conclusion that we think the hole in the cylinder head is a casting flaw. So when they cast an aluminum head, there are little air bubbles and when they port, some of these bubbles can be exposed and kind of pop.

So to speak, so we think this is a casting imperfection in the head and in that case they can be welded, and then we grind it down to make it smooth and it should be as good as new. So to do this welding, i brought in someone very, very special, and it took me forever to find him uh. My friend arnie, you guys know arnie from a bunch of vin wiki stories. He is the cannonball world record holder multiple times now.

I guess so. Arnie had a recommendation for a tig welder who is mobile and he welded a lot of his race car project, car stuff for him, and a recommendation from arnie is like gold. So i stopped looking at that point uh. I spoke with blaine who's with me today and he was willing to drive about an hour to my house in chicago to take a look at this job and hopefully get it done.

And, ladies and gentlemen, my savior, this is blaine and blaine has been a professional welder for about 15 years. I'm gon na leave his contact information down below, but he is a really busy guy, so i'm very lucky to have him out here. So if you guys live in the chicagoland area and need something welded send him an email, he might be able to do it. He might not, but we'll see we'll see, but anyway, today he's here luckily and blaine, we already taped off.

Basically, everything and you kind of went a little above and beyond taping off, really any hole that exists on here right yeah. So, in order to fix this holding head first, we want to grind away a little bit of the metal. That's there any contaminants or impurities or whatnot, that's in there from the uh, the porting and all that or just the casting in general, that created that hole to begin with. So we want to tape everything off.

You know, most importantly, being all the rest of the intake runners, but then, when you're grinding aluminum and sanding and whatnot, the dust and stuff gets everywhere. So, like all the coolant portions oil, even your ac line, anything that has a hole. Anything that's got some oil or something where the metal can stick. We want to tape it off and then we're going to throw a towel over everything else too.

When we do this, we're going to use the tig welder, i got my nice little miller. Diversion 180 fits in the back of my truck, it's not the most powerful machine in the world, but it's very portable, more than capable handling what we got here today and for those of you who are new. This is the pin hole in the head that we're talking about, and i want to show you guys a little test that i did. That makes me feel a little bit better because i don't believe this has actually gone through to anything.

So this isn't the most precise test in the world, but i think it tells me what i need to know. So this is a rubber, flexible tip to my shop air, hose gun. That's set at about 100 psi right now, so we can completely cover this pinhole and if i push down really hard, it doesn't go anywhere. The only air that i hear leaking out is from this cheapo harbor freight blow gun.

So what i think happened is that this casting flaw popped and we're just seeing the bottom of the of the bubble of the casting flaw and had it gone through. It would have gone through to a coolant jacket. So these are freeze plugs right here and then it goes to a coolant, pipe uh in the rear. So we would hear this air coming out because pretty much everything is open right now and there's nothing so blaine kind of agrees with this as well, and that just makes me feel good in this case.

Technically, this could be ran the way it is, but we're not taking any chances at all with this v12. So we're just going to get in here with the grinder real quick, a little burr on the uh die grinder and we're going to just smooth out that hole a little bit so that we can make sure we get to the bottom of it. We clean out any contaminants or anything else, that's in there and we can get a nice solid, weld onto the base material and we did put some paper towels. The valves are closed as well, and i'm going to have a shop vac going at the same time.

So we don't run any risk of getting metal where it's not supposed to go all right, so everything is ground out. We hit it with an 80 grit sandpaper at the end of the drill there, as well and blaine. Just from doing the grinding anything that you felt any areas of concerns at this point nope, it all looks good pretty much what we expected so we're gon na get in there we're gon na get a nice good weld on there. Then we're gon na grind it back down smooth like it.

Never even happened, cool guys. You do not know how good it feels to hear those words. Okay, i have been up many nights. Just thinking about this.

It's just bothered me. I could have taken the head off and sent it back in, but i didn't really see the need because it's not like we're doing anything from the bottom of the head and, quite honestly the head is bolted onto the engine. That's pretty much about as good of a holding device as you can get so now. Blaine.

Is there anything you take into consideration, welding, thinner, aluminum versus maybe a thicker aluminum as far as amperage stuff, like that, my portable machine's a little more basic? So we don't have any frequency or balance adjustments uh, but it works just fine for aluminum at the factory settings as far as amperage goes with the foot pedal here for those of you that don't know tig welding, this is kind of like a throttle. So what i do is i set my machine to the max amperage and then the more i press down the closer i get to that max amperage. So while i'm welding, i can see how it's melting, how much filler i need and how much more amperage i need, and that's just why i like tig welding, it's much more precise and it's the perfect application for this. So we clean off the fill rod because the aluminum, while aluminum, doesn't rust it'll oxidize.

So while it sits, even in my nice sealed tube it'll sit and the surface of the aluminum will get some oxidation on it. So we just take a red scuff pad across your wire, get it nice and shiny and then you're ready to weld. All of your questions will be answered because we have a six-year-old here that has all of them pretty much in his head. Just waiting to come out so blaine is uh, he's a welding instructor now so now that he's done sanding and grinding we're just giving a final clean down here, a little little prep with a stainless steel wire brush and then we're going to hit it with some Acetone and that'll take any surface contaminants out give us the best opportunity to get a good weld in there.

What does that do again? It just cleans it aluminum is very particular to being clean. Sometimes, on steel and other metals, you can get away with a little bit try not to, but if you have to weld over some rust, sometimes you can get away with. Aluminum has to be cleaner. It's not going to be a good weld.

We clean that up with the old d rose number one t-shirt here and for those of you guys flipping out right now. This thing is all stretched out and destroyed. I get these stuff from my neighbors. They give them to me and i use them as rags.

So come on d rose, nice and pretty and clean, and you can see the metal shavings in there that are being blocked up by our paper towels, so we're good to go. That's all there is to it all right. Look at that wow that looks thick. That looks strong, oh yeah.

We added some on there because we got to grind it down and smooth it, and what i did is i sat there. I melted it a little bit with the torch with uh the ac welding for aluminum. The alternating current gives you a cleaning action as well. That's part of that buzzing noise.

You hear so instead of just getting in there and hammering down on the amperage, i kind of swirl around the area being that it's cast, they get a little dirty from time to time. So what that does is, it helps boil any other impurities up to the surface, and then we float them to the top. So now, when we grind it we're grinding all those off and we're just left with fresh clean aluminum, so we blend, so that's it for welding, we're done for welding. That's it now.

We got a grind now if we grind it through and there are still some inclusions or something because it is aluminum casting like when they ported it and they found a little hole. We may find one of those, but i'm confident we'll be good all right. So the weld is all ground down and he did a little work by hand as well and it's getting to the point where we can't even really tell uh that there was anything there. There's really not a hump left or anything so we're gon na get some sandpaper in there kind of make it smooth and pretty, but so far so good.

We don't have that much material. That's come off! Really it's all been sucked up in the vacuum. It's a little bit of scotch brite and wow, like you can't even tell you really can't even tell if every single one of these had holes in it and were welded up like this, you would never know unbelievable. Look at that, even with the light, even with the reflection, crazy, it's perfectly smooth too, like it's gon na flow, the exact same amount as before.

Oh my god, thank you, blaine, not a problem. Thank you seriously. You are a savior, oh man. This is like the best day.

It's friday too. It's right before the weekend, you're going out of town now vacation time. Last customer of the week. Oh i'm not going out of town, but i feel like i'm now can go on vacation.

I'm good! Everything is good in the world because my v12 can finally go back together. We removed the paper towels, we had the vacuum going the whole time and then i shot some air in there with the vacuum running as well. So it's all perfectly clean, and this is the final result guys did you think we were gon na get here. I was very worried in that video very, very worried, but this is perfect.

Blaine's super confident in the repair. He said it went very, very well and that's exactly what i wanted to hear. Oh man, all right so blaine is all done, he's leaving on vacation right now and he has a phenomenal instagram that you guys should be following he posts up a lot of the projects he's working on which range from you know, automotive projects to furniture. He did some carbon fiber work recently, so i'll put it up here on the screen, link it down below check him out on instagram.

Thank you very much, blaine, not a problem. My pleasure man, it's great to meet you all right guys that will do it. For this video, which means in the next v12 mercedes video, we're putting it all back together, we're putting it back in the car as well. I've already cleaned up the garage a bit, so we're getting close.

Finally, with that, i hope you guys really enjoyed this video. I know i did if you did hit the thumbs up. Button share the video subscribe if you're new and, most importantly, have an awesome day i'll see all of you in the next one. You.

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