Today was the big day. After months of setbacks, I finally took the car for it's first post restoration drive. The weather is looking nice for tomorrow, so I was hoping to take the car for a nice drive, but the rear seal seems to be leaking pretty bad. I don't know if I want to take the chance of slobbering up the underneath of the car, so I may call it off. I will be pulling the motor again over the winter and replacing the main seal with a graphite rope. I have considered trying another BOP viton seal, because I know that the design is superior to the rope, however, my application was not optimum for the BOP seal. I changed the seal with the crank in the motor, so I was not able to use an indicator to check the concentricity between the seal diameter and the bearing bore. I did however probe the main cap on a CMM and found the seal diameter to be out .0075" from the bearing bore. The instructions for the seal state that there should be no more than .005". I also was at the low end of the tolerance when you measure the distance that the seal is sticking up from the parting line, so I am not 100 percent certain that there was enough crush when I bolted the main cap back on. With all things considered, I will probably give the BOP seal another shot in my next motor, but this one is getting a rope. At least I have all winter to get it done.
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