What would be useful for something to take apart and get to the internals? Should I just buy a lawn mower or something and take apart the engine piece by piece, then put it back together again or something like that? I essentially want to learn to work my way into the pistons, crank shaft, cam shaft, etc. and really muck about with how an engine works and learn to keep it running. I know at the very least that you need a very high quality and accurate torque wrench and from what I've seen a lot of the time a rather specific order you're supposed to bolt down a camshaft, but I find all of that really interesting. In the end, my objective is to tinker, fix, tear down, and rebuild.
Moving post to a new thread.
If you have not worked on engines before I would say starting small with a lawnmower engine is an excellent idea to get a handle on the basics. Pick up a cheap used lawn mower. If it doesn't run, so much the better, you can work on repairing it.
I picked up a non-working lawn tractor for free. Took it apart, went online for you tube video's and procedded to learn. One month and $50 later I had it running. Painted all the metal, cleaned it up and sold it for $300. After that, I was able to bring two push movers to life.
Since all gas motors are pretty much the same, I learned a lot.
Awesome, thanks for the comments. I'll look to see if I can get my hands on smaller grade engines that are broken and see if I can get them running. I'll go with a lawn mower, then maybe see if I can find a go kart. Thanks again!
If you wind up with a rotary-type push mower with the blade bolted directly to the engine crankshaft, be sure to remove the blade for safety's sake first thing before you start messing around with the engine. (Though of course the blade would have to be removed to take the engine off the mower anyway if you go that far with it.)