Great advice from Day-Tuner

Posted on October 4, 2016 by mark

I love it when you ring someone for a bit of advice and you get an answer you totally didn’t expect.

I’ve finished the engine build, and am about to sort the chassis mould, which means I’m not far from a rolling chassis. I’m gathering together some of the engine components I need and wanted to be sure I had the right advice on intake trumpet lengths I called Damien at Day Tuner – it makes sense to try and get this right before getting to the rollers.

Then Damien came up with the best idea: to quote “with your facilities, don’t try and guess the trumpet lengths, or go from rule-of-thumb. Print out lots of trumpets and we can chop and change over the day”. Bearing in mind pressure waves under the bonnet, you may actually want a selection of different lengths.

To the 3D PRINTER MINES !!!

Printing a few tidy-ups.

Posted on September 8, 2016 by mark

So, with my new tool-chest I had somewhere better to put my 1/2″ extension arms. They were rattling around in the drawer. So, 30 minutes in CAD and a couple of hours in the printer, and now they have somewhere nice to sit, and they don’t rattle around anymore.

Auspicious Day – Caloo-Calay

Posted on September 3, 2016 by mark

So, the engine has gone off to Damien at Day tuner to have the cam timing set up. I tried to do it, and I had sane instructions, but I failed more than Trump in Mexico. Every time I tried to get the valve just so, the springs would shove and the cam would spring round, taunting me. I followed Homer Simpson’s rule: “If at first you don’t succeed, give up”. I rang Damien to get it done (which is what most Duratec owners do around here) and he laughed … “With your setup, those springs will close a barn door in a force 10 gale – come on over”. This is definitely a job for the expert.

Once done, I can seal up the engine (as in seal down the top, front and sump), and put the injector blanking plugs in, then it’s finished.

In the picture below, you can see some of the blanking plates I printed up – this is exhaust side. Pretty groovy I think. I also got more familiar with Onshape and the more I use it, the more impressed I am. If you’re a hobbyist like me, it’s free as long as you store your parts in their cloud and make them visible to all. For $100 per month, you can keep more than your allocated 10 private parts in the cloud. That sounds draughty to me. Onshape really is VERY GOOD. I use it on my iPad Pro and it’s a perfect fit with the pencil. It’s interesting to watch your drawings on the IPad being updated realtime if you’re also accessing them from a Mac or PC.

The engine spec should get me 230 BHP, 100 up from the stock spec, and it’s strong enough to take a super-charger, which will give me 100BHP more, should I decide that’s the route to go. I’ll done that once I’ve got to know the car all over again.

Right – some tidying up do do.

Have I arrived as an engineer?

Posted on August 18, 2016 by mark

I now own a dial gauge. I can measure things. I even now have a drawer in my tool cabinet with “measuring things” on the label.

Lots of things went wrong this weekend, now beer

Posted on July 31, 2016 by mark

So, the cunning plan was to get the short engine built this weekend, and I wasn’t far away until I had a mild issue that turned into a disaster. Well, a recoverable disaster, but not without effort and maybe cost.

I have been time slicing between getting the printer working how I want it, and doing the jobs on the engine. The major job this weekend was getting the head on, with the ARP studs set. The head had been modified and professionally built for me, but you can’t put it on the block with the cams in place – they obscure the head-bolts.

So, off came the cams, and in went the studs (threads lube’d of course) and on went the gasket and head (including the two small dollops of gasket). All the threads were painstakingly painted with the correct graphite paste and done so with an artist’s toothbrush. I’ve learned there’s no use really caking it on – it just squeezes out.

All the pressure washers went on, and as I was putting the last bolt in to hand tighten it before the torquing sequence, I fumbled it and it went down an oil gallery. Mildly frustrating I thought, but no big deal – just take the sump off (only finger tight on three bolts) and it should have dropped down. I turned the engine over on the stand, and this is where it all went arse. Four of the cam buckets fell off on to the floor. I managed to turn the engine over before more did.

Each cam-follower-bucket-type-of-thing is separately chosen for the correct valve clearance, and you guessed it, they’re all different. So, I don’t have a record of which is on which valve, and I’m just hoping my engine builders did keep a record. If not, I will have to take it back to them to be reset. Not a major deal, but hours wasted.

Then I went to do just a simple job – put the cam-chain guides on. The supplied bolts are socket-headed cap screws (my favourite of all the bolts) and they are to be torqued to 9.75Nm. No problem there – I have small torque wrench just for this, and it’s a 1/4 square. Arse. I have step-down from 1/2″ to 1/4, but no step up. By then it was 5pm and Halfords was of course closed. Then I went to my magnificent box of shiny bolts, and found a pair of flanged bolts that were the right size, and shiny. Did I mention how pretty they looked?

Enjoy:

3d prints under the microscope

Posted on July 14, 2016 by mark

3D Printing – Can I Get That in Carbon Fibre?

Yes, but only by printing the part, taking a mould, then infusing the part. But hey – this is the future right? Food is blue, Boris is Foreign Secretary, and I can buy things and my watch pays for them.

I’m using a Velleman Vertex bought from The Electronics Shop in Cullercoats, Whitley Bay.

The Target Pieces

Here we have the two target pieces, 60mm * 40mm * 6mm thick. I was experimenting with quality settings to see what is useable for moulding.

Lower Quality Settings (the default)

Support Matrix: 10%
Wall Thickness 0.7mm
Speed (max) 48mm/s

This is the top layer – you can see plenty of holes

This is the top layer, and you can see plenty of holes – If I was to take a mould off this I’d struggle – it’s an excellent keying surface. I may get away with a lot of brushed on thick PVA release agent, but if I was aiming for fine surface tolerances I’d not get it. Best bet would be to cover with gel-coat, polish then mould.

This is the bottom surface, which has a different setting (I don’t remember) but you can see the holes are pretty uniform and it picks up dust a bit.

Higher Quality Settings

Support Matrix: 20%
Wall Thickness 0.1mm
Speed (max) 43mm/s

This is the top surface with the number of supports in the hollow space doubled, and a thicker shell (1mm) added. If you look closely in the top picture, you can see the cross-hatching that is the support matrix, and the differences between them.

Increasing the shell thickness has also laid down a lot more plastic, making for a virtually sealed surface, but still with some tiny holes.

The Base here isn’t much better – I didn’t make any significant changes to the base, and I don’t think I would – If I design parts that are assemblies, I’d just use the base as my adhesive point. I’d use epoxy as well.

This organic looking beauty is a 3mm hole with a 1/2mm counter-sink. I wanted to see what I can do to leave dimples in the part. Dimples are important because I’d have dimples in the final part, which would make for an accurate drilling point if it needs to be demountable (such as the fuel-pump hatch in a petrol tank).

Praise for The Electronics Shop and Velleman

I can’t recommend the team enough here, and Anthony, with whom I dealt. They have the printer in stock, and all the consumables, spares and upgrades as well. I can’t emphasise the quality of service enough with these guys. I had a question about alignments whilst I was building the printer, and got an immediate helpful response. When I tried the printer for the first time, it printed exactly like it was meant to do, like a piece of consumer electronics, not a cutting-edge piece of manufacturing equipment.

3d printed plastic that is petroleum resistant

Posted on July 5, 2016 by mark

So, NinjaTek have released a new very hard filament which is petroleum resistant – could be useful for making my composite tank. I still need to understand if the regs require foam filling, or if flap gates are adequate. I could then completely print the pump mounts, flap gates swirl pot, etc.

This comes on the back of this post about making tank bladders.

Great article on CF adhesion here

Posted on July 1, 2016 by mark

I was thinking about what’s involved in making a CF (or aramid) propshaft, and there’s some great information in here.http://www.christinedemerchant.com/carbon-kevlar-glass-comparison.html

rubber infusion for fuel tank bladder?

Posted on June 30, 2016 by mark

I’ve been thinking about an internal bladder when I make my fuel tank, and one thing struck me – infusing aramid with viton rubber (very low viscosity) – wouldn’t that get the best of both worlds – really strong bladder and fuel resistance to boot. then sling the entire thing in a CF/Aramid tank.

I can’t see anyone selling VITON compound on its own though – seems to be as a finalised product.

Any thoughts?

Aramid floor tray is in

Posted on June 26, 2016 by mark

Here’s the floor tray, all nicely bonded in.

Here’s the floor-tray all nicely bonded in. You can see on the right of the picture how the floor-tray now replaces the cross-member I removed. I put several extra layers in there as well to pass even more force forward (than the 6 layers of 300gsm that’s already in there).

There’s also extra reinforcement, like a lardy-blokes truss, to take engine mounts if I decide to do that.

So Mark – tell us how you did it

Here’s the part as it came out of the mould – all sharp edges and over-sized. Next job was to put it on the car – mark it up and trim it. That’s the boring bit and I don’t have any photos to document.

This is the chassis before the part is bonded to it. It had been blasted before powder coating, and I used the right high-temp non residue leaving breaker-tape to mask off the mating areas. The blasting heaves a fantastic key. I was worried originally that the tape wouldn’t make a brilliant barrier to rust after coating but it’s worked out fine. The reason being, the coating forms a seal against the tape so there’s nothing to get in – no air or moisture so no rust.

I marked the part up after clamping it down, and drilled for rivets. The rivets were just soft-ally headed ones to provide clamping force rather than to be anything structural.

Here I am as Clampy-McClamp-Face. I had every surface clamped before I drilled rivet-holes. If you drill-rivet as you go along the part, it starts to creep and your holes don’t line up. Clamping the entire thing before drilling keeps the accuracy.

Here’s a close-up of the rivet holes – I’m pretty pleased with how accurately the holes line up. Structurally it’s not really important, but attention to detail matters.

One post-trimming, bonded, riveted part in place. I used an epoxy two-part adhesive. It’s the slightly flexible stuff for parts under a lot of vibration.

Once the adhesive set (24 hours for full cure at 20C) it feels rock-solid.

furyrebuild

Rebuilding my Fisher Fury, from start to finish

Author Archives: mark