Category Archives: duratec

Heath Robinson Compressor Arrangement

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Hmm – going to be time for ‘interesting plumbing“. I’m going to run two compressors in parallel to get the air-flow I need for soda-blasting. Lorraine (My sister) is bringing the extra airline plumbing parts I need, and I have a new soda-specific flow-metering valve and 50kg of soda. This means I can get the air-flow I need for about £100, rather than having to buy a compressor at £380. Fairly pleased with that. What’s more, I can now bypass the oiler when I need to so I have really clean air for the soda and lubricated air for the power tools.

Tomorrow is going to be a blast (geddit?). Pics and vids will follow.

The only thing that is going to be slightly tricky is getting the Y argon cylinder out of the way to fit the compressor. It’s chained to the wall for safety.
The plan is to professionally clean my engine at home, and I’ve now got all the bits to make it shiny factory new.

Rules for becoming an old git

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So, my 43rd birthday is coming along, and I think that whilst this is an excellent prime number, it also makes me feel old. Forty was fine, 41 wasn’t that bad, 42 was a hoot because my wife got me a hitch-hikers guild to the galaxy first edition, but 43 … 43 is just old-gittery.

Following on from my page about the rules I thought I’d pen a few rules about becoming an old git:

  • I will only have brown suede shoes. They will be slip-ons.
  • I will only buy my shoes from the supplement pages of newspapers.
  • I will end up with mustard coloured cardigans
  • People will get me battenburg coloured pringle jumpers, and I will thank them for it
  • All my clothes will sport elbow patches, for no ironic reason
  • I won’t have shorts, trousers, etc. I will only wear slacks
  • There will be no such thing as an ’emergency ginning’. There will only be warm sweet milky tea
  • I will buy shares in horlics
  • I will do DIY for the pleasure not the necessity
  • I will become obsessed with the health of my walnut
  • I will lose all ability to use computers, thinking it is strictly the domain of ‘the kids’
  • I will talk about hobbies I don’t have that I would like to do, but navel gazing prevents me. keeping bees springs to mind
  • All testosterone vanishes.
  • The man-cave will become a potting shed.
  • I will till the soil, and all windowsills will sport pot-plants rather than random car parts
  • I will not understand what BPM stands for
  • Worse, I will enjoy radio 2

monitoring the engine temperature, pretty LEDs

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Hmmm – when I build this engine, there are lots of things to sense (which go to the engine management system). However, there’s lots of data to actually display, which can be done on a piggy-back loom to the engine management.

For instance, there are multiple places to sense temperature, and other things, all grouped together as a set of systems. So, for fuel, the pump in the tank will warm it up, and the (to be fitted) fuel radiator will cool it back down again. So, I could put a sensor in just outside of the tank, after the regulator, after the fuel radiator, and in the return to the tank, so I can monitor fuel temperature and pressure. If I put some storage in the arduino I can over time, log most data.

Similarly, oil temperature before and after the cooler, as well as the head temperature inlet and exhaust are interesting, as is water in similar places can all be monitored, displayed and alerted. I could go the route Saab do, and have a black-panel button as well to keep the eye-clutter down at night.

So, rather than go for a gajillion gauges, I’m looking at going the micro-controller route, and the display shown here is available for $130; not bad for the eye-candy.

I am proud of my dipstick

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So, just about the last job to do on the sump is to get the dipstick path routed up the side of the engine. As per flak’s instructions, I bought some 15mmOD stainless tubing to match the hole machined in the side of the sump. My original plan was to route the pipe vertically up the side of the engine and emerge between the throttle bodies. As you can see from the pic below, this isn’t a great route, and runs far too close to many things, including the engine mount bolts, and one of the water pump housing take-offs.

 

So, I needed to either go for a simple route up, hoping i could get the angles so precise that it missed everything, or find a better way. Digging through the heap of stuff I’d taken off the original engine, I extracted the dipstick tube (just pulls out of the sump – held in with an o-ring) and took a look at the convoluted routing it takes – i found it to be good.
Now that I had a plan to take a route, i needed to plan the take-off from the block. Wrapping some paper around the pipe and using duck tape to make it rigid, i now had a template of the pipe that could be cut with scissors until I had the angle right without risking multiple chops into the steel.

 

Note that it comes off the sump at a slight angle away from the sump to move the dipstick into the void space there. I’ve kept the template in case i make a sump for anyone else (Furyous is getting one if he likes this design).
 

 

 

Next came the plan to fit the dipstick tube onto the sump take-off pipe. When measured, the tube is about 0.3mm short of half an inch, and the ID of the pipe is about 11.5mm, and i happen to have had my trusty 1/2 inch reamer ready. In order to make the dipstick pipe fit the sump, I reamed out the end of the take-off pipe to 1/2 inch. This was a little tricky, needing to position and clamp the pipe in the drill-vice, and then gently ream down and back (lots of cutting spray) in order to take it out. The end result is that the dipstick tube fits nicely into the end and has a little swivel room.

look at the shiny end of my tubeI also cleaned the end up ready for welding. However, I decided not to weld it straight away for a couple of reasons: firstly, there’s no going back after putting that tack in, especially if it’s routed wrongly, and secondly I’d also be welding stainless to mild. In the end, I decided that the better solution by far would be to fit it all back to the car, make a support bracket for the tube so it hugs the engine nicely, and then epoxy it in. It will be a very strong solution, easier than a weld, and will give me a couple of minutes wriggle time before it goes off.

Here’s the final run up through the void. In the background middle-right you can see the starter motor bolts, and i’m going to fabricate a bracket to go onto this bolt as well – job done – dipstick now properly secure.
 

 

Here’s another picture from a slightly different angle showing the take-off from the pipe, because I’m so pleased with it. It’s a good thing when something runs neatly and without fuss – generally simple is always best, and not necessarily the easiest to achieve. Occam’s Razor.

 

 

I originally made this post here on the loccost builders sitebut it’s my post, so I’m following my policy of echoing the content to the blog, just as I push most of the blog content to the forum, only fair to share. I think the only copies I have of these photos are on that site, hence being tagged with their logo. I don’t mind.

 

 

how I made my engine mounts – very happy with them

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How I made my engine mounts putting a duratec in my fury rebuild

So, as part of rebuilding my fury and shoving a duratec engine in, I decided to make some new engine mounts. I wanted to reduce weight and improve the packaging as well – the old mounts used up a lot of space that could otherwise be spent moving mass down – I have swirl pots and fuel pumps to put somewhere after all.

Firstly, I went to Fast Dan (DanST Engineering) and ordered some engine mount plates. They’re a great fit. I think the price is good value and there are times when buy is far better than build.

Secondly, I decided on the design, and went for something inspired by SBDev and which gave me quite a compact result and rather contradicted the original design that was somewhat agricultural (see the picture on the right). The original design was from my previous pinto installation.

So, here is the assembled list of bits. Rather than go for a huge rubber mount (which of course would be good for absorbing vibrations) I’ve taken a gamble on using (reusing) the bushes I’ve taken out of the suspension. I’ve fabricated everything from 32mm dia 3mm thickness CDS. The sleeve inner diameter didn’t match the bush outer diameter, so I bobbed over to a friends and put it into the lathe. It was then machined out to take the bush with a reasonable amount of slack, knowing the sleeve will clench up a little when welded.

The mounting plates needed to be notched in order to accommodate the way the plates were offset when mounted on to the chassis rail. Note that each plate is a different size to account for the angle of the rails; I wanted to feed the load into the chassis at 90 degrees, rather than an angle. An angle would mean putting some bending load to the leg from the plate to the chassis (not ideal). In order to get the hole in the correct place for the plate, I hand-fitted the sleeve and plates to the chassis, and clamped it with a welding clamp (you need a third hand for this, thank you Zaphod). Then I used a CD marker pen to draw around the sleeve, added cross-hairs after dismantling and punched a hole.

These plates are 3mm stainless (left over scrap), so you can’t just go riving at them with a 1/2 inch drill bit (the bushes are the standard, mandatory, obligatory, inexplicable 1/2″ inner diameter). I started out with a 3mm hole, and went up in increments of 2.5 or 3mm, depending on which bits I had to hand. I also found that the cobalt set of drill bits bought from tool-station started to show their value. A cheaper set of bits just screamed and blunted making virtually no impact on the hole, yet the cobalt ones cut through nicely. I also used a spray cutting-oil (and lots of it) to help things along.

The thing you have to remember is that drill bits don’t cut round holes, and the larger the bit, the more obvious this becomes. Once I’ve got the hole out to 12mm, I then ream it out to 1/2 inch. I bought a tapered reamer from ebay for not a lot of money and it’s done me proud. It reams stainless out as well, but again, it wont go out more than 0.75mm. You can see on the right here how the hole isn’t perfect before reaming.

Next, I needed to machine the down-leg to fit the sleeve. The sleeve was cut from the same tube I’m making the leg from, so that was at least reasonably simple to cut a matching fish-mouth. I used this software, printed it out, stuck it to the tube and got busy. I cut the majority of the metal away with a 0.8mm slitting disk, and then tidied up and ground out to the the marks using a tungsten burring tool on an air-die grinder. You can see the results yourself on the right.

There are other things to note in setup before finally welding it together. The main one is to try and have the engine level in the chassis. It helps to keep coolant and oil levels as horizontal as possible. I used a spirit level on the back of the car to be sure the chassis was level (it was) and then put the same level on the flat gearbox top to be sure i had the engine in the right place: one can’t really take a measurement off the top of the duratec: it’s all curvy.

I found out that chocking the engine in place was tricky – the chocks were difficult to place and kept popping out. Interestingly, a run of duck-tape from the chassis rails to the top of the engine was a great way of keeping it in place (Thanks Darren – very smart move). Duck Tape is like the force – it has a light side and a dark side and it holds the universe together.

This is what the mount looks like from the engine down to the bush:



and this is what the whole lot looks like when nailed together to try the fit. The offset between one bracket and the other is more noticeable on this side.



Finally, this is what the almost completed installation looks like. There are a couple of points to note – I’ve put a reasonable seam in to hold the bracket facing the camera (and the one you can’t see the seam on) but I won’t be able to complete the seams until I get the engine back out. This was part of the plan – the engine is just a dry-build at the moment to be sure I have everything in the right place.

I still have one job left, which is to put a bracing plate in at 90 degrees to the bracket to tie the front-to-back loads to the chassis. I don’t think the loads will be all that significant, but they may eventually fatigue the joint. I only need one plate because the bush will transfer the load from the other bracket to the bracket with the cross-brace. It’s only going to be a few grams of steel but it’s worth getting right. Even if I’m being paranoid I’m only wasting a few grams.

Speaking of which, each mount is 500g lighter than the previous, so I’m a kilo up on the deal as well.

Welding in a t-shirt

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So, when you’re up to 75A there’s a chance things can go wrong unless you follow my safety rules set out below:

  • gloves – check
  • gauntlets – check
  • proper mask – check
  • poking a hot rod through your t-shirt and into your chest – check
  • smell of cooked flesh – check

weld your own gated sump action

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So, I’m a good way through the sump build and I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the way.

Having a heavy bolt-to jig helps. Mine’s made of 10mm thick mild steel. The sump is bolted to it at every bolt point to prevent warping and to act as a reasonable heat-sink.I’ve also repeatedly offered it to the block, front cover and ally bellhousing to ensure accurate fits.

 

For some important steps, I used the engine in situ as a jig and actually tacked in place on the block. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how well everything mates up.

 

 

The steel around the bottom of the flap-gates is very thin and prone to warping. This can be helped with a flat-bill welding clamp before you start. It’s a good tool for the job but means positioning all the parts and the job at the same time can be tricky.

 

Part of the quality of this sump is that it mounts to the front plate as well as the base of the block. However, this means (in my case) that I need to tap stainless steel. Normal taps don’t cut it, so buying a specific, decent stainless tap has helped, as well as good cutting-oil. I don’t need shed-loads of this, so I’ve bought it in spray form rather than liquid. You need cutting oil rather than (say) WD40 because the cutting oil can still lubricate the tool even at the extremes of pressure when cutting stainless, whereas a normal oil blend would break down. It’s funny stuff – like a very light oil but it seems to hang around the job when normal oils would have wiped clean or evaporated. I use acetone to clear it all away before welding. It acts as a solvent as well as evaporating away nice and quickly. It helps to buy it in industrial quantities rather than at the chemists. Also, I like the smell. Oy Vey – always with the complex hydrocarbons.

Here it is, with the gates hanging down and bent into place. I’ve bent this one with a set of clamps and some pressure, but it wasn’t as accurate as I would have wanted. I’ve moved on and now am using a proper parts former. It requires some lining up by eye, but the result is pin sharp and accurate.

dry build of the engine

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So, the build is progressing nicely – I’ve got the sump most of the way there, and learned a reasonable amount of stuff as I go. I’m now at the point where serious chassis surgery is on the cards to get the engine mounted further back and at the right ride height. I can’t do any of these things until I have a dry-build of the engine.

By dry-build, I mean assembling it without gaskets, fluids, or inconvenient cranks.

I originally started with this mucky oily disgusting mess as I stripped the block down. The more astute among you will notice the cat-litter on the floor soaking up the oil dripping out of the engine.

 

 

Now I’m at this stage, with the polished rocker and front cover in place, as well as my totally orgasmic Jenvey throttle bodies. They’re DCOE format (original Webber layout I think) and on an SBDev manifold. Go on, click the link to see them in their full glory. You know you want to.

 

 

 

 

What? You didn’t click? All that red tubular delight and you didn’t click? Alright – here’s another view side on, showing the lovely and compact bellhousing which will hold the new hydraulic clutch.

Again, you can see the side of the block somewhat lets down the finish I have on other parts, so that’ll need scrubbing back and sealing at some point.