Roman

Actually here's a fun fact about the nomenclanture of the M series engines, and why the numbers arent sequential as you'd expect. While still in prototype phase as a planned obsolescence engine, Toyota Engineers described each iteration based on how many critical flaws in engine design there are. 4Mistakes 5Mistakes 6Mistakes 7Mistakes They later dropped the idea and went back to making reliable engines.

fixed

I take it back. This was a complete failure haha. Almost none of the resin soaked into the actual carbon. Not sure if my resin is too thick compared to proper infusion oriented stuff. But I think the main issue was that my resin ran out juuusssttt a bit before reaching the far edge. But it seemed sweet and I'm Dutch so I didnt mix up some any more resin. But it probably would have soaked up a fair bit more to fully saturate the fabric if I kept it running. Also, I should have oriented the in and out pipes the short length across the part and used some spiral stuff so it flows more uniformly. It's really really really nice to be able to have a dry layup of cuts though and not feel time pressured. At the very least, I'm happy that I can now make bags that can pull down to about 8kpa absolute pressure without leaks. Will try again! One of the best parts of vacuum bagging and using peel ply etc is that its like unwrapping christmas presents at the end. hahaha. It's like the satisfaction of peeling off those clear stickers on your phone screen but on a much larger scale.

Been having trouble with 3d printer but some flow mesh stuff turned up so i could try some resin infusion. Holy shit this is so cool hahaha. Once you get the bagging right (thanks ned for bag sealer) It works really well. (I assume so at least, find out tomorrow!)

Thanks @nzed, I'll give them a buzz.

I guess so, not very pourable though? Was hoping for something that starts out reasonably liquid-ey.

Thanks!

Hi, Looking for some advice on material selection. I want to cast some rubber, so needs to be pourable. But I want maximum elongation ability (So you can stretch it like a balloon kinda thing) and then some degree of resistance to heat, oil and petrol. Any thoughts on what would be best? The castings wont need to be super thin, or thick - Have some degree of freedom to best suit the material. I can see you can get polyurethane with a very low shore hardness. But would something like latex be better? Thanks

I think it's a fairly safe conclusion to say that there will be graphs involved.

Gave it a bit of a scrub with 600 > 1000 grit and came up a bit nicer With some clear coat or another layer of epoxy it'll be looking pretty sharp! Will try make it prettier once I've finished making the whole intake. Printing the molds for the second part of the pipe now (on of the outers pictured)

That's an interesting idea! But I'd probably just get distracted and paint myself a full latex bodysuit and choke to death on my own farts In other news, here are some pics of my V3.0 bellmouth. If PVA means good release with no more white stuff then that will be sweeeeeetttt But sanding this will get rid of 95% of white marks, just used way too much wax again as I was more worried about breaking mold than surface finish. But this is good enough dimensionally and in terms of strength that I CBF remaking this bit . Would probably polish up nicely on the lathe but I'm hoping to make less of these steps necessary.

I tried vacuum bagging to just half of one of my molds and it produced the worst parts I've made so far, by far. Areas get sealed off by the vacuum bag pressure and it pools resin and air bubbles. So it squashed out almost none of the resin. Which is exact opposite of what i was hoping for. I think I need some of the breather material as outer layer for it to work better that way. The point of vacuum with inner and outer inside the bag is to uniformly put pressure on the part rather than needing a mold solid enough to take the point loads of clamping only a few areas on the perimeter. And so I don't get bag wrinkles etc on the surface which was another issue. And I can lay up all of the cloth and have it in place without it moving around while fucking around trying to find vacuum leaks haha. Obviously the one half method works but I've found it to be super fiddly by comparison.

What do you need one for, and do you have 3 phase power? I've got a few big 3 phase ones here, but probably akin to swatting a fly with a missile if you're doing something small.

That's a good idea! I'm not sure if it will blow PLA to smithereens but I'm willing to try haha. Would probably serve as paths to help the epoxy to run out as well.

I've been playing around some more with mold making. A little sparse on pictures right now but I'll add some later. Here's what I've learned lately. Making Male and female molds for a big bellmouth. 3d printed some big molds and filled them with plaster. First attempt at this was no sanding of the molds, so they had layer lines from printing. Which hasnt previously been an issue. Not much wax on molds. A pretty shitty layup as I mixed epoxy then was trying to cut the cloth as I felt needed to patch on some bits. This sucked from start to finish haha. Was in too much of a panic of trying to get things done before epoxy pot life ran out. And then in a rush to try and cut and arrange the pieces, so not very good layer coverage. (thin in some areas and thick in others) Using big clamps to hold the 2 halves together, squeezes out a massive amount of epoxy and compresses them together awesomely. To get the two mold halves apart I had to use some big screwdrivers and chisels to hammer in around the edges to split it. I ended up having to cut the bellmouth off the mold because there is no way it would budge on the part where there is no draft angle and the layer lines holding it in place. Attempt 2: Still trying to be lazy and not sand the molds, I thought I'd try cover the pipe part that had no draft angle with brown packing tape. This time I arranged the cuts of fabric BEFORE mixing the epoxy. Then instead of laying them up on the part then brushing on epoxy. Much better. Laid the sheets out flat and brushed epoxy onto them all before laying any of them up. This worked better for 2 reasons - Getting all of the epoxy out of the pot means it doesnt cure so fast. and it gave it some time to get rid of some bubbles. Then it was actually way easier to drape these onto the mold as well. So this all worked reasonably well, except for that where there were crinkles in the tape made for a shitty surface finish on the part. But it came off the mold in one piece at least. Attempt 3: So this time, finally spent a few hours sanding the molds to a smooth surface finish up to 800 grit. Then a bit too much wax as I was still paranoid about having it all stick when its such a big part. But then same as above, doing an off-part epoxy layup and improved shape of my cuts again and more layers. This time, it all came out great! I broke the lower mold in the process of separating them, but draft angle wasnt an issue and the surface finish on the actual part was nice. Only problem is the white appearance in the epoxy from the wax, so I think its time to retire the car wax as a mold release agent haha. Overall this 3rd attempt is a good strong usable part though, so surface appearance aside I'm not to bothered about having broken the mold as I've got the part I wanted. Could probably repair it if I wanted to make same part again. Or keep it as 3 piece haha. Next thing For the next thing I want to make molds for, its basically an L shaped pipe with a big radius. so there's no way I can have a reusable core because you cant get it out. Also I want to try further reduce the amount of 3d print time and plastic used for the molds too. So I've borrowed some vacuum bagging stuff from a friend. I am going to make a dissolvable core from HIPS filament, and then have thin outer mold halves from PLA that are just say 5mm thick solid with no infill or plaster. Then chuck this whole lot inside a vacuum bag. By not having to make a mold solid enough to clamp the halves together, material usage can be a lot lower. hopefully. I'm nearly ready to print PLA outer mold halves, then presumably go through a bit of a learning curve with HIPS filament. Hopefully my learnings from above mean I get the layup right first time, as I only really get one chance per core that I print. This time I've got some PVA release agent for the PLA so should be a nicer surface finish. I've tried vaccum bagging some small test parts with bagging material and butyl tape. Its been infuriating to try and chase the vacuum leaks haha. So I'm going to buy a food bag sealer thing so I can just make a big envelope of bagging material and melt the perimeter together. Rather than trying to form a perimeter with butyl tape which is fiddly/expensive. Hopefully this method will be quicker and more reliable as any overlap will just get melted together for no leaks. So long as its strong enough to withstand the vacuum. fake edit: Will add some pics to this post later

You're talking about a 30+ year old gas tank man. All bets are off. I've stuffed a fuel pump from tank rust, and it sucked. haha.

I've made a great start on lightening my vehicle: Didnt need any of that stuff apparently So swapping a new box in, and I find that once more the Exedy HD clutch that I've got had started to rattle the springs loose already. Which doesnt actually cause any problems apart from interfering with the knock sensor sometimes which annoys the piss out of me. So I am fitting up an OEM clutch plate and cover plate. The OEM clutch plate has rubber bits in it, instead of springs. So they never rattle and cause knock sounds. Also my fuel computer project has slowly scope creeped into a digi dash. woops Shitloads of work left to do though. Hah. Will fiddle with the screen layout / arrangement a bit more and I think I'll have a row of LEDs right across the top for a shift light, instead of a big single light. I dont know. It's actually hard to fill the screen real estate when you dont need to have everything displayed at once. Want to make it look like it belongs. Not easy. Am also still playing around with some carbon fiber stuff but havent produced anything useful as of yet. But results so far are promising. I've got a few vaccum pumps to play with thanks to Tumeke, and I've bought a bunch of vaccum bagging materials so I'll give a few different methods a go and see what works or not. I thought making a wing mirror would be interesting but the geometry is so bloody complex. Will park that one until when/if I know what I'm doing So starting on something a bit more simple, will try make a new MAF housing / pipe out of CF. Have printed half of the mould for the bellmouth part but it will need to be made from at least 4 moulds assuming this will work at all... Using the method of 3d printing with thick outer layers, fairly open infill and then filling with plaster for weight/rigidity. Then coating the moulds with wax and just doing a wet layup. For this shape I really need to plan my cuts so I'll do a few trials with some bits of paper I think. Hopefully works well but its a learning process so not expecting stellar results straight away / wont be too dissapointed if it doesnt work out. This is the underside, from where I filled it up: Much cheaper than trying to print a more rigid mould from PLA.

This car has definitely ended up in the right hands

Ahhh sounds interesting! Thanks will flick you a message

This is awesome! I think I saw some photos of this thing and a brief description of it a few years ago. My understanding is that the power to weight is absolutely bonkers. Following this thread with a severe level of interest!

Well yeah it's a process of eliminatio between the sensor and the controller. And wiring perhaps. But my money is on busted heater in the sensor... I've had it happen.

Unless you've got a voltage supply or earth issue to the controller, it's either a faulty controller or faulty sensor though. Not really anything you can troubleshoot / fix with them.

I'm pretty sure in the LC2 there's an option to tell it what voltage or AFR it outputs while the sensor is warming up? So you can just send a signal to the engine to say that it's running at 14.7:1 or whatever while it's in warmup mode. But yeah if its taking that long to warm up I'd say the heater circuit is faulty TBH. As if its taking that long it sounds like its warming from the exhaust temp itself rather than internal heater. What happens if you try power it up without the car running, does it actually heat up? Have you used the serial cable connector thingy to see what it's doing while it's warming up?

For sure, mind was blown the first time I saw a Z20! There's a super mint standard 1GGTE one a few streets away from me. But Z10 is cooler / harder to find / rustier / sucker for punishment / etc.

Haha classic. SAFC was such a staple of tuning in the early 2000s haha. Yeah Type X lights would be sweet of course. E85 definitely seems to be way to go for a sweeeet power bump with minimal effort. All this 1JZ talk is getting me interested in doing some more work on the Z10 one day haha.