1932 Bugatti Type 59 Grand Prix Build

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Been setting up for a bit of a production run of cylinder blocks.

Made a bunch of jigs and handling fixtures to make life easier.

The water cores are the most time consuming and frustrating part. Theres 9 different water cores, all needing hand sizing and fitting, theyre really hard to pack the sand nicely so I have a lot of failures.

So im trying 3D printed sand cores from Thailand. Doing them in 2 pieces instead of 9. Ordered 2 sets, 1 set arrived ok and the others were cracked in half. Luckily not really a problem. Next time ill do them in 4 pieces.

On these two I'm also trying Furan sand instead of Phenolic since Palmy foundry does this. Its more crumbly than the phenolic so I think theres more of a chance of getting inclusions or little bits of sand in the wrong place. But we'll see.

Pouring tomorrow. So we'll know in a couple of days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pouring went well. The new setup with steel pallets, end clamps and sealing plates meant there were no dramas.😀

Its always exiting and nerve racking though. Also it always surprises me that the sand can stay together at 1500+C!

Ive given them their first waterblast and good inspection. So far they look great, no visible issues. The 3D printed cores didnt fall apart, the Furan sand looked like it vented off well and I had no port cores crack.

After I sandblast Ill be able to inspect more. The real test is during machining.

Pretty happy with the whole process, it went great. Moved it from a frantic tiring ~3weeks to a pretty casual 1 week turn around.😆

 

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Finished machining the last two castings. They are dimensionally the best ones so far. Surface finish not as great. Need to tune the feeds and speeds since its a harder grade material.

Did billet Cam boxes and Follow Fingers. The followers are from EN36A and need to go through a few more processes.

 

I need to have cams made. Theres guys in the UK that have been working on developing cams for this engine for the last 20+years and have a good profile to use. So ill go with that. I also used their high lift follower profile rather than the original.

Once I have cams I can line bore the cam boxes to suit.

Ive sent out the Follow Fingers for copper plating. Once theyre back I can remove the copper from the running faces the send them out for case hardening. Then ream and hone.

The 'Follow Fingers' are cool. They're not a rocker as such, theyre a 1 to 1 finger that is basically taking the side load from the valve. Seems to be what is done on sports bikes and F1 engines. I was originally thinking I could so Valve Buckets but once I got into it it was pretty obvious they would be too heavy due to the spring diameter. That would mean changing springs, how its oiled etc, it was starting to re invent too much.

 

 

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Installed sparkplug cups. Theyre about an 05 interference fit on the smaller boss and a fraction over size:size on the larger diameter. Large diameter is oringed but have used rtv on all faces. Got advice from the guys who 'know what theyre doing' so should be good.

Will install them in all blocks from now on.

 

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Completed a couple of engine sets of cam finger followers

Theyre EN36A. Copper plated to mask. Remove the coating on the running surfaces, heat treat and carburize, then ream and hone the pivot bore.

They have a small oil gallery up the middle of them that lines up the oil feed tube that theyre pivoting on to intermittently oil the cam lobe.

 

Note: Im testing out Google Cloud 'Buckets' for image hosting. Hopefully that works in the UK. I havnt figured out how to size the images yet though.