Popular Post yoeddynz Posted July 8, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 8, 2023 I'm still chipping away at the small jobs. Like most of NZ its been pretty wet outside recently which makes being stuck in the workshop even more cosy. I took this pic the other day. My cosy setup. Drilling and milling jobs are the warmest right now Hence I spent a bit of time staying warm and making some of the big chunks of alloy lighter where I can. Starting with the rear plate.. Then the sump plate... To aid the retention of the sealant I machined in some grooves between the bolt holes on both the plates. I'll be using good quality 3 bond sealant but everything helps. So apart from drilling and tapping a drain hole (suitable plug ordered) and making some anti-windage sheet metal bits the bottom end is finished. Oh I also lopped off the remaining unused original engine mounts - bit more weight lost Heat management time. To keep the cam cover seals from the radiant heat off the manifolds I needed some shields. I have had a basic design in my mind for ages but keep ignoring the fact it had to be done because not the most exciting job. First off was to make some brackets to mount the shields to. A bit of 1.5mm stainless and some marking out. drilling and shaping.. A fold.. Now I had to do a second fold to form a tight Z shape. But my folder won't allow such close folds and I really want these to be neat, one piece items. So I made a teeny tiny press brake. Milled a block of steel out... Milled a bit of plate to suit... Welded it to another bit of plate and welded a bit of pipe atop that and pressed away. (I really am super happy I built this press !! ) Now I had the tight folded Z shaped brackets I wanted.. Tidied up.. Fitted in place... I then cut some 0.9mm thick stainless shields to suit. I think I can go thinner. Not happy with the weight of them... Remembered I have had a bit of titanium sheet kicking about since I was a teenager - my sisters old airforce boyfriend obtained it from from the airbase and i was going to use it to make a cycle bottle cage or something - when titanium anything on a bike was super cool. But I never used it. Its lighter, but not by much and too small in size anyway. But now I'll just have to think of something silly I can utilise it on in this build - just for laughs/bragging rights So I'll probably get a bit of 0.5mm SS at some point for the shields. But for now I have at least got something to deflect the heat. They bolt to the brackets and will have some sort of heat resistant phenolic spacers to help prevent heat soak. Bolts were tigged in place.. Shield in place... Next up was the pipework as mentioned in the last post. I cut the old one up and carefully welded its shaped end to some stainless pipe. Not super pretty but happy as the OE pipe was less than a 1mm thick so it tested my skills. Then I started building the pipework in bits... I got as far as there and had to stop because not enough bends to complete the path I wanted the pipes to go in - I had used two bends for the exit from the other head. More bends are on their way from China as I type. Moving on to the next job I'd been putting off which was to make a half moon trigger/phase wheel for the cam angle sensor. I had already made a bracket to suit the Peugeot 307 hall sensor and knew the diameter I needed to start with. I rummaged about the steel racks and found a suitable piece of 3mm thick plate. Plasma cut a disc from it... Then into the lathe where it got a big hole sawed out from its middle. Much quicker than drilling and boring... Then bored out to final size - the process of which created a nice pretty lathe snake which came out of the lathes spindle... I carefully marked things out, drilled some holes and mounted the plate to the cam wheel. Note my lovely warm workshop/homeless person gloves. The bolts will be changed for countersunk items - the dome headed ones protruding just touched the reinforcing ribs within the cambelt cover.. The camcovers are well overbuilt and wont be in danger of getting hit in the back of a car like they could on a motorbike anyway so in an effort to make sure there's plenty of clearance I milled the ribs down.. I'll mill the slots out to suit on the trigger wheel and will add the remaining bolts (just in case 3 wasn't enough). It'll have half of its circumference machined down, with a corresponding amount in weight removed from the other side just to make some sort of effort to keep it fairly balanced. I bench tested the Peugeot sensor I had picked up from the wreckers - its a dud. Probably what sent the car to the graveyard considering the prices that the local NZ suppliers want for them. A new one is on its way from overseas. I have also ordered quite a few other little bits. New terminals for my injector plugs and a crimping tool. I'll be ordering other terminals to suit the various plugs that will be adorning the engines injection and ignition system. I want to create a loom without any unnecessary extra joints. I have never used a proper crimping tool as such. I got a set of little stainless tools for dismantling various connectors. Already used them and quite a breeze compared to my old screwdrivers, nails, pliers methods. I need to suss out a suitable idle control valve. On the Mazda V6 engined Viva I gutted the original Mazda throttle body mounted ICV and machined up a nice little alloy housing to suit its PWM solenoid, so creating a remotely mounted ICV. I'd like to do the same but I don't have any Mazda TBs kicking about and there's also an abundance of cheaply available copies of Bosch remote ICVs available online (with good reviews) so I'll think some more about this bit. My ignition setup is coming along - big thanks to @fletch who is posting me a Mitsubishi GTO ignitor module. I'll most likely get a Mondeo/Jaguar v6 coilpack for the ignitor to..ignite.. So many different brands The sticker list on the side of the completed car will be long. 'This car has been brought to you courtesy of the following' .. Hillman cars Honda Goldwing motor Subaru transmission Honda civic clutch plate Subaru clutch disc Honda civic alternator Subaru starter motor Ford Mondeo clutch release Honda crx(?) throttle body (thanks Chris ) Nissan Micra injectors Mitsubishi ignitor Jaguar ignition coils KMC bmx oil pump chain Lego Mandolorian inlet manifold plenum guardians 58 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted July 26, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 26, 2023 Cam phase wheel continued. I needed a nice solid accurate hub to mount it on for machining the slots. Found a suitable chunk on the rack and turned it down to suit.. Drilled and tapped a hole in the middle then machined a solid cap which is pulled down tight so holding the disc in place.. Using the cam pulley as a template I scribed the outlines of the slots in place. Then into the mill and made lots of mess. Because I don't (yet) have a rotating table for the mill the slots are straight, not curved. But being short in length and even they look ok. Good enough to knock a little weight off. I'll leave the final machining until just before assembly in case something changes with the sensor although I think that's pretty much sorted as I have a brand new sensor as used in many Peugeot/Citreon/fiats plus the ever helpful @chris r had picked me up another one plus some various plugs I needed from pick-a-part. I have been accumulating various plugs and terminals from Aliexpress in my quest to be able to make a new engine loom without having to splice wires to connector pigtails. This arrived in the mail from friendly @fletch, gifted to the cause Its a genuine Mitsubishi ignitor for a Mitsi GTO/many other Mitsi V6 vehicles. However - its the one item I have been struggling to find the correct terminals for. They are either Yakazi or Sumitomo but I've still not found an exact match. I'll keep searching but luckily mr @Corbie is gifting me an ignition module, exact match, plus the 3 Mitsubishi twin post coils with the leads/plugs intact between the coils and ignitor which will make for less splicing. Another little job I checked off was to make some blanking plugs for the unused air injection ports. Not sure if they'll get painted over or left as bare alloy yet. In place but not yet fixed in. Much better than what was there (look back a post or two) Back to cooling pipes then. The extra 22mm bends I'd ordered had arrived so I could continue on with the top pipes. I found another bit of stainless tube with a gentle bend set into it. Ideal for this area... I used some of Dads old surgical forceps to hold the pipes in place while I tacked them.. Now I needed to merge the pipes into a larger size so off to the press.. Tacked in place and blend it in.. I joined the rear pipework with merger to the front pipe assembly with a short bit of radiator hose leftover from the front of the Goldwing. The rear pipe needed a bracket. Played with bits of card until I had a shape that worked.. copied it into stainless like such.. That was welded in place and the top pipe assemblies were pretty much finished. You can see how they are routed in relation to the inlet manifold once its back in place. As with many aspects of the build so far I have done my best to make sure they can be easily removed and don't hinder the removal of the inlet in one piece. I'll be adding to their length, plus the bottom pipe , once I have worked out the best positioning of the water pump but that has to wait until the engine in the back of the spare imp for mocking purposes. Other trinkets/treats/goodies that have arrived in the mail are these universal joints.. They are for the gear shifter shaft that runs under the tunnel from the transmission to the gearstick. Because the selector rod enters the Subaru gearbox a bit higher up and at a slight angle compared to the imps original transmission I need these to connect the dots. I wanted something with no slop to keep the shifter travel tight. These have sealed bearings and are aluminium so lighter than they look. This afternoon I dropped Hannah off at Nelson airport as she's off to the UK to see her family. Almost 4 weeks home alone so I'll be trying to do as much as I can on this build While in Nelson I picked up another one of the same model chain that I'm using for the oil pump drive. I bought it mainly for with the special strong joining link that I needed. It wasn't looking promising to be able to get these particular links by themselves in NZ but no worries anyway as I'll need a new chain for one of my old bike restorations I'm in the process of doing so now I have one... When I got home I found this assembly in my mailbox courtesy of @dmulally. I now have a spare gearstick assembly so I can mock up and build the shifting linkage in the green Imp shell. Next step is to finish my fuel rail inlets/outlets to suit. Then a quick wire brush of the crankcase and assembly can start. With this in mind I searched deep into my moth ridden wallet and paid the man for some of this stuff which by all accounts is the best there is.. I'd like to give a big thanks to those who've helped out with parts!!! Bloody top blokes. 50 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted July 29, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 29, 2023 These bits turned up thanks to @Corbie .. Sweet. I've got some coils and a spare ignitor. but hang on a minute... something ain't quite right. One of these things is not like the other... This will give me nightmares if I fit a mismatched coil. I'll have to look about for another matching FC0021 While is was looking at ignition stuff I dug out the original Goldwing coils and leads from the store room. Then this happened to them... The leads have molded rubber boots, shaped neatly to seal the spark plug holes. Three of them are perfect for the LH bank and will point the leads nicely towards the front of the car direction. At this point in time I am planning on mounting the coils up under the parcel shelf, sort of above the transmission and out of immediate view. But the other 3 boots left over are all over the place. Only one remotely points towards the transmission. The standard leads are solid copper strands and from what I know they are not the best thing to have around electronic engine management. Maybe they are OK? I'm not 100% sure yet but what I do know is that they were too short and a bit messy looking. At the spark plug end there's a very neat little brass fitting that screws into a plastic guide inside the boot. See the bits here... The tread is m10 x 1.25. How handy. I'll get a long bolt, screw it in place, clamp the bolt head firmly in the vice and simply pull the rubber boot off the plastic insert... Poos. I superglued it back together and put it out of sight. It'll be fine. I think I can pass 7mm silicone leads through the insert anyway when I make new leads. I don't like the way the silly boots that refuse to point the correct way bend awkwardly. This is the best of them. Not really neat enough and I only have the one of this shape anyway. So I got a sharp knife and performed a little circumcision on one of the 2 remaining... The end tapered nicely with a flapdisc on the grinder... And looks OK in place. If I get some nice flexible leads they'll curve the way I want fine I think. Now the fuel rail fittings. I had a certain look in mind, tidy, simple and pointing the hoses where I wanted them. I machined up these bits in stainless. You can see the first one I had made and brazed already just as a trial.. silver soldered them together. Not as neat as I wanted- possibly it doesn't flow so nicely on stainless? Luckily the worse bits face down. Now to get the angles just right and mark them.. Then braze them in place... I'll clean them up in the morning. My plan is to paint the rails in black epoxy and leave the stainless bits clear. Hopefully they'll be tidy enough for this to work out well. The rear inlet I have yet to decide on with regards the positioning of the hose. I'm leaning towards it heading down out of the way rather than across because I'd like to keep the area around the throttle body as clear as possible. For the fuel pressure regulator outlet end on the other rail I had to first turn the end of the reg mount down. Awkward in the 4 jaw so I mounted it to a lump of alloy that I'd turned a spigot onto, so centralising the mount. Regulator can now mount here... But it just annoys me a bit that its sitting there, right over a plug hole, on view. Luckily the home made spark plug wrench I'd made... ....because I didn't have one to suit the plugs/hole size on this engine when I was stripping it down, still fits and works but would be better with a smaller diameter shank.. But maybe I extend the rail with a bit of curved tube and mount the regulator sort of here... I shall ponder this and look at it tomorrow. Time to kick up my feet and do my next bit of google homework - look up leads for the ignition. 48 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted August 3, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted August 3, 2023 I went with curved. I thought I had a 16mm/5/8" tube bender but its actually a 1/2" so instead I heated the tube up and bent it carefully... Turned out OK. Not too ovalised or squished at the bend point.. Cut out a small section I needed and welded it in place. Then brazed the Nissan regulator flange on. I now have plenty of clearance around the spark plug hole and the regulator is tucked away a little more from obvious sight. The fuel hose will run neatly over the starter or possibly run it below. I'll decide this when its all being set up in the car. As you can see I had fitted the transmission in place and the starter so I could decide better on the positioning of things. That rail finished I moved onto the other side. I decided I'd run the hose down. Fitted the inlet bit in place, orientated the hose where I wanted and marked it. Brazed in place... Filed the joins and tidied things up as and where I saw fit.. My work area that morning.. Almost getting to the reassembly of this engine But before I stripped it down I marked out the perimeter of the engine crank case onto the rear plate/bellhousing combo. Then I very carefully, with a teeny little slot drill, milled some sealant retention grooves between the bolt holes to a level just above the expected oil line.. Now I could strip the engine. But before I took the crankcase halves apart I gave them a quick tickle with a wire wheel. I'll be painting them soon so I wanted a good smooth surface. It'll never be as smooth as a factory finish because the old paint is too chipped. But it'll look neat enough. Then finally back down to two halves... I pulled the pistons out from their storage spot for a clean. They are actually way cleaner than I remembered with really only the tops having light carbon build up. Interesting and pleasant surprise I discovered. The pistons have press fitted wrist pins. I had always been assuming they would be secured with circlips because I had been told this engine was an '88. In the first year of manufacturing of 1500s, 1988, they had circlips and then they changed to push fit (I'm hazarding a guess that they might have had some engine warranties due to adventurous circlips leaving their allotted slots? ) Anyway. That's nice. There is also one other minor change made to the engine internals around 1990ish, maybe a bit later, when they added needle roller bearings to the valve lash rockers. I'll show that in more detail when I get to it and will discover what type I have. Back to the pistons. I've set up a little cleaning station at the bench and have been getting high on acetone. Too much fumage really - I think will leave the rest until next time and do this job outside. But they are coming up pretty sweet! After they are cleaned up I'll have to make three special piston ring compressors for the assembly of the second crank case half over its 3 pistons. More about this next time 49 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted August 9, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted August 9, 2023 Oven cleaner. Just a tiny bit on a rag was perfect for removing the last stubborn bits of carbon staining on the pistons. Now for the what I fear is the trickiest part of the engine assembly which is assembling the two crankcase halves together, the last half over 3 pistons. Its the bit that's if not done correctly could at worse break a piston ring. Even the one of the manuals states this... So I started the process by giving the crank case halves a nice clean over and prep. Then I got the crank out from its hidy place under the table. Gave it a good clean and as per advice from @GregT double checked for any burrs in the oilway holes. They were spot on. Very nicely finished all over. Put the crank in the hole... Note the smallish crank thrust washers... (edit- this is just one of them - there's another on the flywheel side but I couldn't get a pic of that one because the flywheel adaptor hub is in the way) Rotation direction aside, this is probably the engines weakest spot in terms of being used as car engine, with a manual box that is. Good quality oil with snake oil ptfe treatments and don't sit at an intersection in gear with the clutch depressed etc etc will be the name of the game However all is not glum because after some extensive bedtime scheming and designing I have a good idea as an extra precaution I might do. Anyway- back to the build. Now I had to make some special Goldwing specific tools. Firstly are the piston ring compressors. Here's a pic of one of the Honda items ... Basic and gets the job done. But expensive, especially combined with the other bits and anyway - I like to make as much as I can. I got a bit drainpipe from a local plumpers supplies. It was actually a perfect fit over the piston. Like 10 thou smaller in ID and it wouldn't have gone on. Fluke. Lady couldn't be bothered to charge me anything either I chopped it into bits... To machine such flexy plastic rings I needed a support. Luckily I had a lump of thick alloy tube leftover from removing a customers lpg setup. I skimmed it down... Now I could turn a taper onto the rings and make lots of plastic mess... The taper locates the compressors into a tapered lead at the base of each cylinder liner on the LH case, so guiding the compressors and stopping the chance they might flex out as the case is lowered down over the pistons heads. I had to get the taper angle just right. Cut each rings in two. Now for some decent quality velcro. I found a meter pack of one side sticky, the other for sewing. Perfect! I then bolted the clean, shiny pistons in place. First to go in were the ones for the RH case that the crank is bolted into. Then the left hand pistons get bolted in place... More tools. This time some woodwork. I searched in my wood supplies and found a nice lump of Eucalyptus. Firstly two support blocks made to measure according to sizes specified in the manuals. They are used to space the cases at certain stages. Then a trickier bit which is used to hold the upper most piston straight and in the right location. In that last pic you will note two white plastic supports for the two lower pistons. Honda sell these as part of the kit. Not cheap either. So I cut up a bit of plastic chopping board to suit. The velcro strips needed wire pulls as like the Honda items. I have no fine wire, or a piano to steal some from. But I have a fishing rod, now with a shorter line. So it was all set up for the 'big lowering and clamshell manoeuvre' Oil the bores, the piston crowns, carefully lower lh case. The top compressor slid down the piston, rings were inside the bore and the case sat on the upturned blocks. Remove the wooden piston support and then slide compressor down and remove by pulling on the fishing line loops. Please excuse the lack of photos. I was a combination of being both nervous and satisfied and not thinking camera. Not until the block was over the next two remaining pistons and rings were in place. Then I took some pics... Plastic chopping board supports removed.. Final two compressors pulled out... Case faces cleaned one more time, dowels reinserted, 2 new O rings installed, lower surface gets a thin spread of 3 Bond sealant. Case is lowered then all these cleaned and pre-organised bolts go in and get torqued down. Job done. Phew !!! I had a cup of coffee and tidy up in preparation of the next stages. Its nice having a break from work and not having customers jobs cluttering up the space. Just a little spare Imp... 64 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted August 17, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted August 17, 2023 The 'hard' part of assembly completed I can now chip away at the rest of the engine. I'm taking my time, enjoying the process and tinkering with bits as I go along. The next stage is the oil pump and filter and connecting tubes. First thing to go in was the oil filter pedestal. I looked at the hole for the oil pressure switch/gauge sender and it just didn't look deep enough. I'd tapped it out with the appropriate 1/8" bsp tap and it fitted one switch I had but It just didn't look right for my Imps sender. Only one way to double check. Out to the 'garage' where little imp is safe and dry.. I removed the sender (luckily very easy access on the Datsun engine) and tested it in the hole. Sure enough it only barely started on the thread. Out with the bsp taps and I ran one in a lot further. Much better... Tested it in place. Easy access. I wanted to sort this out now as I could make sure the oil ways were completely clear of any swarf etc. Having to tap this hole out in place after fitment would have been a risky thing. That done I sealed up the filter mounting side with tape and fitted the unit in place.. Oh but not before taking this pic after assembling all the parts together in one place... I also weighed the block with crank/pistons in place before the oil system went in too. More about weights soon. But back to the oily stuff. I bolted it all in and set up the chains and sprockets. Some of the tinkering I mentioned as things went together included milling out as much as possible from all the various plates and mounting blocks. No point in extra weight and anyway- the bits looked nicer for it. Not that anyone will see them. But I know they are there in all their lighter machined goodness. You can sort of spot some of my Jenny Craig weight loss efforts going on in this pic on the idler gear mount.. That lot in place I moved on to another little job. For oil changes I needed a sump plug. This neat little stainless item arrived from China.. M12 x 1.25 and I didn't think I had a tap to suit. Luckily I remembered about a set of Chinesium taps my neighbour had given me a few years ago. Probably made of cheese but hard enough to tap the required thread I needed. Look at the spelling on the box ... Drain plug sorted... Cylinder heads will be next on the agenda. Give them a clean, strip them down, check and softly lap in the valves etc etc. I'll also be stripping, cleaning and bleeding the hydraulic lash adjusters. For that job I wanted a tray for all the little bits. I popped over to the neighbours farm as she has many many many chickens. Got some egg trays. She also gave me some sponge cake because she knew Id have run out of the cakes Hannah had made me. I like cake. Another job I am mid way through is creating a 'thrust' ring to go between the flywheel and the back plate. It's really just a belt and braces fitment in case because why not. As shown in the last post, I feel that the stock Goldwing crank thrust bearings are fairly minimal. This ring I'm building will only come into effect if the Goldwing item gets worn to much. There's about .0006 ~0007" clearance on the crank. Good oil and not sitting at the lights with the clutch pushed in should help things last. But just in case I will add this. I cut some 8mm alloy plate into a circle and then machined a ring up... Ordered some special Tecast Pa6c oil impregnated engineering nylon which arrived yesterday. I also got a bit of bar which will be used later on in my gear linkage. See my lovely shiny ring... More on this next time. I mentioned weighing the block earlier. I thought it best to weigh all the engine parts (because curious and couldn't wait actually). The block with crank/pistons was 36kg on the pretty accurate bathroom scales. Everything else I weighed with the digital scales. I wrote stuff down and took a pic.. Pretty happy with that really. It includes the clutch assembly and the engine side of the engine mounts. When I first started stripping this engine down many moons ago I had always hoped I might see a final weight of around 80kg - but unrealistic when the block and heads are 56kg alone. I'll wiegh the Datsun engine when its out but google sources claim my A12 is 87 kg so I'm stoked with a circa 10kg increase there. The Subaru leone transmission is about 9kg heavier than the Imp item. The big benefit is that the flat six is shorter in length and majority of its weight is down low in line with the crank - not up high like my current Datsun is. I'm super happy with how the current car handles so this will be a decent improvement on that. Plus I get the rear parcel shelf back for shopping bags! Since I had an empty workshop for a bit I thought I'd reunite Impy one with impy two for a few nights. Maybe I'll get baby imps? 57 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted September 3, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted September 3, 2023 So last time I popped by I was talking about my ring piece. I machined it to suit the location around the rear main seal holder, then cut out another ring piece from the engineering plastic. Harder to cut with the jigsaw than I expected. Put it in the lathe, machined it to the same size as the alloy ring. Machines really nicely. Makes lots of fine mess, much like a very not so tasty candy floss. I then drilled and tapped the alloy ring concentric to the main seal holder on the bell housing backplate. Then drilled the plastic ring, spot facing the holes and bolted it to the alloy ring. I now had an easily replaceable large thrust bearing. Next was the tricky bit. The crank has about .007" lineal movement on the crank. I wanted to set the thickness of the ring just so there's a smidge less because it will bed in. First I had to get close enough I could start accurately measuring it but I couldn't get in between the backplate and the flywheel to measure in any accurate way. So I used some plastigauge between the flywheel and its hub. Id fit it in place carefully and because the plastic was slightly too thick the plastigauge would show me how much I needed to remove from the thrust face before there was no lineal movement at all when the flywheel bolts were cinched up. Once I was at that point I could take a skim off the plastic and I ended up with about 5-6 thou movement. Perfect. Because its an English car, irrespective of what engine is fitted it'll no doubt leak. So in order to help it drip oil properly I added a tiny drain hole below the rear main seal.. ...and a hole in the bottom of the bellhousing. Always horrible having a build up of oil in a bellhousing, flicking all over the clutch etc. Now it can leak gracefully onto a drip tray I put the dust sheet over the block and pulled the cylinder heads out from under the bench. Gave them both a clean as best I could with the valves in place. A nice job to relax into in the afternoon sun... Heads much cleaner I put one aside and set up shop on the bench to remove the valves and clean them up. I was going to put the bits in an egg tray but it wasn't really ideal so instead a plastic tray with moveable partitions. Very careful not to mix any bits.. The seats and valves were all really good. A bit of carbon build up behind the heads on the exhaust valves but they all cleaned up mint in the lathe with a wire brush. The stems had barely any sign of wear and were jiggle free in the guides. More signs that this engine really is a low mileage, well maintained unit. I made a basic wooden jig to hold the heads at the valve angle so making for an easy time to accurately lap the valve seats clean. They came up sweet with minimal lapping. Happy that the valves and seats were good I decided to give the ports a little clean up. Nothing too flash but there's a few casting ridges etc that I could remove... I was going to use the air grinder but the Dremel seemed a lot more suitable, especially when I remembered I had the flexible extension I've never used before. Wow!! Its perfect for the job. Just a tickle.. Into the sunshine and swapped over to some tiny sanding drums to smooth things up. I wanted a nice clean but 'rough' finish on the inlet ports. Certainly not polished. The exhaust ports were smoothed off a lot more but not polished either, a waste of time for very minimal gains on one of these mildly tuned engines I think. If this engine swap works out well, without grenading the transmission etc then another set of heads will be a fun thing to play with. More on this later.. once the port clean up was completed I fastidiously cleaned the heads and blew away any signs of anything that might cause harm if it were to get into a bearing surface. Brake cleaner and the airline was perfect for this. Next I sealed up the ports and fitted the plugs back in place.. Brand new stem seals, the ones I'd ordered from Norway of all places and they had taken bloody ages to get here, but here they are.. Refitted the valves and called it done. Rise and repeat for the other head. Then I had two nice clean heads ready for service.. Next job was the cam follower assemblies. Again, like the heads, not too dirty, no real signs of oil staining etc but certainly in need of a clean anyway. The underside showing the rockers.. Plastic tray compartments cleaned and shuffled about to suit their new role. One assembly at a time. The rockers, followers and rocker shafts show next to no wear. The lack of needle roller bearings between the rocker and the eccentric lash adjuster cam thing dates this engine to something around early 90s. If I'm correct I think they added needle bearings around 1993. Here's a pic to show how the hydraulic lash adjuster moves the cam and so take up the slack in the rocker.. These adjusters are like many you might find in car engines. To make things easier to explain here is an exceptionally accurate, highly detail and finely drawn technical drawing I just did on my phone... Oil is contained with the the unit and held under pressure by the engines oil system, fed to each adjuster by oilways within the cam follower cradle. The piston part, uppermost, is a very fine fit into the base and held in place by crimping. In order for them to work properly the air must be removed from the adjusters and that's what the spring loaded steel ball is for. Push that in (red arrow) and air is expelled. If they were to be left on their side or upside down the oil within will eventually drain out and air introduced. From what I can work out they don't self bled and the oil within is not constantly renewed. So over time the oil will break down and become dirty just from the minute amount of metal on metal wear within. Mine certainly showed as much as I cleaned them out and they took a good bit of working before they stopped showing any wisps of dirty oil. There is a special Honda tool that is used to push the ball valve in. I machined one up in aluminium with a bit of tig rod set in the middle but in use it wasn't as good as just using a neatly shaped bit of 1.6mm tig rod. Using this I was really able to see what was coming out each time I purged them after draining. As per the manuals I used kerosene. I had three little vessels filled. Then, after they had been left upside down to drain any residue left over I re-bled them using Penrite fully synthetic full zinc bike oil. I figure that since the oil in these adjusters might never get changed out it makes sense to have some decent oil with good anti wear additives... plus I happened to have a container of it because I use it in our Honda big red quad bike The adjusters were now all clean, lubed and showing no movement when pressed, which is what is required when bled. I then cleaned the rest of the parts and reassembled. I mounted them on the wall facing up - ready for when I need to fit them to the heads. Interestingly whilst doing some googling on these units I discovered that the Honda Valkyrie 1500, a sort of sportier cruiser version of the touring goldwings, has apparently got slightly hotter cams. I have not found any definitive info on exactly what the difference is. More lift or duration etc. But more interesting is that they also ditch the hydraulic lash adjusters and instead use simple screw and nut type adjusters on the rockers as per many other Honda bikes. See here... So my future plan if this engine setup works out ok would be to locate a pair of Valkyrie heads/cams/followers and have a play with them. At the same time I could setup these BMW itbs that hannah so kindly brought back from the UK ... They'll need the tabs lengthening so to space them apart a touch further to suit.. Other parts, this time delivered by the postman... Bosch style (but not price) Idle air control valve, various sensor plugs and some shiny new exhaust gasket rings and nuts. So the heads are ready to go back on but before I do I wanted to sort some other little jobs out while the engine is compact and easy to move on the bench. This morning I made this... It's designed to stop oil surging back up the filler tube. It really is probably not needed actually bu I see no harm it being there as a belt and braces add on. I'e still yet to decide on the final height and extension of the filler.. Oil height and volume is going to be more than sufficient I think. I'm not sure what the height was in the original configuration and I seem to have foolishly thrown away the original dipstick so I cant check that. Dipstick went in here.. I'd like to have the oil height maybe an inch below the crank throw. I'll have a think about this. Anyway - lots of room for oil. I think about 4 litres at least. I also need to add a vent to the crankcase. Most likely it will be here, right below where the little owl is sitting... Because there is a useful casting that would shield the vent hole from oil splash.. 47 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted September 22, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted September 22, 2023 I've not done as much on this project as I'd hoped recently but still chipping away at it. Crankcase ventilation is sorted. I had a rummage through my box of fittings and found a suitable vent pipe thingee... Into the lathe and with a tiny boring bar I was able to reach in to machine the hub down to a neater size... Covered the vital bits to avoid swarf getting in the works then drilled and tapped a hole to suit.. Drilled two drain holes to avoid any build up of of oil accumulating.. Next jobs in line were to add some extra baffles to help stop oil surge. Remember a while back I had put many bits through a Jenny Craig program in a bid to make them lighter. Well I realised I should have left this plate at its full fat weight and not added this big hole which will let oil surge too easily... Silly me. Now I had to fill that hole and I was damned if I was going to disassemble all that lot to do it. So machined up a plug, as light as I could but still heavier than the material I had removed in the first place. Oh well.. I also wanted to stop oil flowing out of this area under heavy braking so I made another flap. I now have two flaps. I machined up a bit of alloy angle.. It was bolted here... In a similar fashion to the 'oil door 3000' its purpose is to help stop oil wafting up the back of the bellhousing plate under heavy braking. Content with the sump baffling situation I could now start sealing and bolting the plates in place. I bolted the backup thrust bearing mount in place on the bell housing and then the bell housing was bolted up to the block.. The thrust bearing was bolted up.. The engine mount plate was then bolted up. I had bought a load of flange bolts for this and the sump but they had serrations under the heads which I had to machine off first.. Plate bolted up well. Now to connect the last bit of pipework for the oil system. But I wasn't really happy with my transfer port block sealing arrangement. This thing here... I had designed it to seal with sealant, held in place with a sealant groove. But picturing the sealant being squished inwards towards the holes started the paranoid cogs in my brain turning. Yes it forms a nice neat bead and its pretty strong stuff but the thought of possibly having a tiny bit get dislodged in time and finding its way into the oil way to potentially block the crank feed did not impress me. So I decided on a change of design using O rings... I cut a big lump of alloy off some stock... Cut that down and machined it.. Did some very careful measuring, marking and setting it up in the four jaw chuck so I could machine some oil ways and O ring grooves.. Sealed the end of the transfer port with a plug and welded it in.. Bolted it up and I'm now able to sleep again. More holes to seal. There were two remaining air injection ports to seal up, one on each head and getting rid of these ugly lumps of metal. I cut and drilled some stainless plate to suit... Much better. Another little job ticked off was the sump plug magnet. I drilled into the stainless plug just deep enough to fit a very powerful tiny magnet I'd found on a keyfob thing.. Epoxied in place.. Continuing on with all things oil I shortened the oil filler neck to a height I was happy with. I'm now trying to decide on how best to possibly add a little sight window into the tube. The flange I had made to allow the filler neck to be removed so the cambelt cover can be removed easier is possibly not needed any more with the neck being so short. The planned oil level is also at or just above the flange join thereabouts. I'm going to have a think about this aspect a little more before I commit to final epoxying of the bits together. Luckily its all easily unbolted so I can be changed anytime in the future anyway. 52 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted October 12, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted October 12, 2023 So where I left off last time was the oil filler pipe and sight window ideas. I don't really need a separate flange now I have decided to run the pipe shorter in height. So I dug out another old bit of alloy, gave a it a clean in the lathe and welded up a new pipe.. While in Nelson city a week or so ago I popped into a plastic place that told me on the phone they had 25mm thick walled acrylic tube. Turned out they didn't and instead I left with some thin walled lexan (polycarbonate) tube, closer to 25.4 in size. It was cheap so I thought it gives me something to play with. I picked up some thin 25mm O-rings on the way home and started to suss out a way I could make it work. The plastic was way too thin to machine Oring grooves into so instead I machined some alloy ends with grooves. Cut a short length of plastic tube to suit.. Which was pressed onto the end caps.. I milled a window into the side of the filler pipe. Now I had some bits to assemble.. Fitted in place.. The bottom of the stub which the filler cap screws onto is pretty much at 100mm oil height. Bottom of the sight is 80mm. So if I aim for a 90mm height I'm smack in the middle. Some led keychain trinkets turned up in the mail from China and I have a metal 'momentarily on' switch from Jaycar electronics. I'll have a play about and see if I can make a neat enough attempt fitting it within the filler cap so it does something like this (using a bike light)... Back to proper jobs now. Painting and finish assembly. First though I wanted to check the TDC marks are correct and make some timing marks to suit on my alternator pulley. I set a DTI up and found TDC. Luckily it seems the factory marks are bang on. Paint time. I had bought some paint for the engine a while ago. I gave the block and heads one last clean and masked them up. Primer first.. Then top coat. I decided on alloy finish, similar to the original colour. Really just too tidy it up and stop the alloy getting that annoying light corrosion. Then that fun job of removing masking tape to reveal a neat finish.. I masked over the original hand painted OK checks - just because I like them. Engine painted I dug out the brand new head gaskets Id bought very early on... Torqued the heads in place and then moved onto the camshafts/camshaft and follower housings.. In place... Now I needed to finish the trigger wheels which meant getting them phased in the correct position. I laid out all the bits that go with the cam covers and pulleys. This alloy bit was damaged from when the original Goldwing bike must have been dropped (I think the engine must have come from a low mileage bike that had been involved in an accident many moons ago) It wasn't sitting flat and needed a bit of a straighten.. Simple I thought. I'll use the press. I carefully set it up on the press with various bit of metal so I could bend it back straight. I got it pretty good - but it needed just a little bit more... Bang! Whoops. * Pic is taken after I'd already started prepping it to weld. I preheated it in the oven and then carefully sticthed it back together. Not the nicest casting to weld but it turned out ok and luckily the repairs are not on display.. Welded both sides.. Trigger wheel time. First off I wanted to work out the wire polarity on the oem goldwing VR sensors.. Now I knew the timing marks are good I set up the main crank position trigger wheel in place and marked it. Then welded a stub of steel in place which was cut down to form a key that locates in the cranks keyway. I doubled checked the megasquirt MS extra build manual and removed the appropriate tooth so creating a 36 - 1 trigger wheel with a 50 degree offset. Then I fitted the brand new Gates cambelts I had also bought ages ago. Sadly I discovered they are English made which means they'll probably leak.. Now I could setup the camshaft position sensor trigger wheel - needed so I can run the injection mode as fully sequential. I had made this wheel a while back but had not yet removed the half moon of material. Annoyingly I forgot to weigh the wheel before I removed material. I now had no real accurate way of working out what to mill off the opposite side to balance the wheel out. Balancing it is probably not super critical but considering that at 6000rpm this wheel will be doing 3000 rpm I really wanted to avoid any extra throw out stress on the pulley or camshaft/camshaft bearings. The final nail in the coffin for this wheel was it slipping in my makeshift rotary table (actually just the mill vice which can be rotated to mill the concentric slot - which I did by hand) It slipped, the end mill grabbed and became two pieces with a loud bang. So I made a new wheel. This time I weighed it before removing the halfmoon. Then I was able to mill the exact right amount off to balance it as best I could. Weighing it before milling out the final weight reduction slots.. Setup in place.. All that sorted I could move on to a fun little job I was looking forward to. Painting the cam covers and sorting out replacements for the old badges. After a really good clean and some light sanding of the covers, which have been through the wars and have extensive welding repairs due to the same crash I guess, I laid down some primer. See one repair here... Due to the fairly rough finish I decided on wrinkle finish paint because it can hide sins and blemishes. I've used this same product to good success on that Mazda V6 I had plonked into my Viva HB so I was pretty confident on getting an OK finish. Covers were warmed up in the sunshine and 3 thick coats were laid down, 5 minutes between each coat. Once the paint did its magic thing they came up ok. I'm happy. Now the badges. I was going to try a couple of mates about getting something with the word HONDA 3d printed or machined in alloy but I really wanted to do it all myself and thought about some nice machined ribs to insert. they turned out neat.. Carefully fixed in place as per original badges with double sided foam tape... Covers bolted up in place. I'm really happy with the look 71 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted October 31, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted October 31, 2023 Continuing on with cleaning bits and fitting them. I gave the inlet runners a tidy up with a wire wheel. I was tempted to paint them but decided I like the raw alloy look and they should be easy enough to keep free of any oxidation. Bolted together and fitted.. Happy with them. Next up was to finish off the filler tube. I had five of these arrive from the land of Ali. I took one apart and studied it and after a stiff coffee eventually came up with a plan on how to cobble it into a unit that would fit the cap, be easy to remove if needed and really easy to change the batteries. Split apart all the bits look like this.. The light unit together.. machined a recessed hole in the cap. No going back now.. Switch in place.. Switch pushed down... light does its thing... Well. That's that done. It'll no doubt get stolen by some little light fingered shit at the first car show the engine cover is up at.. Now back to the topside. The Honda civic throttle body needed some modifications and add ons to suit its new application. The first thing was to sort out a inlet stub to suit the vacuum line that will run to the ECUs map sensor. The Honda had originally been fitted with an external map sensor that goes here... I machined up a plate, machined a little pipe with a flange, bent pipe in vise with a bit of old air rifle barrel, recessed plate to suit flange, epoxied it in place and bolted the assembly on. In pictures... I also needed to make a fitting for the idle control valve hose. The area under the throttle body where it fits is very tight so I had to really whittle down a lump of alloy until it fitted and press a custom pipe in place. Again in pics.. Not a lot of room.. Now a cable pulley to suit the imp throttle pedal. I measured the pulley I'd previously made to suit the Hitachi carb that's fitted to the Datsun A12 currently in the imp. Double checked the cable pull offered by the throttle pedal. Drew up a sketch and started machining. I offset the centre just like I had done on my second iteration for the V6 Viva, so gearing down the first bit of cable pull and making for a nicer smoother throttle opening. Fitted in place. Had to add a stainless stop to the pulley so I can manually adjust the initial opening as per the original pulley fitted. Luckily this throttle body has 2 return springs (another large one is hidden behind the TPS sensor. I need two springs to satisfy the certification process later on. Now I needed to make a bracket to suit the throttle outer cable. More alloy swarf was pinged about the mill... resulting in this... Mounted in place. Note the slotted mount holes so I could fine tune the cable exit to suit the offset pulley. I made a gasket to suit the TB and with that I am pretty much finished with the fabrication of the engine parts.. (exhaust system beyond the headers is still to be made but I consider that's kind of separate to the engine) EFI wiring next. I did a quick measure up of things. I needed to know the length of loom I'd require to suit my ecu location which will be under the front of the rear seat. I also wanted to get some sort of idea as to where best to run the loom so its hidden from view but still easy enough to remove. I cleared the big mobile table and started sussing out the loom requirements... I have a DIY autotune megasquirt ms1 loom to use but since I'm using a ms3x I'll need a few extra wires not offered on the loom. Luckily I have my collection of Mazda and Nissan wires... I've also had this turn up yesterday. Its a 14pointseven Spartan 3 canbus wideband, along with a very nifty looking digital gauge, from the very friendly and helpful team at Justraceparts.com in Oz. So that's where I'm at now. I'll be playing about with lots of wires, sensors, crimp fittings, heat shrink etc etc I'm in no rush to get through this stage either because I enjoy wiring and its at its most fun when I can take my time in order to do a neat job. 57 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted January 10 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 10 Wow- its been over two months since an update but this project has moved way down the list of what's important to me right now. However I am still working on it where I can because its a nice break from thinking about other things and still really fun to work on plus both Hannah and I really do want to get this engine in. I have accumulated quite a few photos so I think I might split the update into a couple to catch up as its too much to do in one hit. Wiring up the engine management has taken the most time because as usual I got carried away with doing my best to keep the engine loom hidden, the system as standalone from the rest of the cars wiring and make sure its easy to remove or service. I started the wiring off with the injectors but first I had to paint the fuel rails. I chose to paint them in epoxy black for a durable finish. Folding bike stand made for a handy hanging point.. unmasking.. The Nissan March k11 injectors, 3 from the 1.0 litre engine we have spare and 3 from a car at the wreckers. 1.0 and 1.3 k11s share the same sized injectors at circa 145cc/min which is ideal for this engine. Gave them a clean and fitted them in place. I didn't want the injectors to point out to the side as oem fitment in the k11s, so I very carefully shaved off the plastic tab on the injector bodies that locates in the retaining rings. I had to change out the screws for dome headed socket screws, which look much nicer and are stainless anyway, so I could use a ball ended allen key to tighten ones under the now rear facing injectors. Much neater. Bought a variety of this braided loom insulation stuff online. Never used it before. Took me a couple of practices to learn how far it shrinks when slipped over the loom and one has to think several steps ahead to make sure there's no backtracking later. Very satisfying to use though! I'd stripped down a heap of k11 injector plugs and had ordered a bag of the correct terminals, along with a very nice crimping pliers to suit a variety of terminal sizes. However the terminals were not a perfect pressing as per the original items and wouldn't click into the housings securely. So I machined a tiny jig that allowed me to mill out the pressings to suit.. I slowly and carefully wired up the injectors using my new braided sleeving. Such fun! Finished... Now I wanted to work out the electric water pump positioning so I could make sure it was allowed for in the loom build. I popped the imp up onto the hoist, did lots of measuring and scribble drawings.. I had to plan it ahead so the plumbing would be easy to route in to the existing radiator pipes that make their way to the front of the car. Because this flat six is still an unknown thing I really don't want to change anything much that would make it hard to re-fit the Datsun engine (which is still being a very well behaved little gem of an engine!!!) Pump will go about here... Happy with positioning I constructed an alloy mount, taking time to make sure the system is easy to work on, remove and not foul anything else. The pump kit came with an adaptor to fit the temp sensor into but I needed to fit another sensor for the ecu plus the imps water temp sender. The plastic one supplied only had room for the one sensor I rummaged through the alloy tube on the shelf and I cobbled together a suitable adaptor that also suited the hose size I wanted to use. Had to add some alloy flat to give it an area to drill and tap in the correct tapered threads. On the subject of hoses... I spent quite a laughable amount of time trying to find the perfect hose clips. They were all going to be on display and I was quite fussy about the look plus I have a hate for poorly designed clips that don't work smoothly. I don't like clips with the slots as they never work smoothly and tend to bind. I ended up going with JCS high grip stainless items with pressed worm ridges - made in the land of the long grey cloud. British quality! So they'll probably leak then. But they look plus my mate Matt at blacks sorted me out with a great price - which helps because I needed many! I was well sorted for neat little fuel hose clips thanks to many k11s Now back to the wiring loom. I carefully wired up new plugs for the crank VR and cam hall sensors and ran the wires back, hiding them as best I could. Did the same for the alternator and the throttle body tps. At this point I dug the megasquirt 3 ecu out, opened it up and did a fair few alterations to the circuitry to suit my setup. I think it had been setup to suit a Nissan sr20det engine. I added jumpers to allow me to connect the 14 point 7 wideband via CANbus while I was in there. I loaded the latest firmware onto the ecu and it all seems fine (so far) Another trip to my friendly local wreckers was now needed. I took this pic when I parked up.. I was on the hunt for a few little bits including some screw on ends for my spark plugs. I'd bought 6 shiny new NGK plugs to suit the goldwing engine but they, like many bike engines, just have the threaded end with a sparkplug cap to suit. I was changing my ignition leads over to modern silicone suppressed cable I'd bought off a roll along with crimp on car type sparkplug terminals. The screw on bits were not available from my local autosparkies and the prices online were priced at 'absurd plus post'. I found the bits I needed and fitted them.. I continued piecing together the loom and ecu setup. I mounted the ecu on some ply, cut to suit the space under the rear seat. I had a little helper at times.. I decided not to add an extra 26 pin plug into the engine loom to avoid an extra point of potential faults or resistance. I designed the loom to remove from the ecu with the main ecu plugs plus 3 nylon plugs. This way I can easily un-plug them, feed them back through the bulkhead and drop the entire engine out without having to unplug anything at the engine. It also allows me to easily set the engine up for bench testing. The fuses for the engine management, water pump and wideband controller are all located in the same unit, split into two sections separated by the tunnel. To sit in here tucked well out of harms way... end of part one 62 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted January 16 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 16 Part 2... catching up now. I finished what I needed to on the loom to enable testing of the injectors. I had made a simple little alloy jig that I could bolt the two rails onto and it sat high enough that 6 matching jam jars could sit below. We set this lot up on the big mobile steel bench and rolled it down to the front of the workshop near the entrance just in case it all goes a bit wrong. Set the ecu up along with a little 'ignition' switch and starter button for later testing of various engine sensors/ test running. The tuning software that megasquirt uses, Tunerstudio, has a good set of testing programs built in including injector testing. Started using that and as soon as the injectors primed and started squirting we found a tiny leak. Poos. My home made rails were brazed together and there was one teeny bit the bronze hadn't flowed into leaving a tiny pin hole that let out a comical jet of fuel. Glad I tested them now. Here under that lovely layer of carefully applied epoxy black... was a tiny hole.. So out with the oxycet and I brazed it up. Then re-tested the setup. No more leaks We ran through a few tests and made notes on fill rates at different opening times/frequencies etc etc to work out the injector dead times. Not a crucial thing to do but since it was setup as such it seemed rude not to. The battery I had was a bit tired and my charger couldn't keep up so I installed a larger wheeled type of Nissan charger at the front of the workshop. This also meant the testing was being done at a realistic voltage you'd expect to see. Happy the injectors were all matched and meeting the factory Nissan specs I packed all the stuff away. Then I fitted the inlet manifold gaskets and bolted the inlet in place on the engine, followed by the rails, with the repaired bit hand painted with epoxy as best I could to match. Next job to finish was the Bosch style idle air control valve. It had far too big in and out bosses so I machine up some stepdown parts to suit a more sensible sized tubing. I needed to mount it somewhere out of the way, safe and not on view because its not very pretty. I spotted a handy bracket on the bottom of the starter motor that has a threaded hole. Perfect! I made a little P clip to suit mounting the iacv. which bolts here.. Like so... I did some more plumbing to suit and after a few last little bits of wiring the engine was about complete. I fitted the pod filter I'd bought a while back directly onto the throttle body but it will actually end up remotely mounted in a cooler spot. I was just waiting on some posh ventilation hose to arrive. The Imp got a fresh wof and we took some pics of it when down at a local swimming spot near Motueka. It looked neat on the river stone so I took some pics.. Went hooning up a local valley to get wild plums.. Got home and snapped some pics of the engine next to car. The perspective makes the engine look huge... Next stage was to bolt the exhaust headers in place properly with the new gaskets and special nuts I'd bought. But before playing with exhausts always be aware of the potential dangers, as so carefully pointed out in the workshop manual !... Manifolds bolted up fine but a few of the nuts are awkward to get started as its tight on space around the header pipes. Next parts in the exhaust chain was the flexible joints. My welding was improved a bit by wearing some reading glasses. I guess I just have to accept that aging thing and embrace the power of +1.5 because now I could actually see what I was welding. Its still not instagram weld porn but it'll do for this project Bolted the cross member in place and with a bit of alloy I was able to check the heights to weld the next sections at. Unfortunately I must have fabricated the LH manifold out of line and I have ended up having to weld the secondary pipe at an angle to make sure the outlet heights match. It wont be easy to spot when its on the car, with a exhaust box hiding them. But I know its there... Or maybe I don't bother with a single large tranversely mounted silencer and just run a couple of old dumpy mufflers... I was now at the point I could fill the engine with oil and test the oil system. Quite a while back I bought some quality oil when on sale.. I filled the filter up first and then carefully filled the engine. Up until this point I had no real idea of exactly how much my resized sump would take before it got to height I wanted it at. I'd done some basic sketches and napkin formula and I knew it would be more than 3 litres. Hopefully more than 4. It almost took 5 litres to get to the halfway point on the sight glass and that will drop once the oil pump primed up and filled the oilways. Cool. Great news then. I'm really happy it'll have a decent amount of oil in there. Now remember back to around the end of December 2021 when I wrote this... "Lastly I needed to bolt the sump cover in place. I had to think carefully about bolt placement for sealing purposes and get the bolts square. This sump plate is going to have to be sealed well because there is no usual high sided sump like most cars. Hence I built it rigid to help against flex. Good quality sealant will be the order of the day* *It will leak. Its a British car. Its destined to leak." Well then. Guess what. It leaked! Ha. Just after patting myself on the back at having a great sump capacity the level started to drop and was leaving a good puddle on the engine stand top. So Hannah helped me move the engine so I could drain the sump and then I mounted the engine/box assembly into the spare imp. On a positive note I was chuffed with how quick and easy it was to bolt up in place by myself - all of about 5 or 10 minutes. Engine in place and with the car up in the air I took that above photo. I had a good idea where it was coming from and wasn't feeling to glum (not even a single toy was lifted from my cot) I unbolted the sump plate and found the hole... Back when I was machining the sump plate and milling the slots it wasn't initially clamped down tight enough and it shifted out of line without me spotting it. By the time I noticed it had moved it was too late. I had to weld up the resulting mess and re-machine that area. I thought it was all fine but I'd obviously missed a tiny pinhole, maybe exposed when I machined the inside of the plate out to take some weight off it. The plate got a good clean (that threebond sealant is tenacious stuff! ) and I fixed the hole with a dollop of JB weld. Took some pics of engine from below with its innards exposed.. Little pistons... Bolted the sump plate back up, waited till the following day and refilled it. This time no puddles. Yay. While the engine was bolted into the spare imp I took the chance to double check measurements and clearances. It was all looking good and I was very happy that I had placed things ideally, especially as most measurements were taken in awkward areas by all sorts of various ruler/tape measure/level balancing acts. The ignition coils for example, just mounted on their makeshift bracket I'd made for bench testing, are actually almost bang on in the right place and only sitting a touch too high. The filter hose will just clear the underside of the parcel shelf and there's heaps of room for the remote filter.. Hose (turned up the day before) .. Hannah's hand holding filter roughly where it will be mounted to the bulkhead... Lots of room out back between engine and where the removable rear valance bolts in place.. and lastly, the 'Mandalorian spaceship' will not at all be hidden by the rear parcel shelf .. Engine is now out and back on the bench for more 'bench testing'... 69 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted January 23 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 23 Bench testing continued. The sump was now holding oil. Phew. I fitted the old smiths mechanical oil pressure gauge that was originally fitted in the imp race car. I mounted the gauge to the temporary coil stand. With the engine cranking over it was seeing about 20 psi. The oil level would drop in the sight glass and after a minute or two it would be back to the old level. I was happy with this. Next on the list was to check the idle control valve was working. Its a 2 wire Bosch style pwm type unit. Very common, simple, reliable and hence used often in megasquirt installs. Its basically a rotary valve that is opened against spring pressure by a solenoid windings when current passes through them. The ecu earths its ground wire in a series of pulses, the quicker the pulses the more it stays 'open'. Simple as I thought.. but.. this is where I discovered that I had bought one of the units that is actually 'closed' at about 30% duty cycle. A failsafe on cars that use these for closed loop idle control (aircon/powersteering/epic sound systems etc etc) If the valve fails then spring pressure actually takes it to a slightly open state so the car cant stall. But I'm only using the valve for open loop at start up. So when its closed I want it to be closed. Luckily I was able to pick out/burn/pick out/burn/pick out the tough as epoxy that was holding the valve stop adjustment screw in place. I wound the screw in until the valve was closed with no power. It still passes a tiny amount of air but its much better. I'll manually adjust the idle bleed screw on the throttle body to get the fully warmed up idle where I want it when that time comes. Which was going to be soon I thought! Next thing to check was that the crank angle trigger wheel VR sensor and the camshaft half moon hall sensor were both putting out satisfactory signals. Opened up the composite logger on tunerstudio expecting to see nice clean signals. But there was nothing. My heart sank. Oh here we go.. I took off the cover on the main board plug and checked the connections there. I then popped the volt meter, set at AC volts, onto pin 1 and 24, wound the engine over and got about 2.0 volts. I don't have an osillioscope and only have an old megastim 2.2 testing unit which won't create the required rpm signals I needed for testing. I wasn't quite sure what to check next so I started a thread on the megasquirt forum. Got some bits of advice but in the end I rang a mate in Richmond who has a lot more knowledge with megasquirts and has helped me out in the past. Organised to go see him the foloowing day. In the meantime I checked the hall sensor. I had never been able to find confirmative details on the polarity of the hall sensor even though it was a really commonly used unit among many a citreon/fiat/renault etc. I finally found a factory service manual online for Fiat ducatos which had a pin out of the sensor. Turns out I'd got my polarity wrong and after swapping the wires around at the hall sensor plug I now had a strong clean cam signal. I also made a mandrel to hold the old honda 12-1 trigger wheel in the lathe. Then I made two jigs. One for the spare goldwing VR sensor, like the one I'd fitted to the engine. The other jig was to hold a Mazda V6 VR crank sensor of which I had a few kicking about and had used them with no issues on the Viva. I spun the trigger wheel up in the lathe at various speeds and took voltage readings of both sensors. The readings were very similar but I still couldn't tell what the actual signals are like. The next morning I drove out to mates place and he set to work on my ECU. He compared the board to his spare Ms3x. looking for any differences. Remember I had bought this ECU secondhand from someone on trademe and was told it was working. I had swap some of the circuitry jumper wires to suit my application. Once he was happy there was nothing major missing on my board he got another spare ecu he had and ran up my sensors in his test bed to confirm they were putting out a good signal. Then we (well - mainly him, I just stood about and learned) systematically went through the VR circuit looking at the signals on his osiloscope. Discovered that transistor U7 was faulty so he kindly swapped out the known good item from his MS1 which I'll find a replacement for him. After that he found a loose, terribly soldered resistor in the circuit- when it was wiggled the signal would appear.... re-soldered that and hey presto - clean signal. Lots of other pins got re-soldered too. The Goldwing pulse generator/VR sensor puts out a much weaker signal that the Mazda crank vr sensor. we double checked them against each other and the Goldwing item struggles at slow speeds (cranking type speeds) so I'll swap over to the Mazda item. When I got home I quickly tried the repaired ecu out and now there's a good rpm signal but it drops out of sync but I took a log anyway. Then started making a new bracket to suit the Mazda sensor. New vr sensor in place and wired up. I then had to remove one cambelt, which is so easy to do on these engines, remove the trigger wheel, file off the old key and weld a new one in place to suit the mazda vr sensor position which was now bolted in the other set of holes Honda used for the original 'pulse generators' as they call them. New trigger wheel key peg.. Finishing that lot got me to this point when trying it out that evening... The red spikes indicate an out of sync situation and no rpm reading but at least the log was clean, consistant and rythmic. Something wrong in the settings, not interference. I tried changing various trigger settings but no luck I was tired so off to bed. Following morning I discovered that when I was changing the trigger settings I didn't spot the prompts to power cycle the engine because I was still on the diagnostics page. So none of those changes took place until the very end when I had actually set it back to the typical default settings. This time a power cycle after changing the capture to falling edge and I got this lovely log... Yay!!! Now I was ready to check the ignition coils and then the base timing. What else could possibly go wrong? Coils all tested fine and the sparks were nice and clean looking. I then marked the timing mark on my custom crank pulley and tested the base timing. I was out by 4 degrees. Pretty happy that I had got my trigger wheel so close. Simply changing the trigger wheel offset value in the settings by 4 degrees had the timing marks line up bang on. Engine start up time was here! I went to bed happy, excited and somewhat nervous about what could happen, or not... So this morning it was time to roll the engine out on the table to the front of the workshop, throw some fuel into the mix and see what happens. I set up the garden hose just in case, taped my phone to a light stand, started recording, tentatively went for a start and this is what happened... Wow!!! Faaaaaaaaaaaarking awesome! What an occasion. What a milestone. Such relief and much giggling with joy. I couldn't believe it. First start on my own custom built engine and it sounds bloody amazing! That was starting on a basic universal base map loaded onto the ecu so I was really expecting a lot more mucking about with the starting settings to get a clean start. I was stoked! I tweaked the cranking settings slightly and now it would start on the button after a few cycles... I can only run it for a few seconds as there is not a drop of coolant in the engine. So my next job is to set up a makeshift coolant circuit using a spare Nissan micra radiator and setup the Davies Craig electric water pump. I can test for leaks and then I can really have a good crack at setting up a nice clean starting and idling tune. I'm so happy! Alex. 101 15 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted January 31 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 31 Now I had an engine that starts and runs for half a minute I wanted more. I needed a makeshift cooling setup. I had a spare Nissan March radiator and fan kicking about so that was called into action. I whipped up this beautiful bit of carpentry artwork.. Using a collection of spare hoses I connected the dots between the engine, the electric water pump and the radiator... I started filling the system with coolant mixed at 35%. Remember this bit. It comes back to haunt me later. The whole system wouldn't fill up due an airlock in the coolant pipe from the opposite head. There was no way this was going to shift. The standard goldwing cooling system has both top pipes meeting in the middle at a thermostat block so they just bleed the air straight out naturally. I needed a nipple. I looked in my collection of various sized nipples and other brake fittings... Found this small nipple which was perfectly formed and a lovely size... I needed a boss to inset the nipple into. I machined one up and tig welded it carefully onto the top of the coolant pipe, in a discreet place tucked away behind the alternator so the nipple isn't immediately on display unless you look for it. Now with the nipple cracked open the large airlock was able leave via some clear vinyl tube. This allowed almost 1.5 litres more coolant in. With the water pump in override mode and twisted sideways I was able to bleed the pump out and the coolant was circulating fine. Next step before running the engine for an extended period was to sort out the O2 sensor positioning. Luckily a nice stainless boss from ali land had turned up so that was welded in place ... I was very happy that I could run the sensor cable around behind the oil filter, completely out of harms way and about as out of view as I could hope for. There's no hiding the ugly sensor sticking out of the exhaust but that's just life. The exhaust also required a token amount of silencing so I popped the old motorbike silencers outside on the truck deck and painted them with black high temp paint, mainly so I wasn't looking at ugly rusty things.. I also had to do a little bit of extra wiring. The water pump and its controller, the O2 gauge and not to forget the remote unit for the mandalorian spaceship interior lights.. I also wanted to slot my throttle cable adjuster base so I could easily remove the whole cable outer and inner without fuss... In the mill with a tiny slot drill... I made a hand throttle using a spare mountain bike brake lever and a bit of suitable alloy tube. But I needed a tiny solderless nipple for the cable end. My tray of bike cable adjusters and such what had nothing small enough so I machined one out of brass and used a 3mm grub screw... Now I had some basic throttle control without reaching over the engine. Time to start it up which happened without any fuss. The coolant system worked fine and the engine rose to temp quickly and smoothly. The fan kicks in above my for now setting of 98 degrees. I intended to tune the idle first, once the engine was hot and not using any of the warm up tables etc. But the idle control valve was still passing a touch too much air even when 'closed'. I wound the idle bleed screw in to its stop on the throttle body but still it was idling at 1200 thereabouts. If I blocked the iacv inlet with my finger the revs would drop to circa 700-800. I could also hear a very tiny vac leak from the spaceship window (plenum lid) Bloody mandalorians with their terrible glazing skills. Tightened the lid bolts down and its not bad. Main issue really is the idle valve. I might just make my own like I did with the Mazda V6. Rip the guts out from a stock Mazda item and machine a suitable body to take the solenoid and valve head. Another issue far more critical that really had me feeling quite low was this... Coming from here... Coolant gallery at base of the head gaskets on each side. It's not dripping but weeping and only once up to temp. I was gutted. I had to travel over to Nelson city that afternoon in my Imp so while there I popped into the engine reconditioners I know there and explained the problem and showed them the photos. Instantly they said I shouldn't have done my first fill with coolant. Apparently it creeps very effectively through any tiny gap before the head gasket has sealed and its slippery/slightly slimy consistency stops the paint on the gasket sticking to the surfaces. All is not lost though. I was instructed to drain the system of coolant, flush everything through thoroughly with clean water and let it dry. I did that last night. I then ran it a couple of times this morning with nothing in it for no more than 30 seconds, allowing it to cool between. Hopefully this will have dried it out and help it seal. Then I was told to just run it with water for a while and see how it goes. It might be ok. If not then they have a kiwi made product called sealwel that many kiwi/aussie reconditioners use with troublesome gaskets. He reckoned its not failed them. Worst case scenario is a pair of new head gaskets. and no coolant when setting them ! I might just order the gaskets just in case so I'm not ever in a position where I have to wait later on down the road if the above doesn't work. So yeah. I hope its ok and I've plenty of other things to do anyway. Like sort out the alternator that seems to be defective. This one. I need to either fix it or find an exact replacement because the spaceship has been built up to it and there's no room for anything bigger/longer.. I have also chopped the throttle body spring back a half coil for more tension on the throttle shut. It wasn't closing completely by itself against the strength of the engine want of air. Oh yeah I took a vid ... 58 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted February 10 Author Popular Post Share Posted February 10 I drained all the coolant out, took the radiator and pipework off and flushed the whole lot through until only clean water flowed. Let it sit in the sun while I did other jobs and gave the engine a couple of short 30 second runs to help dry it right out. I left it at that and decided to sort out the idle control valve that wont shut completely. I started by removing it and putting it somewhere it'll probably just collect dust for a few months and then maybe get sold/thrown in a bin. I then took Hannah on another exciting date to the local wreckers where we looked under many bonnets to find a suitable replacement. 'Automotive foraging' I like to call it. Here I am in the wilds of the wreckers... I took home a couple of throttle bodies with valves attached. One from a Mazda 3 and the other from a Mazda 626. They had almost identical iacvs but one had an adjustment. I cut a section of alloy out of a big block.. Milled it flat and square.. Throttle bodies.. tested them with some pipe and the earlier 626 item has a similar fail safe to my now removed Bosch item, whereby it still lets air through when 'off'. So that just wont do and I have decided the keeper... Mazda 3 unit wins this competition and gets to stay in the workshop while the 626 item went in the bin. I did some more machining of the block so turning it into a ported hub the iacv bolts to, with an in and out pipe pressed in place. I made a bracket to suit the starter motor through bolts to which the aicv block bolts onto. In pictures.. Bolts onto starter like so... Ended up being not only more compact and better mounted than the old Bosch unit but with better pipe routing too. I ran the valve through some tests on tuner studio and it works really well, shuts properly and is also much much quieter , partly due to it running at a much higher frequency than the Bosch unit. The next thing I thought I'd check was the headbolts out of curiosity to see if they were still torqued up fine. I first laid out some neat material that was absorbent, but waterproof. My sister, a surgery nurse at Wellington hospital, gave it to me and said its handy stuff to have about. Certainly is!... Bolts were all fine and I saw no point in giving them anything extra beyond what Mr Honda specifies, so possibly risking deformation of the heads etc. Next thing was to sort out the electric water pump placement. Where I had mounted it turned out to make it a pig to bleed of air due to the outlet pointing downhill and I knew it could be better. See here... I removed the mounting bracket I'd made for it... Unplugged the ecu etc etc and slid the whole engine/transmission onto the the 'engine stand 2000'. This process is super easy as it can be adjusted to the same height as the big table or workshop bench and the engine slides really nicely on the ribbed sump. Then I slung it into the spare imp and tried out the water pump for size in the new location I had in mind... Cooling pipework serving the Datsun engine exit the bodyshell roughly about here... Much better position. Not only will the pump almost self bleed, being at about the lowest point in the cooling system, but I will also clear up the area of uglyness where it used to be. It also gives me full easy access to the transmission filler/dipstick. I removed the engine, put it back on the table and set to work marking out for a mounting bracket... Then fabricated this bracket.. Which mounts the pump here... New improved temporary cooling setup which filled up sweet and bleed of air easily.. Quality touches.. With the cooling system now filled with just water I ran the engine up to temp. The new iacv was working well and I was more confident in running the engine for as long as my lunchbox fuel can would allow. I kept checking for any leaks and found nothing. The cooling system was working well, the fan kicking on and off, the temp staying around the 95- 97 degrees range I had set on the water pump controller (which also controls the fan relay) and I was finally able to set the idle properly with the idle bleed screw on the throttle body - something I was not able to do with the Bosch iacv which was letting in too much air. Still no leaks. I ran it several times, let it cool down, checked it the following morning and the level was spot on. Touch wood but I think the extra heat and lack of slippery coolant has allowed the head gaskets to 'set'. Either that or maybe there wasn't a leak at all and it was just residue coolant from spillage when I had removed the top pipes to pressure test them. Anyway.. I was a farking happy bloke! (Hannah was super happy for me too) Now with the coolant system working and it idling nicely etc I had the confidence to finally give the engine a decent rev up and see what it sounds like at 6000 rpm. Hannah took a vid... I just love that sound. The overrun rasp that flat sixes make. It revs up so quick and clean (and there's no acceleration enrichment setup on the tune yet until I sort the main fuel table later on so it can bog if you snap the throttle open too quickly) Another vid I took showing the hand throttle... So far the little Mandalorians have managed to keep all their limbs in place. In fact the plenum chamber stays quite cool with the constant stream of cool air flowing into it. Their spaceship has aircon? Anyway. I was happy. The only issue was that the whole time I have been running it without any alternator so meaning the ecu is having to use the voltage compensation tables and its not really an ideal situation having everything running at 2-3 volts less than it should. I took my alternator apart again and ran through as many checks I could, following a very handy NZ auto electrical school tutor video about alternator testing online. I suspect the rectifier is kaput and I couldn't locate a cheap replacement. I managed to locate a second hand alternator, pretty much the same unit and have bought it - now just waiting on the seller to sort their sh1t out. In the meantime I got another similar alternator, this time a nippon denso unit from a Honda prelude that actually has a bit more clearance out back, but with an ugly grey painted steel cover. I ran some pigtail connections and bolted it up, started the engine and now have charging! Yay. With things running at full voltage I tweaked the engines idle tune and cold start settings and am much happier with where I'm at there. In case the other alternator turns out to not arrive/be a dud etc I decided to give this working unit I do have a bit of a polish and paint. In pics, finishing it off with wrinkle finish paint on the tin end cover. Much better looking. I bolted it back in place and did one final run up to temp with a bit more tuning of the fuel table idle zone. I now have the engine able to idle at 650 and I could almost get a 50cent coin to balance on the plenum lid. The engine is still only sitting on the table, not bolted in place so I cant really expect it to be perfectly smooth. I think it idles a bit nicer at around 750- 800, a zone where its also running leaner at close to 14.7. Lots of time in the future to play with settings. Confident its all a good starter and idler, plus realising I'm stalling on the next stage, I have now started to take the pump controller, cooling system and temporary wiring apart. The next time it will be started will hopefully be in the Imp. Next job is to reassemble the transmission, bolt the lot into the spare shell and sort out the gear shift linkage. 64 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted February 21 Author Popular Post Share Posted February 21 Ha. So pretty much the day after I had cleaned up that old alternator up and got it running on the engine the second hand replacement for my original unit turned up in the post. It came with a 3 month warranty so I'd better check it works before stripping the engine of its ecu etc. Started to fit it and oh.. Poos. It wont fit. So I took it apart, along with the original.. Discovered its just the front housing that's different and I can swap them across.. So while its apart it would be rude not to clean all the parts up and polish it all (tempting fate just a bit...) Fitted to the engine and started it up. Yay - it works and it looks great, which is really quite important given its right there, in the middle on display. I'll keep the other one in storage just in case I need it one day. Now I could strip the engine back down, removing all the cooling, wiring and fuel lines that I had installed just for bench testing. Then I removed the transmission and put the engine back onto the engine stand 2000, stashing it away because its gearbox tinkering time. This Leone transmission has a few little issues that need sorting out in order for it to run in reverse rotation and not potentially turn itself into an expensive insinkerator or coffee grinder. I could probably get away without doing these modifications because the box is overbuilt for the application but I wanted peace of mind. Remember I had acquired the two gearboxes, 1600 and 1800 items, before getting the engine. Ages ago, in fact 4 years ago I think!!! I had wanted to know if it was feasible to run these boxes in reverse. This pic I posted up way back then gives a good idea on what's going on inside... I had already worked out some of the issues back then and knew what I was up for. With more study I found a couple of other areas that need addressing. Here's another bit of wonderful scribbling I did this evening.. The pink arrows show the new axial forces that are being imparted onto the main (driver) shaft and pinion (driven) shaft. The circles are areas that I think needed attention to make sure it doesn't throw it toys from the cot. 1 : the blue circle. Under high torque loads this area could possibly create the sound of nashing teeth but with much messier consequences. The top left one being the third gear driver wants to move to the right and clip the teeth on the bottom right second gear. In normal rotation they would move apart. There's 1mm of clearance there which is probably enough tbh. But I wanted a bit more and had already worked out how I could get it with no other issues and just a bit of tool making. Which is fun. 2 : The yellow circle. This ring was no going to take thrust loading. It is a strong ring and has a deep groove but I wanted to make sure there was no way it could ever shift. 3 : the green circle. In this area there is a thrust bearing that also acts as a neat little oil pump and squeezes oil through the gear hubs/bushes. Under the new loading the thrust aspect is removed but I still wanted to it pump oil and it was going to be the wrong shape to do so in reverse rotation. So I set to work and checked off each job. I made a bolt holder for ease of reassembly - several different sizes and lengths. Once apart I started with the gear side clearance. First off I needed to split the mainshaft assembly down. 4 years ago I had out of interest tried using a puller on the spare 1600 box, which shares the same layout and design but with smaller parts in many cases. The puller didn't work. But this time round I have the rather handy workshop press I made. I just needed some extra tooling to do this job. Starting with some press plates... Allowing me to carefully press the shaft out... Because I'm not posh (or rich) enough to own a surface grinder I needed to make one. Yes its a bit basic but it will work. I made this... Which allowed me to do this.... I ended up with this gear having the 0.5mm more clearance I wanted. Super happy with the result. Now onto number 3 - the little oil pumpy thingee. I went to my friendly engineering workshop in town and got a big lump of 4140 steel. I drilled it out... Machined out a ring which had to be an exact width. Just in case it needed finishing after the hardening process I made an abor to take it.. I carefully machined it to the right profile, cut the sides down and filed the shapes in, just like the original but in reverse. Happy it was going to work I heat treated it. I have not done any heat treating for over 25 years since I spent a fair bit of time in the blacksmith department while doing my apprenticeship. But it wasn't a super loaded critical component and just had to have a durable hard surface. I didn't take any photos. Hannah was there helping as I carefully heated it up with the oxycet to the austenitic stage and agitated it in some lovely rice bran oil (because I can be posh sometimes) then slapped it in the oven to temper it... Following morning I polished it. It came up sweet and the old file test showed it to be as hard as the oem item. You can see the reversed design here... Here's a little vid I took showing it in action... While stripping the mainshaft down I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that this 1800 box has needle bearings in all of the gear hubs unlike the 1600 box which uses bushes on the mainshaft. So oil starvation would not have been as much of an issue but I'm still really happy I did this modification. Last issue to sort was number two - that ring on the bearing. It would hold fine I'm sure but if could make it bulletproof then why not - it's just a bit of extra machining. I started with another lump of high tensile steel and machined out a ring to suit... This fits over the other ring and then the main thrust plate that sits over the bearing was machined out to suit my reinforcement ring. Its all held in place by the end housing which I have yet to fit. All the potential issues covered I set to cleaning out the casing and then started reassembly. In doing so I discovered that the original axle seals are sided on these boxes. They have those helical lines on the lip surfaces which aid in pulling/pumping oil back into the oil side of the lip ( the lip does not actually touch the steel when the axle is moving and in fact runs on a tiny bed of oil) which I had not realised before I'd bought plain lip seals from an engineering supplies. This pumping capacity is shown to be twice as high in helixed seals. Subaru fit left and right handed items. But I'm running mine in reverse. Luckily the originals were in excellent condition anyway so I machined up a stepped tool, popped them out and swapped them to the other side. The diff axle seal surfaces came up good after a clean. Cute little diff.. I'm now about ready to put some 3 bond gloop on the case half and drop the other side in place. Its looking all very nice, clean and shiny in there... 70 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted March 2 Author Popular Post Share Posted March 2 I glooped the two halves together, bolted them up, bolted the tailhousing on and let it set. Following morning it was bolted onto the engine, unsurprisingly a bit heftier with all the gubbins placed back within the box. Its about 9kg heavier than the standard imp box. I then started to fit the first part of the gearshift linkage. The first of those snazzy universal joints, handily available in a diameter to suit the shifter shaft on the Subaru box. I just needed to add a small locating hole for the grub screw... Universal in place.. Engine and box were then bolted back into the car. This bit is so quick and easy when using the 'engine stand 2000'. It takes about 10 mins and I'm getting quicker. It'll be slower when there's shift linkage to undo and driveshafts to slip out of the way. But at least the main heavy awkward part is actually easy. That lot in place I took some pics. Its neat to be able to look out from the one of the lounge room windows down onto the workshop floor and see this... With that lot in place I was able to suss out the angles I could get away with, as shallow as possible and allowing for the handbrake mechanism. I had this old imp gearstick assembly that @dmulally kindly posted over to me. Some previous owner of the car he got it from liked painting things. Everything. Multiple times... I scraped all the layers off, took it apart and cleaned off the dirty old grease. Discovered it had been cobbled together from two old shifter bases. It was originally a very early Imp unit when the very first cars had an automatic choke, which often proved problematic. Hillman then changed the cars over to a manual choke with a nifty little lever in front of the shifter. This mount had been added to the early base. Which means they must have chopped up a later baseplate to get the choke mount. Why they didn't just fit the entire newer base plate I don't know. But what I had in front of me was a frankenstein of base plates with barry spec welding and fixes, but also including a not too badly made bronze bush on the lever where there is normally a (wornout) plastic bush. I had a couple of shift rods to choose from. I chose the least worn. Moving back to the gearbox end I machined up some shaft ends from stainless bar to suit the universal joints. I had some stainless tube and welded the ends in place on the first shaft that runs from the gearbox universal down to the tunnel. Now I needed a sturdy, slippery support to mount in place of the second universal joint. This will not only take back and forth movement on the shaft but also a bit of thrust loading created by the angle on the connecting shaft. I had already bought a lump of slippery hard engineering plastic with this application in mind when I had ordered the plastic for the flywheel thrust bearing a while back. It was bright yellow. Luckily not seen under the car as it would clash with the blue paint. I put a hole in it and machined the outside down. Which also created a pile of pretty swarf.. Then reamed it out to 1" Still a bit tight so out with the adjustable reamers.. until it was just right... Then made a stainless cradle .. The cradle got some wings welded in place and I dug the rivnut tool out.. Mount now bolted in place in the tunnel I had to chop the last tube to the right length, weld on the end and bolt the universal in place.. The front end below the shifter was was standard imp stuff and this is where problems popped up to throw a medium sized spanner in my workings. The side to side gearstick movement across the gate was minimal. Ridiculously so. Like about 1". Or 25mm in new money. Yet the fore and aft movement was about right. But quite stiff. I was contemplating why this was so and what I could do to remedy this when I also noted that 1st gear was where 3rd was and 3rd was where 1st was. Poos. Four years ago when I had compared the Subaru gearshift pattern at the box to the imp unit I thought they were exactly the same. But I had not accounted for the reverse rotation taking place under the imp gearstick. Also I never really thought much about how little of rotation the Subaru box needed on its shifter shaft to shift the internal selector across the 3 rods. Its a tiny amount, like 3 degrees say. Whereas the Imp box has a shorter internal selector and requires more rotation at the shaft. Hence the Imps gearstick knob only moves a teeny bit when coupled to the Subaru box. But the Subaru box has a standard/similar amount of rod movement within (ie 1-2 and 3-4th) which was going to make things trickier to fix. Simple linkage/leverage multiplications that is easier to see than explain. Sorry if your brain hurts. I had to hurt my brain a little bit to suss out a solution but there was only a little bit of smoke. The reason the scooby box is different becomes obvious when you see the scooby shifter setup. Which luckily I can show you because last week thanks to @Leone I was put onto a local fella to me who happens to have many old Leones and Brats kicking about his property and he had a spare leone front wheel drive box that I wanted (always handy just in case...) His property is amazing!!! Long 4wd only driveway up to a ridgetop house with stunning views out over Tasman Bay. Old leones just kicking about... Luckily we have our trusty old 4wd Hiace and that became the days gearbox transporter... Box on bench. Look at that shifter mechanism... The shifter rod attached to the gearstick only rotates a tiny amount when the stick is moved sideways across the gate. But the rod moves 10mm in each direction when shifting for and aft. Simple. Robust. Very Subaru. I can't copy it though because I have turned my box 180 degrees. No matter where I put my pivot point (below or above) I'll have one of the planes working backwards. So I decided to build a new shifter base setup. The most important thing was to reverse the rotation so the gearstick pattern is correct. The imp pivot point needed raising to allow the offset shaft end to be rotated to above rather than below the centre line, so reversing the across gate movement. I would add the ability to adjust both rotation and lineal movement. Started with a new pivot cup because I was not happy with the worn and Barried pressed steel item.. I dug out a large lump of steel bar... Chopped out a square and cleaned it up in the mill.. Big drill = big hole.. Rough machined out a cup shape. Cut a form in cardboard to suit the brass ball and used a die grinder bit to finish the shape... Grinding paste time... Slots for pivot pin.. Lightened the lump down.. Built the shaft up with weld and machined it down so I could add a lower pivot point. Milled some steel like so.. Welded a boss on.. New socket for shift lever ball end... Cut out Barrys previous workmanship... Machined up some spacers and a base plate.. Welded up a little tower (my stainless and steel tig welding is definitely improving, helped muchly by realising that not being able to see what I'm doing does not help much and finally admitting to my age and buying some reading glasses....) Welded tower to base.. Now all together please... Bolted together. You can spot the adjustable rotation, which the spacers allow for, along with adjustable pivot point. In place... Yay- it works! The shift pattern is correct and the action is much smoother. The spring loaded indents on the internal gearbox shift rods are quite stiff, which I noted was the same on the other box with its stock shifter. Its a bit baulky to push past the synchro baulk rings into gear but I think will feel better when the gears are actually rotating. There's certainly no slop in the system and it feels very mechanical - not rubbery. I now note how much flex there is around the shifter base in the imps tunnel (granted a very rusty shell..) Its something I might just try to stiffen up on my blue Imp when fitting this lot in. Phew. That was a little mini engineering mission I was not expecting but that's this project in general 65 15 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted March 17 Author Popular Post Share Posted March 17 Well after the last novel length wall of text I'll try to keep this update shorter otherwise I'll never finish the thing. Lots of little jobs starting to pop up on my 'to do' list. Driveshafts. Connecting the scooby shafts to the imp axles. A job I wasn't sure which direction I'd take as there's so many different ideas out there on the nerdnet showing 'the best' way to join shafts. First thing I did was to double check the suspension travel allowed by the stock shock absorbers and then use those datum points to work out if there was any growth in the length of shaft required as the wheel moves through it path up and down. There was minimal amount, like maybe 5mm at the very most. I guessed as much because the stock Imp driveshaft doughnuts dont allow for much sideways travel. I then cut one of my 22mm scooby shafts down in length so I could work out the lengths required with the CV joint in place. This move I soon regretted. I was allowing for plenty of plunge into the CV joints to make sure the whole joint could be removed from the box stub axle with the box pushed sideways when removing the transmission. I was happy with the length and then decided to go visit a local hotrod builder friend for some advise. He's well known about for his many many full scratch builds and has done heaps of driveshafts in his time (a fellow machinist by trade too) I showed him the two ways I was considering doing the join. He showed me a better way. Shrink some bored out yokes cut off from some spare axles. Plenty of meat, will never let go and even if they somehow did loosen and spin they cant come out because there's not enough travel in the CV joint to allow them to. No welding needed. He's run axles done in the same way with some serious big block power and they never let go. Just has to be accurate and luckily its the sort of machining/fitting job I like. But i needed to start with almost full length scooby shafts to do it, of which I was now down on.. Roll eyes and back to the wreckers to see this beauty get pulled from the hedge... Hannah helped me remove the shafts. It was her birthday too so wow, what a treat. She got visit the wreckers and get oily. Got home and the shafts didn't fit my CVs. Bigger diameter end. Really weird because I checked online... ha. It lies. Turns out some late 4wd Leones had even bigger axle ends than the imprezzas. Also odd is that one shaft is 22mm and the other side 24mm, although both the same length. Back to the wreckers. This time I got larger 25mm shafts with the smaller ends from front wheel drive Imprezzas. I grabbed two pairs. Same again, 22mm on one side and 25 on the other. Now I had two of each. Got home and spent some time cleaning them up, outside because petrol fumes. Cleaned up the spare pair of axles in the lathe to make sure I had an accurate clamping spot for the later boring. Good quality steel! I turned them down to less than the 23mm bore size and chopped the yokes off. Made lots of swarf Bored out to bang on 23mm with nice radius. Double checked and triple checked I had my lengths required correct. Chopped the two 25mm scooby shafts down to length and turned a step down on one end of each, a radiused step to stop any stress risers. I went for .0015"~.002" interference. Go online and see the debates between all the barries about what a good shrink fit should be There's many variables as well. I consulted my old faithful machinery's handbook. I wanted it tight, but not stressed. Luckily the axle is of good steel. I also made a sample first, using one of the cut off bits of scooby shaft and some 4340 I machined to the same outer dimensions as the yoke. This way I was able to test how hot I needed to get it to expand enough to drop in place. I'll take this to a local engineers who have a press with a pressure gauge and see how much force it takes to wreck this thing Here's about a one hundredth of a millimetre (iirc) getting removed.. Then things got hot.. photos taken after it was done because I had to move bloody quick! Hannah would grab the torch and I would drop the yoke in place. It was a tense bit of time. If the yokes teetered and grab they'd pull the heat so quick and shrink in place before getting to the shoulder. No removing them without damage and I only had the one pair of spare axles. It went well. I was happy and relieved. The light rust flashing off on one is simply due to that one having been left nearer the front of the workshop to cool down and it was a chilly damp start to the morning. They wired brushed up neat as, got painted with black epoxy and when that was set they had new universal joints fitted. I cant try them on the car until I remove the existing axles from the hubs but it should be fine. Next up was to sort the fuel tank out to suit fuel injection. I brought the blue imp in and checked a few ideas out on what I could do. I don't really have room for a surge tank and I never liked the noise on my Viva from the external fuel pump anyway. Nor did I like the way the fuel in the surge tank heats up. Enter the humble Nissan Micra k11 intank fuel pump and surge container... It actually looked like it was just going to fit into the pressed depression at the bottom of the imp fuel tank.. With enough room to run the imp fuel float sender next to it. Cut a hole.. It fits. I'll cut the bracket off the side at bottom of pic and it'll move sideways a bit more.. Made some metal brackets Welded them in and now I have a cradle that takes two cable ties across the top to secure. I needed a flange.... Made this. Its designed to recess the lid about 10mm below the tank top. I want to keep the tank top as flat as possible. It'll have the usual layer of foam over top but I don't want things sticking up proud when the 'frunk' is being used (cant be tearing those bags of concrete now eh....) Many holes drilled and tapped.. Carefully welded in place. Was a tricky job. Thin steel on the tank that had some sort of (probably poisonous) coating. But happy with result. I made another hole... That takes the sender. Drilled and tapped more holes to suit. Now I needed to get fuel from the outside in and from the inside out. I machined up these in stainless.. Thought of a neat way to hold the little bits together for tacking. Blue tack. Or blue tack tack? welded up.. I made an angled recess into the hatch cover so the fuel hose goes even further below the tank line. Visible in that photo are the cable connections. Again - I needed to get power in. I machined some shouldered fittings in plastic.. Luckily the micra pump so handily just uses a simple connector with 6.3 spade terminals. Under the lid... Tank hard work done. I'll paint bits and cut some gaskets. Speaking of gaskets. One of mine between my oil filter pedestal and the block is weeping oil. Plus one of the bolt heads weeps. Typical. Put a Japanese engine in a British car and turn your back for a minute... I've already drained the oil cleaned it up and ran a smear of paintable sikaflex along it and around the bolt head. I didn't take photos because not really exciting. I'll paint it silver and no one will know. Except you the reader. Next up is the exhaust I think. 53 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted April 20 Author Popular Post Share Posted April 20 As per the title this next stage of building the exhaust silencer/muffler/back box/ take your pick has taken much more time and effort than I had always expected. I started by taking the blue imp apart. To Woolf valley garage I went.... ..where I removed (rusty mild steel) exhaust, bumper and rear valance.. Popped it onto rusty imp shell... Now I knew exactly how much room I have to play with. Whatever I was going to build had to work with several things. I wanted the box to be mounted higher than the existing one behind the Datsun engine as I was sick of scraping it on steep driveway exits. It had to be built completely of stainless steel, no exceptions. No more corrosion. It had to look tidy and fit within the bumper line, tailpipes excluded. The tailpipes were to be twin centre exit. I had a very specific look in mind and they have to be just right. It had to be quiet enough and yet still sound sporty. This last one is tricky and will most likely need modifications to get right hence the last design point... It has to be modular, easy enough to disassemble and repack with sound deadening (most likely glass fibre) Now I knew the size I could build it to I started by making some flanges. This so I can unbolt the flexible sections between the V clamps and the box. Made to suit the 44mm tube as per the tube off the V clamps. Lifted the big folder we'd made onto the bench top and folded up some 1.2mm stainless. Although heftier than I could have used I've gone with this thickness to helped avoid the tinny sound thin stainless boxes can make. I wanted perforated stainless tube but couldn't find any within NZ. Got some perforated sheet instead - again 1.2... Which I cut strips from and formed up into tubes as such... Welded... Now I had the start of a box and some tube. I could sit down and nut out a design. I have had some basic ideas for ages on how it might look inside but it was really good to sit down and see how it might work. Drew some ideas up.. Nutted out something I think would work well and be easy enough to change if need be. Time to commit. I had to cut some blue steel. First actual act of modification to the imp in my quest to plonk a flat six in it. Now I could double check box sizing and weld the flanges in place. Folded up the second box side.. Complete with captive nuts to suit a lid.. Tail pipe time. I almost went with twin 2" exits but they were just a tad too big. Settled on twin 45mm. Tacked them to yet another stainless pair of flanges to work with the modular design aspect. Happy with the look I then fully welded them on the inside. The flanges will be sealed with a soft copper gasket. Happy I had the look right I cut the centre top from the box, created a recessed bit and carefully welded in the second threaded flange. So now I have inlets and outlets where I want them and just have to connect the dots. Ideally a nice long a route to dampen sound while keeping it as smooth flowing as possible. Plus, as per original brief, it has to allow for easy disassembly and re-packing. There was quite a bit of head scratching with this bit of the build but eventually I sorted a design out. I cut various bit of sheet and put big holes in them with a nice brand new holesaw set. Made little boxes with more big holes... Shaped bits like a heart...(#putmyheartandsoulintoit.....) Welded the ends onto the main box, curved in bit to help with flow and also hide the external bobbin mounts from view a little. Now I had a collection of parts that would come together and form a london underground of tubeways for the exhaust gases to follow. I was pretty happy with the layout for its potential silencing effect. However I now wondered if it might just end up being a touch too quiet and restrictive. Luckily I had come up with an idea early on where I could add some valves. Quite a little bit of extra work involved but the more I'd thought about it the more I was convinced it could work well. With this in mind I had built the middle chamber width to allow for some valves and made sure they could be removed to fit said valves in place. I cut some 44mm holes in the middle chamber lids and made some to valves to suit... Whipped up a little press form to create brackets.. Valves mounted. Underside of lids have the heart halves which help direct flow from one tube back too the next, or up and out through the open valves.. Valve shafts stick out through back of box. Sealing will be by a combination of spring loaded fibre and silicone washers. Now for an exciting point in life that every shed 'Barry' looks forward to. Emptying out those boxes of little random fittings that have been stashed away 'just in case you might need them'... Such fun! I selected my (stainless!!!) treats and scribbled on some alloy. Made lots of alloy swarf.. Ended up with these levers. Pinch bolted to the shafts along with added grub screws. The short length of threaded rod will be changed for a long length of stainless rod, actuation method from within the car yet undecided. Possibly a 12volt door lock motor etc or maybe mechanically with a bicycle cable. Recessed the backs to allow for seals.. So yeah. Lots of parts! Compulsory photo of thing exploded into many bits... All together now with some arrows. Remember each side is just a mirror of the other side (there is a small cross over hole in the centre plate that separates the sides) Valve closed... Valve open... I think it'll be quite a difference in sound and look forward to hearing it. Valves can be seen in action in this very exciting video... So It's pretty much complete except for the mount points which I'll do once I've got some bobbins from engineering shop along with seals. The lid will be sealed by running a bead of silicone which I'll let set before clamping the lid down. Oh I weighed it too. I was worried it might end up quite hefty but it will be only about 6.4 kg once all the bolts are in/packed with fibreglass.. The box will be painted satin/matt black leaving the tailpipes shiny. Silencer mounted in place... View from above showing plenty of room for the valve linkages in place. I ended up cutting a tiny bit more of the valance away so there's room for a stainless heatshield. I then covered the valance with some masking tape to help prevent it getting too scratched while I put back in some internal strengthening and capping it all off. I'll also be adding mount areas for the bobbins. I'll remove the engine next and add in the big multi-pin connector to the engine loom. Then I'll be seriously very close to removing the Datsun engine and cutting out the under seat area just as I have on this rusty shell. Wow!! 51 12 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post yoeddynz Posted May 4 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 4 Getting closer!!! Next job was to strengthen and close up the rear valance. Pics.. Added internal bracing. I probably didn't need to. Its not really under much stress now without an engine hanging on it as per on an original imp setup. Just closes off the back end, gives something to hang an exhaust on and something for the fiberglass engine cover to latch onto. But hey, I'm only adding a little bit of extra weight... Gave the inside an extra layer of zinc rich paint .. Closed it up.. Flap disc on the welds and trial fitted it. I won't yet fit any exhaust mounts. i want to weld those on when the engine is sat in the blue Imp so its all done to suit its home as no two imps are exactly the same. It looks neat in place though. Speaking of exhausts. I needed a bit of rod for a customers job and went searching through the steel rack... ..and I found this bit of stainless rod with an eye pressed in at one end. Its perfect for the valve actuation rod that'll run along the exhaust box.. I've been having a little browse at various actuators on Ali express and I think one of these could do the job well... https://vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005003796596080.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.148738damrmWCz&mp=1&gatewayAdapt=glo2vnm With the valance sorted and covered in some epoxy paint ready for a skim of filler I could now remove the engine from rusty green imp. That's the last time it'll be sat in there. Not sure what will become of that shell. Maybe garden art? Maybe just chop it up and keep any useful repair panels in case I have a whoopsie with Blue imp? Its not too rusty and could be saved but it would take another fella like me to do such a silly thing to a car where you can buy better shells, rego on hold, for not much money. British imp fans would probably save it though as its a good solid base compared to what I have seen on offer in the UK. Green imp was then pushed outside into the cold and I sat in front of the wood burner, warm and cosy. I cut the main engine loom in half and let in a big multi plug. I'd been contemplating whether I'd be bothered to do this for some time now and I'm really glad I did for it didn't actually take very long to do. It'll make removing the engine even easier with no need to disturb the ecu wiring under the rear seat. I then removed the gearbox and made a cover plate for the gap located below the flywheel. The bellhousing opening it covers faces forwards and I don't want to fill it with stones, dirt, dead possums etc. Removed the flywheel and carefully ground a lead onto each tooth on the Subaru ring gear. Its designed for a different rotation on the starter and in use the starter would sometimes not mesh properly and make a horrible loud 'gnashing of metallic teeth' sound. Not keen on that. I'd also given the pinion a similar grind so hopefully they'll slide in nicer. Time will tell. I then machined up a basic clutch disc alignment tool.. I refitted the valance and exhaust to the blue imp, drove it into the workshop and then removed the lovely comfy, but not exactly period correct (like as if that's an issue with me....) Tomei steering wheel which will now be fitted into our Nissan Micra. I then cleaned up the lovely Moto-lita steering wheel that has been hanging on the wall for years since I sold my Viva HB. My Uncle in the UK worked for a short time at Moto-lita many moons ago and got this wheel then. He'd fitted it in several cars including a few Morris Minors. When he died my cousins gave it to me after his funeral. I'm very happy to be fitting it in the Imp. It's more in keeping and looks great. I was also happy to discover that Imps and Vivas share the same spline pattern so I was able to use the original nicely made boss. I also removed the stereo, speakers and parcel shelves. The speakers were always in the way and getting knocked by my feet when I entered the car so they won't be going back. Then all the blankets and other stuff that's accumulated in the imp. Lol at the several British airways blankets that had found their way into the imp... Next up were the Recaro seats. Out they came. Definitely going back in though. Might not be period correct but they are lovely. In the future, once I've won lotto I'll get them recovered in a more suitable style. Looking quite bare inside now.. I do love the two tone red/black colour scheme on the door cards and the red rear seat. But I don't love the super sticky flashing tape I'd used to hold down the loom under the rear seat. This stuff is great if you don't want things to move or you desire tired hands trying to remove it. Now it was finally time to remove the Datsun engine. Actually now it was time to make a 'Datsun 1200 wheely stand 2000'. I want to have an easier system to remove/refit the Datsun lump without having to use a top mounted engine cradle and sling - a setup that was due to the centre mounted engine cross member. So I made this.. Yes, a bit over built, but it'll find other handy workshop carting uses in the future if the flat six proves itself and the Datsun setup gets sold on. Fitted sturdy wheels, painted it workshop grey and whipped up a plywood engine cradle with room in the centre to drop the cross member down into. Now in action. Much easier and way faster!!! Engine out... Still a neat little engine. If I was to keep it in the Imp (like said above, the flat six has to prove itself) I'd rebuild it, balanced properly, fit my oval port head, sporty cam, itbs and full engine management. Then promptly destroy the Imp transmission... Arty shot... I stripped out the remaining bits from the engine bay, the rear suspension and cross member. Drained the fuel tank, luckily only 5 litres to bother with, removed it and stashed it away in the garage which is now filling up with imp parts. Brought the green imp back in from the chill so I use it to take measurements from. Measured and marked out the cut lines where I need to chop out under the rear seat base for the taller Subaru transmission. Covered the inside glass surfaces with paper. I'll get Hannah to block grinding sparks when I'm doing any cutting from under the car. So that's where I'm at now. Next job is cutty cutty time. 52 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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