Popular Post Roman Posted May 7 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 7 Good news is that the head looks okay, valve guides look okay, exhaust valves look untouched. Just intake valves got pretty tweaked! There's a few tiny marks on the pistons but nothing to worry about. Because I have stiff valve springs, and the valves were held about half way down because of the bends. It was an interesting experience banging the collets out. I may have fired a few into orbit. So need to get some of those when I go to pickapart to get new valves etc. I was also cursing at the fact that I need to take the sump off, in order to get the front cover off to reset the timing. If I need to take the upper sump pan off, it's an engine out job which I dont really have any space to do. I managed to get the cover mostly off by only removing the lower bowl, and undoing the cover bolts from underneath - but then it seemed stuck so I resigned to the fact that I'd have to take the sump fully off. Then I remembered that the oil pickup tube is attached to the oil pump, which is on the front cover - Which was what was jamming it. Ha. So when I undo that, hopefully the cover comes off no problem. In other news, I saw a video from Papadakis racing where they fully made a turbo manifold from 3d printed inconel. It looked absolutely friggen amazing. So I thought for interests sake, I wonder if there's anywhere that 3d prints metal that could give me a price online by just uploading an STL file. So I drew a collector with no particular science to it, just to get a shape to get a ballpark figure. Expecting zillions. Much to my surprise, one of the places could do it for $250NZD from 316L stainless. Which seems absolutely incredible! The prices for getting aluminium printed seemed completely sane as well. For some smaller or more complex objects, this might be a no brainer. So at some point I think I will get one made and see how it looks. Then order a 2nd one for the other side if it's any good. But I'll do some more investigation on what makes a good collector shape first. This will be by far the cheapest and easiest option, and potentially the best shape too. I'm excited about it. It will be cool to be able to make some organic shapes without being constrained by working just with a constant pipe diameter. Might be a month or three down the track though. But thats what I'm fizzing over a the moment. 40 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Roman Posted May 14 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 14 Pulley carnage Made some progress getting the old stuff apart. The old intake pulley has a few interesting things which suck about it. So firstly the 3 bolts holding the pulley together have threads going nearly all of the way up to the head: So when the bolt passes through this front section, if there is any shearing load then it's happening threads against pulley. Rather than acting like a dowel pin. There isnt anything that locates the front part of the pulley to the rear half, apart from those 3 bolts. So once they started coming loose, we get this sort of thing going on: So what I'm thinking is to replace with a bolt that has a longer shank that fits tight to the hole instead. Not on that pulley obviously though. Although, I'm also thinking to just replace all of the pulleys with the newer versions. Check that the locking pins are functioning. Then just get on with it. Which brings us to the next part... The suffering and joy (and suffering) of having a common engine I've bleated on many times now, about how I'm glad to have a common engine so it's easy to get parts etc. But I now realize this is a double edged sword. If this was an uncommon engine and I had no choice to just pay for brand new parts. Then I'd just do that. Sure it would set me back $1500 or something. But making myself suffer at pickapart wouldn't be an option. When it is an option though, I'll always consider it. Ha. So that's what I've been doing. I found the Mark X in the Mangere yard that was the 2009+ model with the later pulleys. I turned up and it's looking like this: Awkward to work on as the motor has already been dropped down. The radiator was stoved into the front of the motor as well. Not deal breakers, just make it more annoying to do remove stuff. After considerable aggravation I managed to get the cams out from one bank. However the intake manifold is held on by several regular bolts, but also ONE fucking cap screw. Which I didnt have anything to undo it with. Then I had also forgotten to bring my hex head bit for undoing the head bolts to try get some valves out. So called it a day. Came back another time. It was easier getting the other bank's cams out once the intake manifold was off, because the chain was already loose. Then to get the head off, lots of stuff needs to come off from the front and back. I finally got a head ready to come off. Except for that I forgot how stupidly tight these bolts are, and that I usually have a long extension on the end of my breaker bar. However I wasnt ready to give up, so had a wander around and found a piece of exhaust pipe that did the trick. Then the valves banged out easy enough. Sure enough they are all caked in shit though from not having port injection. Job done. I forgot how much garbage is all over these engines in factory configuration. Definitely zero percent interested to ever diagnose or fix any issues on a Mark X. ha. So I'll get the valves cleaned up, fit them up and get the head back on. So the one good thing about all this, is that it didnt cost too much. 4x VVTI pulleys @ $15 each 6x intake valves @ $7 each So $102 + some gas money (and some hours...) The best prices I could find brand new parts were around $350-$400 per pulley. Then $35 each per valve. So that would have been more like $1800 if that was my only option. Which would set me back a few months worth of car budget, meaning no progress on other things. Having the pulley blow up didnt bother me too much at first. But after a while it was a bit of a downer thinking about how much work I've got to do, just to get back to the starting point I was already at. But at least now it feels like I'm on the path to putting things back together, rather than pulling it all apart. Exhaust stuff Having the pulley blow up also made me realize that although it was a good milestone to have the motor fired up. There were really just a lot of things not anywhere close to being ready. Needs exhaust, needs more wiring sorted, needs a radiator fan, needs a firewall, and so on. So I'm focused back on progressing on these things rather than melting my ear drums. Generally doing any exhaust stuff has been a fairly stressful experience while I've tried haphazardly put stuff together without much of a plan. So I'm trying to do things differently this time. Firstly came up with a simple sketch of how things are going to be laid out. Then added some angles and dimensions to this from measuring the car to revise this sketch. So then I can always refer back to this if I get myself in a fluster, and feel like I've got a plan. Also have a decently educated guess about making a few sections off-car without scrounging around on the ground a lot. So it's mostly going to be 3" pipe. I tallied up all of the bends and lengths, then ordered a bunch more than needed. Rather than, buying as many as I think I will need then stressing because I'm trying to ration them. I will get the Y section all tacked together and put some flanges on it. Then I will bolt this solidly to the underside of the car, offset from the body with some printed fixtures. Then I can work on everything forward and back from this pieces without jiggling it all around like when it's hung from rubber mounts. Then hang it from rubber mounts all at once, rather than trying to second guess the addition of extra weight as you add bits on. Hopefully I'll be able to fit two decently big mufflers under the car, one mid and one at the back. The bends turned up a few days ago, and the straight sections in the post just today. So hopefully it wont be too much of a drama to repair this head and get it back in place. Then make a decent start on the exhaust. I think working from the exhaust backwards towards the manifolds will make the manifolds a bit easier as well. So no shortage of thing to be doing right now. Having a very limited amount of garage space and limited daylight hours is definitely making things difficult right now. But will keep chipping away at it. 35 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Roman Posted Saturday at 22:20 Author Popular Post Share Posted Saturday at 22:20 I havent had any time or space to get any welding done on the exhaust, but I've nearly finished putting the rest of the motor all together. But once thats finished I can push the car back outside for a few days and have some space for doing stuff again. Having a V6 with 3x timing chains really makes me appreciate how much simpler life is when you use a belt, and can just take the timing covers off without 3 litres of RTV to deal with. Exhaust collector side quest I've been doing some more reading and mulling over collector shapes/options, drew up shape that I'm happy with and have put through an order. Just one for now, in case it's crap. Estimated 7-10 days arrival, $263 delivered. Seems insane! Hopefully it works out good. I've opted for having quite a tight choke point and quite a short merge. Which makes for a fairly steep angle. But when you arent fabricating it out of just straight sections of pipe, I think the shape should still flow pretty good. I think some of the general rules around collector design are based around 4-1 construction and only having straight pipes to fabricate things with. When you have a 3-1 without the symmetry of a 4-1 or 2-1, it seems like making the merge section longer doesnt affect the shape of the center part by much. So I'd rather just get the change in cross sectional area over and done with, then start tapering back out which I think is probably the more important bit. This is using 3x 38mm OD pipes for the runners, 1.75" choke point and is a 2.5" exit. So can taper this out further to 3" or maybe keep the 2-1 section as 2.5". Not sure yet. While looking at different cars collector designs it was really interesting to see that F1 cars seem to have some fairly gross looking merge designs, like this weird 3:1 Or the crazily steep merge angle on half of a V8 Some of it looks like packaging determines the shape more than anything, so I'm not too concerned about the (hand waving gestures) manner in which I've made the shape of these ones. While I'm drunk on the idea of metal 3d printing Aluminium is even cheaper than stainless to 3d print, so decided to price up making some better throttle pulleys. As they ended up being surprisingly heavy with the stacks of 2.5mm stainless, and they look a bit shoddy. It would also be nice to have more of an internal radius for how the cable sits. So now the design is much, much lighter. To print from aluminium the single row pulley cost $32 NZD, and the double row pulley cost $40 NZD. But then shipping was $50, this seemed to be the same price regardless of whether it was 1 or 2 pulleys. So next time if I've got a bunch of small brackets etc to do I'll make sure to put all the files together at once. Hopefully they turn out good. I dont know how much detail the metal printing is actually capable of. A week or 3 ago I also ordered 2x 500mm lengths of 10mm OD carbon fibre rod, which is something else that is surprisingly cheap. So I'll use this instead of the stainless steel rods to link the throttles, as these are also surprisingly heavy. The weight difference is pretty incredible, will be going from ~1.1kg down to ~140 grams. 24 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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