Just a quick update this week.  Family stuff kept me pretty busy during the week, but on Saturday I got back to assembling the car.  I received my new torque converter from Neal Chance on Friday, and also got some coarse filter screens to put on the dry sump outlets on the oil pan; I had decided that in case of an engine failure I wanted to try to prevent any shrapnel from getting into the dry sump pump.  On Saturday I got the dry sump filter screens installed and the lines modified so everything fit again, and after a certain amount of trouble I got the transmission reinstalled.  Took a lot longer to put it in than it did to take it out, of course...

Sunday I put the front suspension back in the car, which also took quite a bit of time, and then finally mid afternoon I filled the engine with oil, topped off the transmission fluid, and fired the engine.  It ran for 20 minutes with the car still up in the air on the jack stands, and I didn't see one drop of oil or transmission fluid.  What a relief.  I've burned a total of three weeks on this problem; three weeks I didn't really have.  Drag Week starts three weeks from today!

Sunday night I got the wheels back on and put the car down on the scales, after I'd leveled them on the floor, so I could find the CG and get the height set at all four corners.  After I'd made all the adjustments the weight bias was 58/42, much more of a front bias than I'd been hoping for, but it is what it is.  Weight on the rear wheels was pretty close to 50/50 left to right, and the left front wheel was about 120 pounds heavier than the right front wheel.  I think this is about where it should be, given the propensity of a drag car to lift the left front wheel on launch, but I'm not 100% sure about that so I need to do a little research on that this week.

Next I checked the driveshaft angles and found that I had too much up angle on the pinion.  I ran out of time on Sunday to map the four link hole locations, but I'll do that next, get the bars in the holes I want to try to get a neutral launch, and then adjust the bars to bring the pinion angle down somewhat if that is still required.  I think this is going to be Monday night's project.

Last thing I did for the night was put my freshly painted hood in place to get a look at the overall appearance with the hood scoop.  Unfortunately, the throttle linkage that I spent so much time fabricating hits the hood    I will have to either trim the underside of the hood or revamp the throttle linkage; I haven't decided which yet.

I'm out of time now for testing, so getting to the track on Saturday this week is not optional, it is mandatory.  One way or the other, weather permitting of course, I will run the car next Saturday.  I'll post another update next weekend.

Just got back from a family vacation through Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.  Among other attractions, we spent most of one day at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton.  Always wanted to go there, and finally made it this week.  What an unbelievable collection.  I'll let the pictures do the talking; sorry for some of the poor photo quality, but its pretty dark in some areas, and the place is so big that the flash doesn't light it up:

















































































































If you ever get the chance - go there.  You won't be disappointed.

Just a short report this week, plus a video.  I got the rear end gears installed on Wednesday night, and spent Friday night and Saturday until noon getting the throttle linkage worked out.  From there I started working on the wiring, disconnecting all the wiring for the old ems-pro EFI system, and the datalogger electronics that I had added to it, and then working over the wiring for the MS3X that I had put together on the dyno.  Bill Conley was in town over the weekend visiting his wife's family, and he stopped by for a few hours on Saturday night to help out.  Towards the end of the night we had beer and pizza, and Bill snapped this photo of me installing some of the MS3X wiring in the car:



I had no idea that the broad, flat surface of the plenum would be so convenient for holding a couple of beers   Anyway, I got most of the way done with the wiring on Saturday night and finished the MS3X wiring up by about noon on Sunday.  After a family commitment I was back out in the shop by 3:00; I still had to install the wiring for the O2 sensor controller and a new relay and wiring for the electric water pump.  Once finished with that I turned on the power, and happily there was no smoke.  After checking out some of the systems everything seemed to be working well except for the Aeromotive fuel pump.  It had flipped on once when I was messing with the wiring, and that was it.  Finally I gave up on that for a while, and finished up under the car, which involved filling the differential with oil, draining the old transmission fluid, installing the pipes and mufflers, and then installing the rear tires in preparation for breaking in the rear end gears.  After that was all done it was around 6:00 PM, and I decided to take the fuel pump and filter arrangement of the dyno and plug it into the car.  Once I did this the fuel system started working fine.  Filled her up with trans fluid and put water in the radiator, and crossed my fingers as I turned the key.  The engine spun over with no trouble, but wouldn't start.  I broke down and hooked the computer up to the EFI system, and realized at once when the display came up that I had not recalibrated the throttle position sensor.  I did that, and tried again, and this time the car fired right up.  Next I wired in the electric fan control, and set up the software to turn the fans on at 180 degrees, and started the engine again.  As it warmed up the idle came up higher and higher, and I still have to address that issue.  The Accufab throttle bodies have the throttle stop screws loctited in place, and there is no additional screw to set the throttle openings, so I had to try to do that with the linkage.  That of course is not the ideal solution, and I'm going to have to work on that in the coming week to find a solution.  But after adjusting the throttle linkage a little more I got the engine to settle into a 1500 RPM idle (?), and warmed it up.  Everything looked fine, so after it cooled a little I took the following video, where I started up the engine again and put the car in first gear to break in the new rear end gears.   The video is not the greatest quality but you will get the idea.  You will also see that there is a lot of cleanup and finish work left to do on the car:

http://youtu.be/DZb7XK9qNMM


After I got done breaking in the rear end gears I felt pretty good about this thing.  Then, I looked under the car, and saw a big puddle of oil with drips coming from the back of the pan    I'm a little baffled by this, because the engine wasn't leaking any oil on the dyno, but somehow between the move from the dyno to the car, something has changed.  I started the car up again to try to find the source of the leak but it appears to be dripping all across the back of the oil pan, and the front side of the flywheel is wet with oil.  Its almost like the rear main blew out, and badly at that.  Right up to that point I was confident I was going to make it to the track on Friday this week, but it is leaking so much oil I don't think I dare take it racing.  It looks like I'm going to have to pull the pan.  I will do some more investigation on this tomorrow night and try to figure out where it is leaking; maybe I can patch it externally with some RTV if its not the rear main.  We'll have to wait and see if I can make it to the track or not.  I'll post another update next Sunday...

I'm pretty sure that I've seen an oil filter that will fit an FE, but has a smaller outside diameter; anybody know who makes such a thing, or have a part number?  Where the oil filter adapter is on my race car there is limited room, and having a filter that is smaller in diameter by 1/2" or so would make it much easier to service.  Thanks in advance for any help on this - Jay

The three day holiday weekend really afforded me a great opportunity to make some headway on this project, and I was fortunate enough to take advantage of it, without a lot of family commitments this weekend.  Right now I've caught up some on my original schedule, and it looks like I'm only about three weeks behind.  My original plan was to have the car running and driving this weekend, but now I'm thinking that I'll make my first trip to the track on July 26.  There are another 2 or 3 track days that I can squeeze in before Drag Week after that point, so hopefully this will give me the opportunity to get the car really well sorted.

Once again I was tied up during the week this week, but on Friday morning I got going right away on the engine.  I still had several things I wanted to try on the dyno, primary among them getting the crankcase sealed, and retesting without the 1/2" plenum spacer I had installed last weekend.  The plenum spacer was kind of a head scratcher for me.  Before installation of the plenum spacer, the dyno data had been showing a vacuum in the plenum of up to 0.6 inches.  When I installed the plenum spacer the vacuum during the pull went to zero, but the engine picked up kind of a funny pulsing noise partway through the pull.  It also picked up power.  I was pretty sure that the pulsing noise was induction noise, but I hadn't heard anything quite like it before, so I wanted to run another test, to remove the plenum spacer and see if the noise went away again.  Also this week my new O-rings arrived, which were larger in cross section than the original O-rings; I hoped that they would provide a better vacuum seal around the spark plug tubes for the dry sump system.

Also, over the course of the week I had carefully reviewed all the datalogs from the cam sensors, and had concluded that in all cases, regardless of the sensor and target combination, the right cam was retarding about 3 degrees more than the left cam.  Whether I believed the absolute numbers or not, this phase shift between the two cams seemed pretty consistent, and also dovetailed with my original test data from 2006.  So, after thinking it over I elected to advance the right cam 3 degrees with respect to the left cam.  This put the cams at 105 and 108 for ICL, which was exactly where I had set them when I set the cam timing on the engine stand, before the engine went on the dyno.  It kind of felt like all the cam timing changes I had done were a wasted effort after this, but at least the way I've been setting up the cams on these engines over the last 7 or 8 years has probably been correct.

So on Friday I tore the top end of the engine apart, to advance the right cam 3 degrees, check the timing chain tension, give the valvetrain a very close inspection and reset the lash, etc.  I also removed the Honeywell sensors from the valve covers and replaced them with Cherry sensors, which were the ones I planned to run in the car.  I made sure to seal them with some RTV from the inside, because the Honewell sensors had shown leaks around this area.  Thinking about the crankcase sealing issue I decided to take a new set of cork valve cover gaskets and glue them to the valve covers, to help hold the gasket in place when vacuum was being developed in the crankcase.  I decided to let the sealer dry overnight so that on Saturday morning I could pressurize the crankcase again and check for more leaks.

I had still also wanted to run a pair of Dominator throttle bodies on my sheet metal intake, so I spent the rest of the Fourth of July holiday (until the fireworks started at 9:30) working on a new top for the intake.  First I drew up the design for the top in my CAD software, and then wrote the program to machine a piece of 1/2" aluminum plate to the drawing.  While the CNC machine was running I robbed the two Dominator throttle bodies off the high riser in my Mach 1.  Around dinnertime I had the plate finished up; here's a couple of photos, one from underneath (the inside of the plenum), and one from on top showing the throttle bodies bolted in place:





To be honest I didn't really think the Dominator throttle bodies were going to help much, because the 90mm throttle bodies flowed 1100 cfm each, but it was worth a try, especially since I didn't have to buy any parts to try it.  After I got the top done I took some spare 1" X 3" aluminum angle and welded it together into a box that would fit on top of the intake, then welded the top plate in place.  At the end of the day on Friday I was pretty much ready to go with the Dominator parts.

Saturday morning I finished re-assembling the engine on the dyno, without the 1/2" plenum spacer.  Then I ran the pressure check again, putting 5 psi into the crankcase.  I was pleased to see that the leaks around the spark plug tubes were gone, and also that there were no leaks around the cam sensors.  I began checking the rest of the engine over, and then discovered a leak that I hadn't seen last weekend.  This one was between the intake manifold and the head.  Now, on a regular FE I would never have had to worry about this because this junction is covered by the valve cover, but on the cammer of course this is not the case.  I had run a ring of RTV around the ports on either side of the intake gaskets, but as I sprayed a soapy water solution onto the junction between the intake and the heads, I could see that pressurized air was escaping past the gasket and between the ports.  And some of these leaks looked pretty substantial.

I dug out the Ford TA-31 and ran a bead of it along the top of the intake manifold rail and down the sides a little ways to try to get this area sealed up.  I decided I wanted to let this cure for a couple hours before running the engine, so I took care of a few other things in the shop while I waited.  About noon Marc Hunter from the forum came by; he was in Iowa visiting his brother, and had previously arranged to stop up to my place and pick up his FE intake adapter.  He brought his brother Ryan with him, and his dog, named Cammer.  Best name ever for a dog if you ask me LOL!  Ryan owns SCE gaskets and is working on some new FE gaskets, and wanted to show me some of the stuff he was doing and ask a couple of questions.  I told him about some SOHC gasket requirements that I would like to see, including a valve cover gasket that isn't cork, and also gave him one of the old Victor Reinz FE intake gaskets, which were far and away my favorite FE intake gasket until they quit manufacturing them.  Maybe SCE will start making them now.

After a quick tour of the shop and some more technical discussions I got back to working on the engine, while Marc and Ryan hung around waiting for me to be finished so they could see the engine run on the dyno.  I still had to wire up the new Cherry sensors I'd installed in the valve covers, and this took about an hour to finish up.  Finally around 2:00 or so the engine was ready to go.  It fired right up as usual, meaning that I hadn't screwed anything up with the cam sensors (which is always a possibility LOL!).  A couple of minutes into the warm up it dawned on me to look at the crankcase vacuum, and lo and behold, I had close to 10 inches of vacuum running at only about 1500 RPM!  Boy I felt good about that; all the chasing around of the vacuum leaks had paid off.  I was pretty sure that significant crankcase vacuum would improve the power output of the engine, so after the warm-up was complete, I made another 5500-7500 RPM pull.  The first thing I noticed during the pull was that the noise from the previous few pulls was gone; removal of the plenum spacer seemed to have eliminated that sound.  After the pull was over and we looked at the data, sure enough the 0.5 inches of manifold vacuum was back.  So the plenum spacer definitely helped the power output, and caused the new noise.  But on this pull, I was a little disappointed by the power numbers.  It seemed that the crankcase vacuum had not improved power at all!  This was a surprise, given the size of this engine and the low tension rings I'm using.  A review of the data showed that 10 inches of vacuum was all I was getting.  I figured that I could use up to 20" or more, so after talking it over with Marc and Ryan I decided to adjust the vacuum relief valve on the engine to stay shut until a higher vacuum level was reached.   I started the engine to run another pull, but now the crankcase vacuum was reading much lower, maybe only 1-2 inches.  I was confused by all this, but I ran the pull anyway.  Towards the end of the pull some smoke starting coming from the right side of the engine, indicating a valve cover leak.  The engine didn't seem to care, though, and made the same power as the pull before.  After looking at the data we went back out into the dyno room and I checked the valve cover bolts.  Sure enough, some of them were really, really loose.  This is one reason why I would like to see a rubber or composite valve cover gaskets for the SOHC; the cork gaskets get hot, shrink, and then start leaking.  Then, as you tighten down, the same thing happens a few more times.  Finally after you've tightened them a few times the cork splits and you have to ditch the gaskets and start with a new pair.  A better gasket for the valve covers would be a real help for these engines.

After tightening the valve cover bolts the crankcase vacuum came back.  Marc and Ryan had to make the return trip to Iowa; two really nice guys, and it was my pleasure to have them visit.  After they left I took a short break and then went to the next test, which was to install a 1" plenum spacer on the intake.  I figured if a 1/2" spacer was good, maybe a 1" spacer would be better.  I was curious what the engine would sound like with a 1" spacer, but when I ran the test it sounded the same as with no spacer at all, and the power was back down a little, plus the 0.5 inches of vacuum was back in the plenum.  So it seemed like the 1/2" plenum spacer was optimal for this engine. 

At this point, I decided to install the new plenum top with the Dominator throttle bodies.  Here's a picture of the engine with these installed:



As mentioned previously I didn't hold a whole lot of hope out for this combination, but I thought I would give it a try.  Boy, was I mistaken!  The Dominator throttle bodies picked up a solid 20 horsepower over the entire RPM band, 5500-7500!  A huge, huge power improvement.  Boy, was I happy to see that!

It was getting towards the end of the day Saturday, and I had wanted to run some more experiments with the Dominator throttle bodies by adding some plenum spacers, but I was running out of time to do that.  I decided to jump to my last test.  During all the testing with this engine I was seeing about 0.85 psi in the dyno's exhaust system.  Usually there is power available when there is pressure in the exhaust system; in fact, I documented some of this in the miscellaneous testing section of my book.  So, for the last test I disconnected the exhaust system and ran the headers open in the dyno room.  When I started the engine, I immediately had to put ear protection on; that thing was LOUD.  I ran the pull, and anxiously downloaded the data and...  no improvement.  Nearly identical numbers to the previous pull with the exhaust system connected.

So the dyno results this weekend were all rather surprising to me.  First, no power improvement with vacuum in the crankcase.  Second, a big power improvement with the Dominator throttle bodies.  And finally, no power improvement with open headers over the dyno exhaust system.  I would not have guessed any of these outcomes.  I guess all this shows is that you have to test this stuff to really find out the truth.

Sunday morning I spent working on the car.  It felt pretty good to get my hands back on it; it has been two years since I've really done anything with it.  I got it positioned in the middle of the shop and spent some time pulling the pumpkin, because the car currently has street gears in it and I need to put in a set of pro gears.  Shortly after noon my friend Kevin R came by to give me a hand pulling the engine off the dyno, and putting it in the car.  We attached the engine and transmission together, along with the Gear Vendors overdrive, and had it muscled into place by 4:00.  Here's a photo of the engine in position:



Right away I could see that my hood scoop is too low, but I have some plans to address that, including getting a pair of Accufab Dominator throttle bodies, and reshaping the plenum box to make it wider and shorter, so it has the same volume but a lower profile.  I have a lot of work in front of me on the left front corner of the engine compartment, to fit the dry sump tank and accessories, but I think I can get all this done in the next couple of weeks.  I'm shooting for a test and tune at a local track on July 26; we will see what happens.

Dyno weekends tend to be exhilarating and frustrating all at the same time, and this one was surely that!  When I wrote my last update I figured I'd be spending all weekend wiring the EFI system onto this engine, and would be lucky to get it running.  That all went out the window on Monday when I emailed Scott Clark and told him that I probably wouldn't be ready to run this weekend, because I didn't have the engine wired and I wanted to have it up and running before he drove up with his double throwdown, triple whammy 8 oxygen sensor tuning setup.  But in his return email Scott pointed out that he was not tied up on Friday, and if I could take Friday off he would come up and help me wire the engine, and we could get it running and tuned over the weekend.

Well, I had another errand that I had to run on Friday morning anyway, so I had already taken the day off.  Scott had to drive up from Omaha to my place, and I figured with both of us working on the wiring we might be able to knock it out by the end of the night on Friday.  So we made the arrangements, and I spent some time during the week getting all the mechanical stuff done for getting the engine running on the dyno.  On Thursday night I was clipping part of the wiring harness out of my Shelby clone and putting it in place on the engine, and at the end of the night on Thursday, for once it appeared that I had overestimated the time it was going to take to get the project done; it seemed like between the two of us Scott and I could indeed get the wiring done on Friday.

Friday I got back from my morning errand by 11:00 or so and started working on the wiring shortly thereafter.  Scott showed up around 2:00 and between the two of us we had it finished up and were ready to start the engine by 6:00 PM.  About that time another guy that Scott knows, Mark Dahlquist, also showed up.  He drove down from Fargo ND to meet up with Scott and drop something off with him, and he hung around to help out with the engine.  I was really lucky to have both of those guys here to help out.  Some of you may know that Scott is kind of the EFI tuning guru for a lot of motorsport teams; he tunes for Bischoff and Ray Barton at Engine Masters, and of course those teams always do well.  He also tunes for some of the Bonneville teams, and he is actually making his living at this point tuning engines.  I hadn't met Mark before this weekend, but he is also an Engine Masters competitor; his first year was last year, and he finished 9th (I think) with a Pontiac engine, with Scott tuning the engine for him.  The most recent issue of Popular Hot Rodding has a writeup on Mark's EM engine.  Talk about qualified assistance!  I'm practically a newb compared to these guys.

Anyway, after Mark showed up Scott spent some time setting up the Megasquirt MS3X EFI system, and then we tried to start the engine.  First time out on this stuff you are always concerned about getting a good signal from the crank sensor.  I was using a Ford VR sensor on the crank target wheel, and a Cherry digital sensor for the cam position sensor.  After several tries we got the engine started, but I shut it off right away because we hadn't put coolant in the engine yet.  When assembling this engine I had been concerned about internal water leaks, so I had decided that the first thing I was going to do was to run the engine on the dyno with a radiator, so that after the water temp came up I could dump in some Moroso ceramic sealer and circulate that through the engine for a while to seal up any seepage that might be present.  After we knew the engine would start, I got to work setting up the radiator and the cooling hoses.  Mark had the idea to put some hooks in the ceiling and hang the radiator from a couple of tie down straps; that worked out very well, and shortly thereafter I had the cooling hoses attached to the water pump and the thermostat housing, and the electric fans wired up.  I filled the engine with distilled water at that point, checking carefully for any leaks, but there weren't any, so that was a good sign.

Next we fired up the engine, but Scott was concerned about the crank signal because the engine wasn't running that well.  The MS3X system has a diagnostic mode where you can watch the signal from the crank sensor, after conversion to a digital signal (the Ford VR sensor puts out an analog or sine wave signal).  This is just like having an oscilloscope screen on your computer so you can watch the crank and cam signals.  This diagnostic mode was showing errors with some of the teeth on the target wheel; the sensor was losing teeth, and so the missing tooth on the wheel was not being detected properly.  We messed around with the sensor airgap to try to resolve this problem, and it seemed like it mostly went away, but still would give us some intermittent errors when the engine was running.  In any case though, we could get the engine started, and it sounded pretty good.  Finally around 10:00 PM we just decided it was getting too late and that we needed to run the engine to get the sealer circulating; I didn't want to leave it overnight with water in it and no sealer, and also I wanted to circulate the sealer and then later drain the coolant out of the engine, per the sealer's instructions.  So, we fired it up with a less than ideal crank sensor signal and started warming up the engine.  It wouldn't idle much below 1500 RPM at this point, but that was OK for Friday night's purposes.  After the engine was warmed I dumped in the bottle of sealer, put the cap on the radiator, turned on the electric fans, and let the engine run.  The CVR water pump seemed to keep right up with the cooling system; it did gradually warm over 30 minutes from 180 degrees to 210 degrees, but by that time the sealer was well circulated and we had run the engine twice as long as was recommended by the sealer instructions, so we shut it down and called it a night.  Scott and Mark took off, and around midnight I came back out to the shop, drained the water out of the engine, and then went to bed.

Saturday morning I was up early, taking the radiator off the engine and hooking up the dyno's cooling system.  After Scott and Mark arrived back we got to work on the startup procedure for the engine again.  We continued to have trouble though with the crank signal.  For a while it would work just fine, with no errors, then suddenly we would get bunches of errors all at once, and the engine would sound like crap.  One thing we tried was changing the lead on missing tooth of the crankshaft target.  My target wheel, like the Ford ones, has a tooth every 10 degrees around the wheel, with one tooth missing to allow the EFI unit to sync up to the wheel, and know where top dead center is.  I had the tooth #1, which is the first tooth after the missing tooth, set for around 65 degrees BTDC.  My target wheel is drilled for multiple mounting positions, in 20 degree increments, so we tried advancing the target wheel so that tooth 1 was at 45 degrees, and retarding it so that tooth 1 was at 85 degrees, but still couldn't get a good consistent crank signal.  This was the same issue that was dogging me at Drag Week in 2011, so we really needed to get this problem solved.  Scott began promoting use of another Cherry digital sensor, like the one we were using for the cam sensor, on the crank; he had recently had good luck with those.  I did have one spare Cherry sensor, so finally I installed one in place of the Ford VR sensor.  There was an immediate improvement in the cranking signal from the sensor, and the engine began starting much more easily.  We had it up and running for several minutes at a time while Scott tuned the A/F ratio and logged the sensor diagnostic data.  We were still seeing some drop out of the crank signal, though, so Scott thought we should try moving the target wheel again.  After I did that, suddenly we had nothing for signal, and the engine wouldn't start.  Mark went into the dyno room and wiggled the sensor, and found that it was loose!  This was my fault; I had only put the nuts that held the sensor in place finger tight, and they had come loose and the sensor had started to wobble around.  I tried to put the sensor back in its original position, but it looked like the sensor body had been dinged by the target wheel, and it just wouldn't work anymore.  So, our crank sensor was no longer working. 

We thought about going back to the Ford VR sensor, but I did have a couple of other digital output sensors made by Hamlin that would also work.  Unfortunately the Hamlin sensors wouldn't physically fit in the crank sensor mounting bracket that I had machined for this engine.  So, in the end what we decided to do was take the Cherry sensor out of the left valve cover, use that one as the crank sensor, and put one of the Hamlin sensors into the valve cover to act as the cam sensor. 

All this screwing around with the sensor took the whole morning and most of the afternoon, but when we got the new sensor configuration set up it seemed to work really well.  Finally we were ready to make some dyno pulls.  We started with pulls from 3000-5000 RPM, and gradually worked our way up to 5000-7200.  The engine sounded really good, but was down just a little bit on power compared to what I was expecting.  (By the way, this will be disappointing for some of you guys but I won't be sharing any of the dyno results from this engine just yet.  There are Drag Week competitors watching this web site, and I don't want to tip my hand before the event.  I will post the dyno results on this blog in September, after Drag Week has started.)  While we were doing these pulls Scott was messing around with a software feature in the MS3X called VVT.  VVT stands for variable valve timing, and it allows the MS3X to control the variable valve timing actuators found on some modern engines.  What he was discovering, though, was that despite the fact that this engine doesn't have VVT actuators, the MS3X can log the position of the cam sensor during a pull.  This would allow us to see the cam with the cam sensor on it advancing or retarding during the pull!

Back in 2006, on the second SOHC I ever built, I added proximity sensors and targets to the crank and both cams, and ran multiple experiments over a 4 week period trying to determine exactly how much the cams were moving with engine speed.  The datalogging capability I had back then was SLOW, and so I ran the pulls really slow, and tried to get data every 500 RPM or so.  It was quite the torture test for the engine, and gave me some surprising results.  What I found was that while the right cam retarded with RPM (as everybody always said they did), the left cam actually advanced with RPM.  This led to about a 3-4 degree variation in cam timing between the two cams, so ever since this I've been setting up my SOHC engines with the right cam advanced 3-4 degrees compared to the left cam.  The two graphs reprinted below summarize all this data:





The "calculated" vs. "measured" data in the second chart refers to calculating the difference between the two cam signals when they are compared to the crank signal, and then a directly measured difference between the two cams.  The data was taken on different days, so there are some minor differences, but the general trend is the same.  Now that we could see this same data logged directly from the EFI system, I was anxious to get some confirming data.

The cam sensor was on the left cam, so we were expecting it to advance.  After the next pull, the data seemed to show that the left cam was retarding, and by quite a significant amount!  However, there was some question about the data itself; could the direction be wrong?  We weren't sure, but in any case we were seeing something like 8 degrees of change in the cam phase.  Yikes!

While we were thinking about this, we decided to go ahead and put Scott's 8 O2 sensor setup on the engine.  Here's a picture of the engine with this setup installed:



This setup uses the closed loop corrections available in the MS3X to monitor the O2 sensors in each primary pipe, and then hold the injectors open a shorter or longer period of time, to try to hit the targeted A/F ratio in each cylinder.  After getting all the O2 sensors installed Scott configured the CAN communications in the software, and we were ready to run.  We targeted the A/F at 12.6:1, and ran the pull hoping for a significant power increase.  We did see a bump of about 10 HP, but it wasn't a real big improvement.  This basically meant that the sheet metal intake I had built for this engine, previously known as "the steaming pile" because of the problems it seemed to give us in 2011, was actually pretty good.  In fact, Scott was praising the steaming pile by the end of the day Sunday as one of the better sheet metal intakes he's seen with respect to fuel distribution. 

Last time I ran this engine on the dyno, in its 585" form, it had wanted to run a little lean.  So we ran another pull, changing the targeted A/F ratio to 13:1, and the engine really picked up, to the tune of about 18 HP.  That was good news.  We continued to log the cam data, and we continued to see what appeared to be a big retard in the left cam during the pull.  It was about the end of the night on Saturday, so we made plans for the next day and called it a night.

This morning (Sunday), the first thing I did when getting out to the shop was to take my second Hamlin sensor, and install it as an auxiliary cam sensor in the right valve cover.  I was certain that the right cam would retard with engine RPM, so if the right and left cams were moving in the same direction, we would have confirmation that both cams were retarding.  Thinking about this a little more, I began to suspect that the long, slow pulls I had done on the test engine back in 2006 were not really reflective of what would actually be happening at the track, and that maybe with the rapid logging available using the MS3X, and a normal dyno pull rate of 300 RPM/sec (rather than the 25 or 50 RPM/sec I was using in 2006) might make the cams behave differently.  When Scott arrived the first thing we did was run the test to look at the left and right cams together.  Sure enough, they were both moving in the same direction, and both retarding a significant amount.  Here are four screen shots from the MS3X datalogger that show this effect:



The vertical blue line running through the graph has numbers next to it, and these are the ones we want to pay attention to.  The top graph shows engine RPM, which is about 1200 at this point in the log.  The bottom graph shows the cam sensor angles.  These are phased arbitrarily, so what we are looking for is changes in these numbers, not absolute values.  The red line is the right cam sensor, and the white line is the left cam sensor.  At this point in the log the right cam is at 127.6 degrees, and the left cam is at 156.9 degrees.  Off to the right of the vertical blue line, you can see the engine RPM during the dyno pull.  Also, the left cam line goes vertical in the middle of the pull, but that's not real data, that is just a noise spike.  Here are the other graphs with the blue line positioned at various points during the pull:



In this graph we are at the start of the pull, 5000 RPM, and the right cam has retarded to 116.7 degrees, while the left cam has retarded to 153.7 degrees.  Here's the next graph:



Here we are at 6360 RPM, and the right cam has retarded to 115.3 degees, while the left cam has retarded to 149.7.  Here's the next graph:




In this case we are almost at the end of the pull, at 7180 RPM, and the right cam has retarded to 113.7 degrees, while the left cam has retarded to 147.0. 

To be honest I'm not really sure I believe these numbers; that is a tremendous amount of chain stretch, and it just seems unreasonable to me.  The difference between the right cam at idle (127.6 degrees) and the right cam at 5000 RPM (116.7 degrees) is just not believable.  Also, the left cam is retarding more during the pull (6.7 degrees) than the right cam (3.0 degrees).  This is in spite of the fact that as the engine spins the length of the chain between the drive sprocket and the left cam is shorter than the length of the chain between the drive sprocket and the right cam, in the direction of engine rotation.  If anything, the right cam should be retarding more than the left cam, if indeed they are both retarding as this data seems to suggest.  I can see several potential sources of error in this data, including variability in the targets (which are just bolt heads), and frequency response of the Hamlin sensors.  Just doing a quick calculation, at 7000 engine RPM the cams are spinning at 3500 RPM.  This is 58.33 rotations per second.  To discriminate 0.1 degrees of accuracy the update frequency of the sensors must be 1/(58.33 * 3600), or about 210 KHz, which is pretty fast for a magnetic sensor.  Even to discriminate 1.0 degrees the frequency response still has to be 21 KHz.  I need to do some research on the sensors to see if they are up to the drill here.

In any case more happened on Sunday than I have reported so far; I will update this post tomorrow with more information on Sunday's tests - Jay

I regularly find myself bemoaning the fact that I always seem to be behind schedule on my various projects.  Many of my friends, and my wife, always point out that I am trying to do too much all at once.  I have no doubt that this is true; perhaps it is a feature of my personality that I'm not happy without several balls in the air at once, so to speak.

Here is the latest "ball in the air".  Knowing full well I would get my share of flack from machoneman (LOL!), I embarked on another project reminiscent of the old products from Pro-Stock Engineering.  I had always admired their timing cover, with the removable plate allowing access to the top cam gear.  I thought the basic idea was great, but that it needed a few more features to really take it to the limit.  So, several months ago I started drawing up the FE Power timing cover.  I did this in 2D CAD, and then the pattern maker that I have been working with on the intake adapters turned it into a 3D model.  Here are a couple of screen shots of the machined model:





Let me point out some of the features of this timing cover.  First, of course, there is the large opening allowing access to the top cam gear and the cam.  The cover for this is going to be a laser cut steel plate.  Notice the groove around the large opening; this is for an O-ring seal, so that no gasket will be required to seal the opening.  I chose a steel plate for the cover to make sure it was rigid enough to compress the O-ring evenly between the attachment bolts, for a good seal.  I will provide button head cap screws to bolt on the plate, and powder coat it for a nice appearance.

You will also notice five extra bosses on this cover, around the opening for the crankshaft.  These will be drilled and tapped as blind holes, for use in attaching brackets to the timing cover.  With my experiences in EFI I think it would be very helpful to be able to attach a bracket for a crank sensor directly to the top surface of the timing cover.  In addition, with most electric water pumps available these days there is no provision for mounting brackets to hold the alternator or other accessories (my CVR water pump adapters being the exception).  Especially for a low mount alternator, I thought that bosses like this would be very useful for use as a starting point for brackets if an electric water pump was used.  Also, on the back side of the cover these bosses have some strengthening ribs; they may even be strong enough to use as a motor plate mount, although I'm really not sure about that at this point.

Also, there is a raised area around the crankshaft opening on the front of the cover.  This is there so that a front seal can be installed in this position.  Now, the back side of the cover also has the standard position for the front seal.  The idea here is that you can use two seals, one reversed, and be able to seal the engine either with a vacuum pump/dry sump, or if the engine is running normally with some pressure in the crankcase.  I've often run vacuum pumps on my engines, and usually I run with them disconnected on the street, so that you need the regular front seal.  But when you connect them at the track, you need the reverse seal for optimum sealing.  With the two seals, your engine is sealed up either way.  One question about this approach, by the way, is will the front seal survive if the back seal is working effectively; in other words, if the front seal is not exposed to oil, will it eventually burn up?  I was talking to Blair Patrick about this a while back when I was doing the design, and he suggested putting a little grease between the two seals, so I'm going to try that and see if both seals will live.  If they don't, well I can just machine off the boss for the seal on the front of the cover.  One other idea with this is to just use the seal in the normal location, and if the seal goes out, you can install one in the front more easily than replacing the one in the normal position.

I don't know how many people have had problems stripping the corner oil pan attachment bolts out of the factory front covers, but I certainly have, so I made this area of my cover thicker to allow more thread distance.  Also the bottom front bolts are extended out with a boss, so that the head of the bottom bolt doesn't interfere with a longer oil pan bolt in the corner. 

On the laser cut steel cover there will be two small threaded holes for attaching a factory timing pointer.  One downside to this arrangement is that you will have to remember to put some sealer on the threads of those bolts, in order to prevent an oil leak there.  And one other thing about that steel cover is that it can easily be drilled for a 1/2" barrel cam sensor, and a simple target like a bolt put into the top cam gear to make the cam sensor functional.  Again this is an easy way to run a cam sensor in a full sequential EFI application, without having to buy a special distributor.

Several weeks ago I pulled the trigger on the casting patterns for this design.  They were done in mid-May, and today I picked up the first prototype castings.  Here's a few pictures:









The squared-off part at the top of the opening is there for initial fixturing purposes only, and will be machined off as shown in the CAD model during the machining operations.  I was ready to get started with the machining programs a couple of weeks ago but I am still behind on getting some of the intake adapter machining programs finished (such as the one for CHI ports in my standard intake adapter, and the standard version of the high riser adapter), so I was a little conflicted about starting this project.  As it turned out, though, the pattern maker has some free time on his CNC machines, and he was able to quote me a very competitive price for machining these things.  So, on the castings themselves I won't have to machine them myself at all, at least at first; the pattern guys are going to make all the fixtures so that they will work on my machine or on theirs, and are willing to machine the first 100 castings.  That frees me up to keep going on the intake adapters.  I will have to do some very minor machine work on the steel cover plates, and also powder coat them, but this won't require a significant time investment.

For this particular product I'm going to use the same rationale that I used for the FE intake adapters, which is to try to sell 100 covers and amortize my tooling costs over those covers.  I think I should be able to sell 100 of them, but we will see.  They'll be priced at around $225 complete.  After I get the first prototypes machined, hopefully within the next month or so, I will test one out on one of my dyno mules, and if everything looks good, I'll post an ad in the vendor classifieds and start a list of people who want one. 

So, what do you guys think?  Will this be a worthwhile product?

I have to chalk this week up as another frustrating one, where I spent a pretty fair amount of time working on this project but really didn't get a lot accomplished.  Over the weekend I spent way more time than I expected doing more machining for the front mounted parts of the engine.  My dry sump gear arbor needed to be shortened, and the little bracket that holds the crank sensor seemed to take forever to machine.  Plus I had forgotten that I had used some washers to space out the alternator pulley that goes on the crank, so I had to machine a donut to replace those.  Pretty much took me all day Saturday, and Sunday morning to get all that done.  Here are a couple of pictures of the crank sensor bracket, and how it looks mounted on the engine:







Next I made up the dry sump oil lines that go to the pan; here's a picture of those:



After that was done I was FINALLY able to flip the engine right side up again, and start thinking about installing the intake manifold.  Of course, pulling it off the shelf it was pretty dirty, and so I had to pull it all apart and get it cleaned up before I could put it on the engine.  Here's a picture of the lower part of the intake, just sitting in place:



Here's a shot down one of the runners:



Pretty straight shot to the valve, that's for sure.  As I was inspecting this whole thing I realized that there were going to be some modifications that I wanted to make to this manifold, based on what I've learned about sheet metal intakes since I built this one back in 2010.  By the way, any suggestions from you guys on how much plenum volume I should use for this manifold?  I'm following the rule of thumb that you should have one cubic inch of plenum volume for each cubic inch of engine displacement on a sheet metal intake like this, but one of the modifications I'm planning is some spacer plates that go between the plenum top and the intake base, to increase plenum volume if necessary.  To me, just looking at it, the plenum appears too small, or at least the top of the plenum box is too close to the top of the runners, but I really don't know for sure.  One thing I do know is that the runner lengths are off based on my intended RPM range, which is up to a redline of 7500 RPM.  But at this point there's not too much I can do about that, and in fact even if I started a new manifold from scratch it would be difficult to get runners that were 1.5" or 2.0" longer without tipping them way up, so that the air would have to bend going into the port.  At the time I built the manifold I didn't want to do that, so I'm living with a less than ideal runner length to keep a straight shot at the port.  Here's a couple of pictures of the manifold top in place:





Those throttle bodies are rated at 1170 cfm each; just like two Dominators!  Coming in from the front makes the tall induction system work with my hood scoop, but I'm sure that I'm leaving power on the table without having the normal Dominator carbs or throttle bodies on top of the plenum.  I'm hoping this doesn't cost me too much power.  I guess we'll see on the dyno.

I should be able to get the modifications I want made to the intake this week, so that hopefully this engine will finally get mounted on the dyno next weekend.  Then I've got a bunch of wiring in front of me before I can run it.  It's June already, and Drag Week is only 3 months away!  I need to get this engine running...