We will be at the event, showcasing the first production cylinder heads and related items, plus of our standard products.  If you will be attending the show and want to purchase any FE Power items, please leave a response here, or message me, or email me (jayb@fepower.net), or give me a call (952-428-9035), and I will bring the product you want to the show, to save you some shipping expense.  FYI, we are still out of intake adapters, but have limited numbers of timing covers and timing sets available.  We will also be running a show special on books.  Looking forward to seeing all my FE friends at the Reunion!

After nearly a 6 month delay, I finally received my next printing of books yesterday.  They are available now for immediate shipment.  If you are one of those folks who paid for a book and is now waiting for it, it shipped out earlier today (8/11/21), and thanks so much for your patience - Jay

http://www.fepower.net/GFEIC.html

On my 390 stroker project in the Member Projects section I had been looking to use a main stud girdle, but couldn't find one available at the time I wanted to do it, so I went with crossbolted main caps instead.  They were expensive, and a real pain to install.  I wanted to try installing a girdle as a comparison, and it turned out that one of my cylinder head customers was going to use a 390 block and put a girdle on it.  I offered to install it for him at no cost because I wanted to see how difficult it would be.  He was able to find a girdle like the one I wanted to use, so last week he drove up to my place and dropped off the block and the girdle and hardware.  This week during a break in the action I got his block on the CNC machine and started the installation.

My plan was to precisely indicate the height location of the five main cap registers in the block, then shim up the block to make them as level as possible.  From there I wanted to cut a few thousandths off the pan rail, in order to make sure that it was square with the main cap registers before machining the caps and bolting on the girdle.  I had been told that the oil pan rail would not necessarily be square with the main cap registers, and in order to make the girdle a nice fit I wanted to make sure that it was.

By the way, the directions that came with the girdle didn't suggest anything like this, basically saying to use the oil pan rail as it was.  This didn't sound right to me, since if the pan rail turned out not to be square with the main cap registers the girdle would have to deform to fit. 

Anyway, I set the block up on the CNC table, resting with the main cap registers facing up and roughly aligned square with the table, clamped it in place, and started measuring the height of the main cap registers.  This was done with an arbitrary Z axis setting; all I was interested in was how the main register heights compared with each other.  I figured that they would all be very close, and I was surprised at how close they actually were.  On the right side of the block, they were all within 0.002" of each other, and the left side was only a little worse:




On average the left side of the block looked just a couple thousandths higher than the right side of the block, which I thought was pretty good given that the block was sitting upside down, and relying on the squareness of the end rails relative to the main cap registers.  In order to make the main cap registers as level as possible, I used some .004" shim stock under the right side of the block's end rails on each end.  I remeasured and got the following results:




This brought the height of the #2 and #3 main cap registers just about the same, and #4 was only off by a thousandth.  #5 was off by almost 0.005", but that wasn't a concern because the girdle doesn't tie into the  #5 main cap.  The left side of #1 was about 0.004" higher than the right side, and I figured I could compensate for that with the spacers.

Now that the main registers were as squared up as I could make them, I measured the height of the oil pan rail in the four corners of the block:




These results were not nearly as bad as I had been led to believe; worst case variation was only about 0.010", and since the distances across the block were much greater than the distances across the main cap registers, it really wasn't that bad.  Nevertheless, I set up my 3" facing mill and took about 0.012" off the oil pan rail, to square it up with the main cap registers:




This whole process, from getting the block fixtured on the CNC machine, to cutting the pain rail, took about an hour and half.  No big deal.

Next I took caps 1 through 4 and put them into the vise on my smaller CNC machine.  I indicated off the ways of the vise in the Z axis, and then indicated on each main cap bolt hole to find it's center.  Then I wrote a short CNC program to spot face the bolt holes in the top of the caps, to make them all exactly the same height.  I tried to go to a 2.5" height from the bottom of the caps up to the spot face, but it turned out that one of the caps was a little lower than that, so I went down to a height of 2.475" to get all the spot faces on the caps exactly the same height from the bottom of the caps.  It took about an hour to machine the caps.

Another quick aside is that the manufacturer provides a spacer between the cap and the girdle that is a single piece strap for each cap, with two holes in it.  They tell you to bolt the girdle on the block, then measure the distance from the main cap registers up to the girdle, subtract the thickness of the strap, and machine the whole top of the cap to get the height to that dimension.  I also did not like this idea, it seemed to me that getting a precise measurement of this distance would be problematic, and also machining any more off the cap than necessary would limit the strength of the cap.  So I elected not to use the straps, and decided to make up some donut spacers instead.

With the block still fixtured on the CNC machine, I measured the distance between the main cap registers and the oil pan rail, subtracted the 2.475" distance from the cap base to the spot face, and found that I needed spacers about 0.182" thick.  Due to slight variations in the height of the registers, I ended up machining spacers of slightly different thicknesses, ranging from 0.180" to 0.184".  This was the most time consuming part of the project, and hindsight being 20/20, I can think of a much easier way to do this; more on that shortly.  It took me about 3 hours to get these 8 donut spacers machined:




From there I assembled the main studs in the block.  The stud kit included two studs that were shorter than the other eight, for use in the #5 cap, but actually they were still too long to be used, and even with the presence of the girdle they would stick up above the oil pan rail.  The instructions said they "may" need to be cut to fit    Anyway, I had known about this issue and had the block owner buy some special, shorter studs for the #5 cap.  To make the stud washers and nuts fit, I also counterbored the #5 cap 0.275".  I installed the studs, the caps, and the spacers in the correct location to make them all the same height, then finally I installed the oil pan studs that came with the kit; here's a picture of how the block looked at this point:




The girdle fit nicely down on the block, and in fact it could be wiggled around a little; probably the holes for the studs are slightly oversize.  The main stud washers and nuts were installed next.  The kit comes with some thin nuts that fit into the counterbored areas of the girdle.  I found that the counterbored holes were too small for my 3/8 drive 1/2" socket to fit, so I couldn't use that to tighten the nuts; I ended up going to a 1/4 drive ratchet and socket to get them tight. 




The last thing I did was to machine a couple of precision holes for some 3/8" diameter steel pins, in order to positively fixture the girdle on the pain rail.  I was uncomfortable with the fact that the girdle could slide around some when it was placed over the studs, and despite being clamped down, I wanted a more positive location for it.  So I machined two holes through the girdle and into the block, and will install some steel pins to lock it into a fixed position.  Here's a photo of one of the holes:




Having installed one of these now, I can say by comparison it is a much easier installation than the cross bolted caps.  With the crossbolted caps, the block has to be perfectly aligned in the X axis of the mill, and also perfectly machined to make the caps fit properly.  Then, the block has to be set up on the machine rotated 90 degrees along the X axis to drill the holes for the cross bolts on one side, then it has to be set up at -90 degrees to drill the crossbolt holes on the other side.  This is a ton of setup work, and horsing the block around to these different positions, and then fixturing it in those positions, is very time consuming.  Not to mention tapping the cross bolt holes in the caps.

Despite being more expensive by around $200, and requiring much more expensive machine work, the cross bolted caps are probably more rigid than the standard caps using a girdle.  My take on this though is that given the cylinder wall and main web thickness of a 390, the cross bolted caps may be overkill.  I'm pretty sure that the girdle will make the block able to withstand 650-700 HP, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to go beyond that with a 390 block anyway.

One issue with the girdle that I don't like is that the spacers have to be kept in the same position, in order to maintain minimum stress on the girdle.  Since they are slightly different thicknesses, if you mix them up you may impart a twist into the girdle when it is assembled.  I thought I was going to be able to address this by just stamping or scribing each spacer with it's position, but that didn't turn out to be practical; the steel was not easy to scribe, and when I tested stamping an extra spacer, it raised the material around the stamp mark and changed the thickness.  So the spacers need to be carefully marked when removed, and then replaced in the same spot.

Another concern with the girdle is that if you want to run a windage tray, it is going to be spaced 3/8" farther from the crank, making it a little less effective.

Speaking of the spacers, if I was going to do this project again, I'd take advantage of the precise ring shims available from McMaster Carr.  For example, they have a 0.188" thick spacer with a thickness tolerance of +/- 0.007", and they have .001" and .002" thick ring spacers, with thickness tolerances of much less than .001".  Having a selection of those on hand, and cutting the main cap spot faces just a little deeper than I did, would allow these off the shelf shims to be used as the spacers, taking the majority of time out of this project.  If I ever do another one of these, that's what I'll do.

One last comment is that after this work is done, the block should be align honed, if it hasn't been already.  Sometimes the machine shop will take a few thousandths off the bottom of the caps to align hone the main saddle.  If that happens, then some of those really small shims mentioned previously will have to be added to the shims that are already in place between the girdle and the caps.  For example, if the shop takes .002" off the bottom of each cap, then a 0.002" shim should be installed with each spacer.  But again, since those shims are readily available, no big deal.

I hope this quick tutorial will help if you are considering a girdle for your engine.  Anybody with a vertical mill can do this work, although it is a little easier with CNC, and it seems like a good upgrade for a 390 or 428 block that is headed for serious horsepower.

It's been mid winter since I've run the dyno mule with my cylinder heads, and despite having several tests that I've needed to run, work on getting the head package into production has taken a bunch of time so I didn't get back at the dyno testing until this week.  All along my friend Royce B has been mercilessly hounding me to get back on the dyno LOL!  Royce is a dyno junkie, and wanted to come up to help.  Finally on Wednesday this week my schedule opened up, Royce arrived and we got going again with the testing.

It had been quite a while since the last test, so the first order of business was to baseline the dyno mule again.  The unported SE cylinder heads and the 8V intake with two Dominator carbs were on the engine, and the cam was still the same cam Brent Lykins got for me last winter.  Previous best was 861 HP with this combination.  After debugging an electrical problem we got the engine running correctly, and I was happy to see some even better results; the engine peaked at 869 HP and 730 lb-ft of torque. 



Later during the analysis I discovered that I had left the RE timing spec in the EFI software, which was 30 degrees total instead of 28 degrees total as I had originally run with the SE heads.  So that little tweak to the timing probably explains the slight improvement.  Nevertheless, we were back to baseline and ready for more testing.

Over the last several months I've been designing some new intake manifolds to use with my heads.  I'm actually quite happy with the performance of the 4V intake, but the 8V intake isn't working as well as I'd hoped.  I tried to design the 8V intake as something similar to the tunnel wedge for use with my heads, but in the quest for power I kept the runners straight, and it ended up not looking like a tunnel wedge manifold at all, and not having the plenum volume and design of a modern sheet metal style intake either.  So I went back to the drawing board and the 3D printer, and ended up designing two more 8V intakes in the more traditional sheet metal style.  Also, in speaking with a few of my cylinder head customers, some of them had hood clearance concerns, so I elected to do an 8V intake design that was lower, and did look like a traditional tunnel wedge manifold.  Finally, I also wanted to do a lower 4V intake, and after making some measurements I concluded that using a low profile EFI throttle body, I could actually make the intake work with a shaker or ram air setup.

My 3D printer has been balky over the last few months, and I've had to make some repairs and part replacements to keep it running properly, but after a few false starts I finally got all four of these intakes printed.  This is the low version of the 4V intake, sitting on an intake adapter:




The photo below is the low version of the 8V intake, designed in the tunnel wedge style:




This one is one version of a sheet metal style intake, with short runners and a lot of taper:




This is the other version of a sheet metal style intake; this one has longer runners and less taper, and is shown mounted on the engine:




I've been thinking about running these plastic manifolds on the dyno for a while, and one concern was if they were going to be airtight or not.  Before the dyno session I had briefly considered painting them all to try to make sure that the external surfaces were all leak free, but I didn't get around to that before the dyno session, so I decided to just bolt on the red sheet metal style manifold and try to run it.  Unfortunately, when we started the engine it was obvious that there was a big vacuum leak, and a few seconds after starting the engine, it backfired and broke the plastic manifold.  So, it was clear that some sort of sealing on the external surfaces of the 3D printed intakes was going to be required.  The joys of R&D...

At that point we decided to swap over to the RE heads.  We had not yet tested the RE heads with the Lykins cam, and since that cam had picked up the engine with the SE heads substantially, I was anxious to see how it would improve the performance with the RE heads.  Pretty much all day Thursday was devoted to the swap, since in addition to just changing the heads, all the valves and springs had to be swapped from the SE heads to the RE heads also.  We finally got the engine all back together with the 8V intake at the end of the day on Thursday, and started it up to make sure that everything was OK.  The engine sounded good, so we were primed for a good dyno session on Friday.

Friday's dyno session did not disappoint.  After a couple of checkout pulls, we ran the engine to 7000 RPM, and much to my surprise, it appeared to be still climbing in power at that point.  I really didn't want to run past 7000 with the RPM crank that is in the engine, but we decided to make a 5300-7300 RPM pull and see what happened.  We were rewarded with just over 881 HP, and again the engine still appeared to be climbing at 7300 RPM:




Next step would have been running to 7500 RPM, but as the engine came out of the pull on the previous run, Royce and I thought there may have been some valvetrain noise.  So out of an abundance of caution we decided to pull the valve covers and check the lash.  Sure enough, the #6 exhaust lash had increased from .016" to .030", and that was probably what we had been hearing.  We immediately suspected a lifter was going away; the Crower roller lifters I've had in this dyno mule have been around for a while and used in different engines, and we've had to replace a few of them during the course of this testing.  So, reluctantly we pulled the intake and carbs, and opened up the plate in the middle of the intake adapter so we could pull the #6 lifter.  However, checking it there were no obvious problems.  Next I disassembled the rocker arm pair from #6, and again everything looked fine.  I don't have an explanation for the increased lash, unless I just didn't tighten the adjuster enough when I set it.

At this point we decided to just go to the 4V intake, since we were happy with the results of the 8V.  We installed the 1150 Dominator carb on the intake, and ran again.  Previous best with the old cam had been 857 HP, but the new cam bumped us up to 873 HP, and also a bit of a torque increase:




One thing about the 4V intake was that it did not appear to be making power all the way to 7000 RPM.  In fact we ran two pulls to 7300 RPM, and in both cases the power did not increase, and in fact the engine seemed to miss a little past 7000 RPM.  A look at the air inlet data gave a clue on this, as the engine was requiring very close to the 1150 cfm of air that the carb was rated for.  We saw vacuum levels of as high as 1.6 inches with the 4V intake and carb, where vacuum levels for the 8V setup were zero through the whole RPM range.  So obviously the engine liked the 8V setup better.

Thursday I had taken the time to paint the exterior of the remaining 3D printed intakes, to try to seal them up.  The 8V tunnel wedge intake also had some gaps in the plastic that the paint wouldn't fill, so Royce took a caulk tube of The Right Stuff and attempted to seal up those holes.  By the time he was done, he had slathered about 2/3 of the intake with that stuff LOL!  It was ugly, but we hoped it would seal.  We decided to do that intake next, so Friday afternoon we bolted it on the engine with two 660 center squirter carbs, and tried to run.  But again, it was obvious that there was still a vacuum leak; the engine would burn through the pump shot and then die.  We didn't want to risk breaking that intake with a backfire, so we stopped the testing. 

As a final experiment with the plastic intakes, we took the low 4V intake and sealed up the carb pad with a plate, then taped off the runners on one side and filled the intake up with water.  We were very surprised that despite being painted to seal it up, it was still leaking like a sieve.  We had water dripping out of the bolt holes, the bottom of the plenum area, and some of the runners.  So obviously just painting the intake with Rustoleum was not going to get it sealed.  This week I'm going to be working on a better sealing procedure for the 3D printed intakes, and also a test rig so that I can test them for leakage with a few psi of air, prior to actually installing and running them on the engine.  I'm sure that they can be run if I can fix the sealing issue, and it will be good data to have before deciding if I want to proceed in production with them or not.

Regardless of those issues, I'm very pleased with the power numbers from the existing 4V and 8V intakes.  I'm close enough to 900 HP now that with some tweaks I'm sure I can reach that goal with this engine, which I think is pretty cool with heads where the ports are still rough cast.  I'm not running much crankcase vacuum, only about 7", so I may increase that somewhat to pick up some power.  Lykins thinks I should run some shear plates under the carbs, so I may try that.  I may also try a bigger primary tube on the headers; I picked up substantial power going from 2" to 2-1/8", so it may be worth building a set of 2-1/4" headers just to test on the RE heads.  When I have more data I will put it up here; I'm particularly looking forward to running the single piece crossram intake, which is ready to be cast as soon as the foundry can open up a slot to pour it.  Stay tuned...

This topic has been moved to Member Projects.

http://fepower.net/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=10062.0

Quite a few years ago David Freiburger wrote one of his back page columns for Hot Rod entitled, "Life at the Side of the Road".  It talked about the inevitable breakdowns that all of us suffer with our high performance equipment.  It struck a chord with me because I'd been there, probably like most of us on this forum.  I was there again yesterday 

I was on my way to my friend Steve's house to see his progress on my 69 Torino; Steve is doing the bodywork.  Three quarters of the way there in my 68 Mustang with 428CJ, I stopped at a stop light and heard a noticeable ticking sound.  Hmmm, did I just develop a header leak?  I turned the corner and accelerated and suddenly things got dramatically worse; the engine was backfiring and popping, the car bucking and lurching, etc.  Oil pressure was down to about 20 pounds, from a normal 60.  I pulled into the nearest parking lot just as it died, wondering what the heck had gone wrong.

I popped the hood and through my trick FE Power clear valve covers ( ) I could see that the #4 exhaust rocker had broken.  This was a Comp Cams rocker, one of the extruded aluminum ones that Dove used to make for Comp.  They are known to fatigue and fail after a while, but I hadn't been too worried about this because the valve springs on this engine are pretty mild.  Apparently that didn't matter to this particular rocker arm.  The engine has been together since 2008, and I put a couple thousand miles a year on it, so I guess it doesn't owe me anything, but still...

Anyway, with just a busted rocker I figured I could limp the remaining 3-4 miles to Steve's place.  I got the engine started and found sort of a sweet spot where the engine would run without a whole bunch of drama, and pulled into Steve's driveway.  At least I wasn't on the side of the road LOL!  I had a spare rocker arm at home, so I borrowed Steve's truck to get back there, and while I was gone he pulled the valve cover.  When I got back he had the offending rocker out, picture below:




Nice!  While I had been at home I called Steve and had him check the pushrod, and it was still straight, so I figured we'd just pop in the new rocker and I'd be ready to go.  Unfortunately, when we got ready to reinstall the rocker assembly with the new rocker, we discovered that the lifter had come completely out of the bore, and was laying in the valley.  No wonder the oil pressure had gone away.  At the rear of the engine compartment, the hood hinge and spring were in the way of really seeing anything, and it was clear that we weren't going to be able to fish that lifter around through the holes in the intake and get it back in the bore.  It was getting dark, and I didn't want to impose any further, so Steve lent me his truck and I went home, figuring I'd fix the problem today while he was at work.

I got over there early this afternoon after taking care of some FE Power stuff in the morning.  My plan was to leverage the features of the FE Intake Adapter to open up the valley of the engine, reinstall the lifter, and button everything back up.  Everything went fine at first; I had the intake and carb off in 15 minutes, and the center plate of the intake adapter off a couple minutes after that.  There was the lifter just laying there in the valley, so I stuck it back in the bore.  However, quite unexpectedly, the #4 intake pushrod was bent down near where it goes into the lifter:




Well, that wasn't good.  With the exhaust rocker broken and the intake pushrod bent, it seemed like something could be seriously wrong in cylinder #4.  I got back in Steve's truck and headed back home to pick up a spare pushrod, while thinking about this.  Bent valve?  Broken rod?  It almost seemed like something had to be seriously wrong.

When I got back to the car, the first thing I did was pull the #4 plug.  It looked fine.  Then I spun the motor over while holding my finger over the plug hole, and there was plenty of compression and no leakage back through the intake valve.  Also, the whole valvetrain seemed to be working as it should.  Nothing to do but put it back together and see what happens.  While I was getting the engine put back together, Steve got home from work and mentioned that when he took the broken rocker arm out, it had been sitting vertically in the rocker arm area.  We think now what probably happened was the broken rocker jammed underneath the #4 intake rocker, preventing it from opening, and that caused the pushrod to bend.  In any case, the engine went back together and fired up with no hint of a problem, and I drove home uneventfully. 

I've had to do these kinds of repairs many times over the years, and often in parking lots or on the side of the road.  Drag Week comes to mind.  You guys must have some stories like this; let's hear them!

And also locking threads, but the political BS is NOT ALLOWED AT ANY TIME on this forum.  I'll start deleting members if I have to...