Unless I've missed something, I haven't seen many builds being documented with Jay's cylinder heads. I thought I would throw this out there, as I have a build in progress, and it may generate some dialogue.
This has been a painful build in terms of wait times. Jay got me the heads, intake adapter, and rocker arms fairly quickly, but up until a few weeks ago, I had been waiting on the crankshaft for about 9 months. It's finally starting to come together.
The engine is 511 cubic inches, using a 4.375" bore and a 4.250" stroke. Block is a Shelby aluminum block, that has been honed with torque plates, sleeves set and decks squared up, mains align honed, and has had .904" bronze lifter bore bushings installed.
Bryant made the crankshaft for me, as the customer requested a billet crankshaft. It was REM polished, which produces an almost mirror finish on all the journals, counterweights, etc. By the time it was all said and done, this ended up being a $5700 crankshaft.
The rods are Callies Ultra I-Beams, in 6.800" length.
Pistons are custom Diamond pieces. This will be a dry sump engine, so we are running vertical gas ports and we're using DLC coated Trend wrist pins with custom pin clearance.
There's about $18000 in this picture.....
I worked out a solid roller lobe that would be fairly easy on the valvetrain, but would also get me the lift I need to take advantage of the heads. This was made on a special round lobe core, in order to get the durations we need, the long LSA, and the .820" gross lift.
I'm using BAM pressure fed lifters, with a .904" diameter for a little extra valve action, stability, and strength. They have an offset pushrod cup on the intake lifter, which gives us a little better pushrod angle with Jay's heads.
Speaking of the heads....
These are a pair of Jay's castings that have been ported. I ordered some custom Ferrea titanium valves and even with a 2.300" valve head diameter and a much longer length than standard FE stuff, we are still under 96 grams on the weight. The exhaust valve weighs 74 grams. Both feature a bead lock groove and hardened tips.
The valve springs are Manley NexTeks and we are using Manley spring locators, titanium retainers, and valve locks.
The flow numbers for the heads are as follows:
.100 80/54
.200 165/114
.300 245/174
.400 310/213
.500 356/240
.600 390/257
.700 415/268
.800 430/275
With the flat valve faces, the chambers measure about 61cc's. This helps out tremendously on having pistons made, as these pistons came up at 32cc dish, aiming for ~11:1 compression. This is a "street engine", so we didn't want to get carried away with compression.
We had initially given Diamond a copy of Jay's cylinder head solid models so that they could make pistons accordingly. Upon piston/valve clearance checks, I found that they didn't stick the valve relief eyebrows in the right spot. The valves get pretty close over the quench "rim" of the piston but we still have adequate piston/valve clearance, so I didn't modify them. I didn't want to lose the compression, nor did I want to wait on Diamond to make new ones or modify these. As parts are now trickling in, I want to keep the momentum up. So, if any of you guys decide to order pistons in the future from Diamond to work with Jay's heads, you may want to keep that info in your back pocket.
I have oil system parts inbound from Aviaid. Not too fond of their oil pans, they usually require a lot of modifications, but I absolutely love their dry sump pumps. They will pull 15 inches of vacuum very easily.
We will be using Jay's intake adapter, along with his cross-ram EFI setup. Plan is to send the engine to Jay for wiring and EFI fitment, then he will dyno at his place. Plans can change and if I can talk Jay into sending me a 2x4 or 1x4 carbureted intake, I may just spin it up here first.
Did a lot of valvetrain mock-up over the weekend. I usually spend a few hours on getting geometry correct. I found that the rocker mounting bar needs to be raised up about .120" in order to get the pattern right over the valve stem and I verified this with some mid-lift geometry checks. I keep a plethora of pushrods around, so I was also able to check out some pushrod/lifter/rocker arm clearance checks.
Not a bad little pattern at all, considering we're sitting at about .800" lift here.
Making progress.....have head gaskets and other parts on the way, so hope to show more later this week.
