Update on the FE Power Cylinder Head Testing

[blykins]

Not to highjack ,what is the alloy know as tool steel? How much carbon is in it? Would it be too brittle to use as a rocker?
At what point,alloy wise ,could you run the rockers without bushings? Or would that call for a lot more oil and oil control upstairs?

There are probably 30 or more grades of tool steel, from mild to wild.   You'll see H13 used a lot, in hipo wrist pins, etc.  It's a .4% carbon alloy.  There are some grades with much more carbon than that. 

[Royce]

What characteristic. puts it in the "tool" steel category.vs regular chrome moly

[blykins]

What characteristic. puts it in the "tool" steel category.vs regular chrome moly

The heat treat/hardness. 

[jayb]

Just as a for instance, the roller tip and roller axle on my rockers are made from A2 tool steel, and are heat treated to Rockwell C57 hardness.  I'm also using A2 tool steel for the rocker shafts, although I may go to 8620 steel in production, which is case hardened when heat treated, not through-hardened like A2.  4140 steel like what is used in the rocker arm bodies is usually heat treated to about Rockwell C30.

[cammerfe]

Just as a 'for instance', a good knife blade is somewhere in the RC range of 50-60.

KS

[Dumpling]

Glad to read up on the progress. One request....please don't use Unobtainium. Thank you Jay and supporting Staff!!!

I'm thinking this entire topend, intake and heads, are made of "unobtanium". In the event of breakage, or need for replacement, it seems like this setup will be rarer than MT FE Hemi heads and matching intake....

[cjshaker]

Glad to read up on the progress. One request....please don't use Unobtainium. Thank you Jay and supporting Staff!!!

I'm thinking this entire topend, intake and heads, are made of "unobtanium". In the event of breakage, or need for replacement, it seems like this setup will be rarer than MT FE Hemi heads and matching intake....

Why would that be the case? As far as I know, all of Jay's parts are pretty much readily available, short of time frame issues with the foundry. I'm pretty sure Jay will have parts on the shelf as needed, and I'm also pretty sure that Jay will get parts to anyone who needs them in short order. I have not seen or even heard of a single complaint about customer service, so the comment seems unwarranted.

[frnkeore]

In my early years ('70's) as a machinist, I worked in the mold industry and with that, I usually worked with A2, D2, H13 and some S7. All through the years, I worked with O2 & W1 for temporary tooling.

Tool steel, is a specialty steel, developed for a particular purpose. A2 & D2, for wear resistance, H13 for strength in elevated temps such as forging dies and S5-7 for impact applications, such as air chisels and shear blades. They have carbon contents of .40 to 1.5%, the higher carbon the more wear resistant they are. They are also stable after heat treat. Meaning you can machine to closer tolerance, before HT. Most of them, require grinding to the finished dimensions.

There machineabilty, generally goes with their carbon content, of all of them D2 was the worst. It's both hard on cutting tools and grinding wheels. The easiest was H13 and it leaves a nice machined finish. In my day, there wasn't inserted carbide cutting tools or low priced carbide end mills. They would have made my life much easier.

Overall, H11 & 13 are the best steels to use in automotive applications S7 might be a good one for rocker arms, though harder to machine. I think A2, is a little over kill for rocker shafts but, you shouldn't ever wear them out and if both rocker arms and shafts are hardened, you shouldn't need bushings, just oil grooves.

[Gaugster]

Glad to read up on the progress. One request....please don't use Unobtainium. Thank you Jay and supporting Staff!!!

I'm thinking this entire topend, intake and heads, are made of "unobtanium". In the event of breakage, or need for replacement, it seems like this setup will be rarer than MT FE Hemi heads and matching intake....

I wasn't expressing any doubts about the final products. Just a little Engineering humor. Jay has been pretty clear that his products are meant to be the best bang for the buck going. Any departures from backward(s) compatibility are needed to push the platform forward raising the power limits

[jayb]

Glad to read up on the progress. One request....please don't use Unobtainium. Thank you Jay and supporting Staff!!!

I'm thinking this entire topend, intake and heads, are made of "unobtanium". In the event of breakage, or need for replacement, it seems like this setup will be rarer than MT FE Hemi heads and matching intake....

Actually, one of the reasons I got into this business in the first place was the difficulty of obtaining good parts on a regular basis.  It used to aggravate me to no end when A) I had to pay for parts in advance and then B) wait long periods of time in order to get them.  I hate that; parts from Dove and Blue Thunder come to mind.  As a result I try to keep all my normal "catalog" parts in stock.  At the moment the only thing I'm out of is my intake adapters for the high riser heads.  I have all the normal intake adapters and the tunnel port intake adapters in stock, as well as the timing covers, timing sets, water pump adapters, SOHC inspection covers, and of course my books. 

One thing that makes keeping parts in stock difficult is that I have a significant inventory cost; for example I have to buy the timing cover castings 50 at a time, and I currently have about 40 of them in stock.  It will probably take me a couple years to sell those, so the casting cost is completely tied up at this point.  Also, with any new product there can be unanticipated issues, that make them more difficult or expensive to manufacture.  The pentroof valve covers that I manufactured for a while come to mind.  You'd think those would be easy (I did), but it turned out that right out of the foundry, the finish on those valve covers was typically a little rough.  As a result, with every single valve cover I had to hand finish parts of the external surfaces, and then take them back to the foundry to be re-blasted to get the outside finish that I wanted.  This was very time consuming, and both timewise and financially the valve covers were a loser.  This is why I haven't put them up for "catalog" sale on the main web site.  I have been working with the foundry and we have some ideas on how to solve this problem, so I expect to make the valve covers available again in a few months.  But I'm going to do a limited quantity this time, probably only 25 sets, and if they still turn out to be difficult to build, I probably won't do them again.

Now on the cylinder heads, I think they really will hit the mark from a performance perspective, which bodes well for me offering them for a long time to come.  And assuming the valvetrain issues get resolved, I expect to be able to make them generally available as a catalog product after I produce the first 30 sets.  But I can't promise that yet, because I haven't built the first 30 sets.  Lots of unexpected problems can come up with the first production run; manufacturing products can be hard.  However, when I go to production with the first 30 sets, I will have all the tooling in place to build them, and the last thing I want to do is leave another FE guy hanging without the ability to run the parts.  So even if I don't make them a catalog item, I will still be able to offer replacement parts, because the tooling is there. 

So, as long as FE Power is around, I anticipate that replacement cylinder heads, intake manifolds, and rocker arms will be available, either from stock or with a relatively short lead time.  And of course I would be happy to trade one of my cylinder head packages for a pair of M/T hemi heads and intake for the FE 

[gdaddy01]

Yea , take that .  keep up the good work , Jay .

[Gaugster]

Any updates yet? Curious to learn how things are going. Thx!

[jayb]

Things are good, just taking longer than expected, as usual.  Right now I'm buried in getting some unrelated projects done for a couple FE Power customers, and I need to finish that up before I can get the dyno mule back together.  I now have the pushrods, and I got the roller tips, roller tip axles, and rockers shafts back from heat treat on Monday, so all I have left to do is finish machining the rocker arms.  Once the other projects are done I'll be back on the CNC to do that.  I'm hoping for more dyno results between Christmas and New Years.

One thing that was a surprise when I took the engine apart, and I don't think it was mentioned here before, was a coil bind issue on one of the spring/retainer combinations.  You may recall that I had trouble with the #8 exhaust rocker arm getting the adjuster jammed up into the rocker arm.  I thought I had bent a valve and this was the result, but when I took the head off and disassembled and checked the valves, they were dead straight.  This had me baffled for a while, because I had checked coil bind on a couple of the springs when I had initially assembled the heads.  But I didn't check all of them, which in hindsight was a mistake.  On the spring/retainer combination for the #8 exhaust valve, the inner spring would not seat completely on the retainer.  It was like the boss on the retainer had a taper in it or something, because the spring would fit partially on, but not go all the way to the seat on the retainer.  This subtracted about .060" from the coil bind on that spring/retainer combination, which was enough to cause the problem.

Upon further inspection of the rest of the springs and retainers, I found that most of them were tight; even the outside springs were rather tight on the retainers.  This was a surprise, because the retainers are the ones that PAC recommends for their springs, and I've never heard anything bad about PAC's quality before.  Just my luck   I took the whole set of springs and retainers into my local shop, where they have a fixturing tool for cutting retainers.  The shop agreed that they were too tight with the springs, and they cut all the retainers by a small amount to allow the retainers to fit onto the springs correctly.  They also checked coil bind on the whole set and wrote the numbers on each retainer/spring combo, so I'm confident I have this problem resolved now.

I've never encountered a situation like this before, but at least it's fixed now, and I don't expect any further problems.  Hopefully the next dyno session will go smoothly...

[MeanGene]

So this was my reply on an antique tractor forum, in a thread about finding ways to use your lathe- and a true story about my 16x60 South Bend.
A buddy who has a Pro Modified pulling truck with a 672 ci Ford on methanol was upgrading his tire sizes, had rims and a set of centers  another buddy cut out for him when they both still worked at Mare Island  Naval Yard in the 90's, but the centers, although very nicely done,  were about 1/8" too big to fit in the rims, so he asked if I  would trim them down. So he brings them over, get one loaded up, and  select a new carbide bit, and start to cut- SCREEEEEEEEEEE along with  much smoke, and a fine wire chip coiling up. Stopped to regroup, could  barely cut the wire chip with a pair of dikes, jeez. Tried several bits,  faster, slower, always SCREEEEEE! So I ask him, what is that crap? He  says its Ducol steel from the Yard. I ask what is Ducol steel?  Battleship armor he says- there were lots of scraps laying around....
Caterpillar cutting edges are D2 steel, and they are indeed very tough- I have ripped solid rock with D8s and D9s with smoke coming off the tips, and they hang in there- same with the dozer blade edges

[427John]

Sounds like what the Navy called STS(special treatment steel) used for deck and superstructure armor,had lots of nickel and very elaborate heat treatment.