OK, here's a quick update. Lots happening on this project but it all seems to take too long
Right now I'm trying to finish up the rocker arms, which are the biggest hurdle to getting back on the dyno. The picture below is of two of the rockers that are nearly finished, plus some of the raw castings that I start with:
Here's a close-up of the two rockers that are mostly machined. You'll notice that the intake rocker isn't finished on the adjuster end. This is because I have not yet completed the fixture necessary to put the hole for the adjuster in that rocker at an angle, to match up with the intake pushrod angle. The fixtures are the long pole in the tent on this project; they seem to take forever to machine.
The photo below shows the first fixture that is used to machine the rockers; in this case the rocker castings fit into pockets in the machined steel fixture, they are clamped down with bars that go across the fixture, and then the holes for the rocker shaft and roller tip shaft are machined. This particular fixture took 4 days on the CNC to get those pocket cut right:
There are a total of four fixtures that are needed for the rockers, and I have three of them machined, and also have run the first pair of rockers on them. The fourth fixture is the one that puts the angled adjuster hole in the intake rocker, and I should be done with that one in a few days. Then I can write the programs to machine the adjuster hole, and test machine the first intake rocker. Once that is finished, I can machine a complete set of the rockers with just a little more work.
However, there are also rocker parts that need to go off to heat treat yet, and that will take 7-10 days, plus I need to order new pushrods which will take a week or so, so I'm probably 2-3 weeks out before the engine is running again on the dyno. I was expecting to be running by now, but as usual there have been delays. In fact, I had a CNC machine that I use for a variety of products, including these rockers, come up with an electrical fault a couple weeks ago, and it was down for over a week. Plus the motor on my air compressor went out, so I had to get a new one of those, and of course the first one I got was defective, and quit after two days
Everything is up and running again now, but you can never tell what is going to happen to slow you down.
On the positive side, I sent both the 4V and the 8V intakes, plus a new intake adapter with the modifications I found I needed after running the first one, down to Joe Craine. Joe flowed the intakes and found that while the 4V intake was pretty good, the 8V intake needed some work. He tweaked them both up for me, so I'll be taking some careful measurements on these and modifying the production model to match. Joe also was of the opinion that having the manifolds split in half for easy porting wasn't really necessary, so I think I'll revise the production versions to make them single piece, rather than two piece.
Also, I got in touch with SCE gaskets and now have 5 sets of the gaskets that I need to install the intake adapter and intakes. I was really tired of manually cutting out gaskets LOL! The new SCE gaskets look great, and in addition to the intake gaskets they sent me a pair of their new MLS steel head gaskets, which look really nice. I'll be installing those before I run the engine again.
In summary, two steps forward, one step back, but getting closer to more dyno time...