Todays Project - What did you do today?

[pjf134]

I spent the afternoon with a guy from Cincinnati, OH Home land Security. He drove to Pittsburgh with a truck and 6'x12' trailer and we went to a storage place to load up some stuff. He did leave some old stuff behind that was old and told me to get rid of it Wed. When he got back to Ohio he sent me a e-mail saying to check out the computer hard drive he left behind for Government info. and wipe it clean to Government specs. if it does have any. So back to storage I go on Wed. Being retired sure keeps me busy and I can't seem to get my stuff done. Honey do stuff on Wed. also. I was going to look at a small machining job today maybe 2 gears but never made it.
Paul

[4R8]

Oh dear. it seems Impulse purchasing has struck me again.
My brothers car (mentioned earlier) is still a a fair sight away from completion and Today I....

I bought another car to go into it's place with no room for it anywhere.
it's a 196* Humber Super Snipe which has had a full restoration 10 yrs ago. Won't need much work to bring back up to scratch again but we all know how "not much work" quickly turns into something with no end in sight.

[bobm4360]

(11-21-2012, 03:35 PM)4R8 Wrote: Oh dear. it seems Impulse purchasing has struck me again.
My brothers car (mentioned earlier) is still a a fair sight away from completion and Today I....

I bought another car to go into it's place with no room for it anywhere.
it's a 196* Humber Super Snipe which has had a full restoration 10 yrs ago. Won't need much work to bring back up to scratch again but we all know how "not much work" quickly turns into something with no end in sight.

Ayup! When the restoration is 90% done, you have 90% of the work yet to do

Regards,
Bob

[Rickabilly]

(11-22-2012, 12:38 AM)bobm4360 Wrote: Ayup! When the restoration is 90% done, you have 90% of the work yet to do

Regards,
Bob

However I do the sums there is always 100% of the work left to do, because no matter how much has been done you have to do all of the rest of it

4R8,
There's nothing like Nissan engines for forced induction, back in the day I used to have a Lotus 7 styled car for hill climbing, I built it but only ever took it out on practice days as running my machine shop got in the way of me getting any racing done, I would regularly take it out on the street in our quiet little industrial estate despite a lack of registration, It used the old Nissan A12 from the 120Ys and Datsun 1200s as they were tiny and took turbo charging very well, We would pump 26 lbs of boost through them using a Bog stock short motor, the head was decomp'd, roller tip rockers made and fitted on needle rollers and the valve springs uprated, but the bottom end simply freshened up with new pistons rings and bearings, As a Vibration engineering specialist I had all the gear to balance bottom ends so I did set up the first three engines for balancing but three out of three were as close as I could measure to spot on, so I didn't even bother after that, The little Toyota engines were almost as good and sat lower as they were a slant fitting but I had a good supply of Nissans so I used them.

An A12 at 1171cc's + 26lb of boost would rev past 11,500 RPM and clock over 200 BHP (the limit of my engine dyno) before the head studs stretched and the cooling system would over pressure often blowing off hoses and bubbling radiator tanks as the radiator cap couldn't handle the flow rate so couldn't control system pressure. Under the CAMs regulations at the time the penalty for forced induction was a capacity handicap of 1.7:1 factor but the cost of getting a normally aspirated 2000cc engine while keeping the carburation compliant up to 200BHP was prohibitive and even then they weighed twice as much and needed heavier gearboxes and final drives, so better tyres and a stronger heavier chassis. with the A12 I had the whole car with me in it down under 400Kg (900lbs) which meant well more than 500BHP/Ton!

I cracked one bore, stripped some head stud holes and melted pistons as a result of poor mixture control and the resulting pre ignition, but I never burned a single bearing or snapped a rod, I have nothing but respect for those little Nissans.

The best part was that a basic starter engine never cost more than a case of beer, and with all the parts for a bottom end build being less than $150 and taking about three hours to put together, I just didn't care about blowing them up, when the other boys would go on a weekend bender drinking, drugging, smoking and gambling away the same sort of cash in a weekend, I was building race engines and learning the skills while having an absolute blast.

I did buy an A15 with a set of twin hitachi "SUs" but never got around to fitting it. The A15 would have put it into a lower class for racing but I just couldn't bear the thought of losing my horsepower

Regards
Rick

[Mayhem]

Rick - you may be interested to know that Nissan will be racing in the V8 Supercar Series next year.

[sasquatch]

Rick, very interesting post!!

[ETC57]

YEHA!!
Gotta love those Horse Power stories!
Ya know a good gear head can squeeze performance out of a piano dolly.
Jerry.

[4R8]

(11-22-2012, 06:08 AM)Rickabilly Wrote: However I do the sums there is always 100% of the work left to do, because no matter how much has been done you have to do all of the rest of it

hmmm, I don't like that way of thinking. Sounds too much like the glass is half empty. I like it half full.

Unless is amber in colour and carbonated, then it'll be empty bloody quickly!

Cheers for the hillclimb vehicle goodness. Love hearing old race stories!
The Nissan for my brother will be his daily driver so unlike the insane 26lb a12, it'll probably be kept to a very conservative 5-7lb.
We'll see how long it stays that way though!

[Rickabilly]

Yep, Horsepower stories are often like fishing tales, I am really careful to quote only dyno figures and always to note whether it is a flywheel or roller figure. So many guys make up numbers "calculated" from how quick their car is over the local "Quarter mile" street run and anyone that has ever raced knows that this is more like guessing than calculating, a difference in any one of a hundred factors will affect the outcome of these calculations by hundreds of BHPs per ton.

And the biggest thing is that Horsepower matters much less than Torque anyhow, but as anyone that builds race engines for a living knows that you've got to supply horsepower figures to make a sale, Leading responsible Race engine builders to use a practice known as "Post holing" where an engine is set up for ultimate horsepower at only one point on the operating range of the engine and then Torque at all of the areas that matter when actually racing,
This technique is also used by the manufacturers when building performance variants of production cars that need to comply with emission regs, so they can quote a high BHP and then tune every other area for low emissions. I used to work in a GM owned engine test facility and was continually amazed by the questionable ethics of all of the manufacturers when it comes to type approval.

It's a funny game, engine building, where even now some of the best known names don't really understand what they are doing, but rather build to formulas laid down fifty years ago during the hot rodding and muscle car era, neglecting the little things like pushrod length but claiming BHPs that were achieved on a different engine with different valve train geometry.

Wow, Nissan back in supercars, are they being forced to use V8s, or have they opened the formula back up? After that fateful Bathurst race where the crowd wanted to kill Jimmy Richards, I didn't think we'd ever see the Japanese back at Bathurst. I haven't watched Bathurst since, I too was disgusted, and then when they rewrote the rulebook, meaning that Ford couldn't use their OHC V8s and had to use US produced Crate motors rather than the showroom product which would have been awesome, they lost me forever, just a political ploy to keep the redneck yobs happy, rather than developing the breed through competition.

Personally I have always been a Ford "Cleveland" fan, having built some twin turbo streeters and more than a few naturally aspirated semi drag engines for customers, but when Ford built the Boss quad cam I just had to have one, so I bought an XR8 Ute with a 290kW(390BHP) Boss, with all the trimmings, I even brought it with me when i emigrated to England. The thing with the Boss is that despite the power it is really quite boring to drive as it has this big flat massive torque curve, inlike a Chevy LS which is comparitively peaky, so with the Chev you get the sensation of coming in and out of the power and torque which makes it feel like you are doing something, the Boss just goes, smooth and easy, but with the big unrestricted exhausts in the local Baldock tunnel there is just nothing like it.

Any way rant over, One day I hope to get back to building my dream engine, I have most of the parts already, but I just need to finish the manifold and get some pistons.
Ford Cleveland, thick web four bolt main block +0.030", with aftermarket 4340 chrome moly Main bearing saddles, Billet steel 4340 3.75 inch stroke crank balanced polished and knife edged, 4340 H beam con-rods, Aluminium cylinder heads with raised inlet and exhaust ports S/S 4V valves on double valve springs and titanium retainers, with quench chambers and to top it all off my own design of fuel injection system using a base manifold I cast from a Detomasso Pantera copy and then fitted with Air horns I designed and had my guys machine on our old CNC gear, it is designed so that each port has it's own injector that squirts directly down the centre of the air horn as per F1 and Indy cars, giving the most even cylinder filling possible with the most even fuelling possible as well.
It will come in at about 383 Cu Inches and have ultra smooth torque across the range. Power? it'll be enough, but as I said before only the dyno will tell the actual figures.

I will post some pictures of the manifold and other parts when I find them they are in some obscure folder on my old laptop, I will start looking right away.

Regards
Rick

[Rickabilly]

(11-22-2012, 04:09 PM)4R8 Wrote: hmmm, I don't like that way of thinking. Sounds too much like the glass is half empty. I like it half full.

Ahhh, but I actually prefer the building to the driving when it comes to race cars.
Rick