It's been a time

Post date: Mar 27, 2020 4:32:06 PM

Yeah, it's been a while. A lot has happened, though.

Side rant: Google is slowly breaking the features of Sites "classic", with the aim of getting everyone to "New Sites". Only problem is all (and I do mean ALL) of the features I use on Sites don't convert over.

So do I deal with a slowly crumbling interface, or do I completely rebuild this whole thing?

SaaS is simply awesome.

Since we last met the car has been through a whirlwind.

It was still down on power with the new cam. I picked up a reman Street Demon for cheap and put it on. Suddenly it had much, much better part throttle response! So, maybe I've finally failed the Qjet. I never could get the Street Demon quite where I wanted - simply never got enough fuel through the secondaries - so I picked up a Brawler 750. Thankfully I was able to sell the street demon and the box full of bits and got about half my money back.

I went through at least 30 different setups on that thing. Lots of jets, bleeds, power valves, squirters, cams, types of squirters, etc etc.

Then I hooked up the timing light to check the idle speed -

Oh, did I mention that my custom tach is futzing out? Yeah, that too -

and figured WTH, pointed the light at the balancer.

9 degrees initial timing.

My spec for this engine is 24 degrees initial.

I used the same process I always to for setting up this distributor and ignition box (load a specific timing curve, set initial, load the running curve), and, well, something apparently went wrong.

It runs a whole lot better now!

But I had to undo a whole bunch of stuff on the carb. Notably, when I first put the Brawler on, it simply wasn't drivable. I had my first ever carb fires thanks to that thing. It'd idle just great, rev just great, but put it in gear and try to move? It'd cough, sputter, stall and die. I kept adding more and more squirter - finally getting to the REO pumps and 52 squirters - and it was still terrible!

Well, get the right timing setup, and now I'm back to standard pumps, a 28 squirter, and a orange cam. And it probably needs to be leaned out even more.

After about the 20th time removing the carb, and specifically the super cheap summit fuel line, I convinced myself to get a jiffy tite quick disconnect kit. Finally got that installed this week. I've only used teflon lines before this, but their connectors go straight to standard rubber braided lines. Thankfully I still had Shaun's leftovers from the 4.6 which had some aeromotive -6 and fittings. After struggling with teflon it's hilarious just how easy it is to assemble rubber lines. The inner size is notably different, but maybe only 10% or something. Also got a y block off amazon for less than $10.

So finally making progress there, but it's slow.

In other news, while planning for the diesel build, I picked up the 4" crank and rods from Remmel. BTR promises he'll have the spacers made Real Soon Now. Amazingly the crank is dead straight, but when I inspected it, it appeared the 3rd and 4th throws are about a half thou larger than 1 and 2. Haven't done full clearance measurements with bearings and everything, so might have to mix some bearing shells, or just get those two throws heavily polished. Who knows.

I've settled on a 4.185 (or 4.195) bore with a 4.27 gasket. I had unshrouded the valves on the current heads out to a 4.4 gasket which kept gnawing at me.

Then Edelbrock ran a fire sale on their heads! Seriously, they knocked 40% off the price or so. The basic assembled heads are cheaper than the bare heads.....

Decided to go All In on porting these suckers.

Here's an idea of just how much unshrouding happens even with a 4.27 gasket, and the kind of casting flash that they had out of the box

I was worried this would all go horribly wrong so got ahold of Kim to flow the heads. Funny story, he has an old flow bench (no computer) but hates using it. He hemmed and hawed then said "Aw hell, you're a smart guy. Want to just come down and run it?"

Obviously!

I might figure out how to post graphs at some point, but here's the key points

Reference stock head intake flow @ 0.6" 255

Unshrouded, otherwise stock intake @0.6" 266

Fully ported by yours truly flow @@0.6" 284

Reference stock head exhaust flow @ 0.6" 179

Unshrouded, otherwise stock exhaust @0.6" 188

Fully ported by yours truly flow @@0.6" 207

11% gain on the intake, 15% gain on the exhaust.

There's lies, damn lies, and flow benches, but at least I know I didn't destroy those heads! Something like 10 to 15 hours of work, too.

Oh, and R&R solid valve guides is a real pain. Ended up buying all new guides. Still need to get them sized.

Still need to get them surfaced - one has a 3 thou dip on one end, didn't even bother checking the other - and a valve job.

You may remember I talked about trying the Flatout exhaust gaskets?

Total failure.

Tried three different types!

All leaked like crazy.

Finally bothered to actually check the headers, and, well......

That's AFTER working on it for a couple of minutes. There was over 20 thou warp in those things.

which also resulted in:

Hey, ya gotta do what you gotta do.

But I did get more welding experience, which made the work on Shaun's Lincoln exhaust a few weeks later go much much better.

Considering that, plus the, ah, creative oil passage machining, and this:

pretty sure I'm going to a special Machinists Hell.

What else?

Oh yeah, super special $500 alternator was complete junk. Got a partial refund.

Choke design on the Street Demon is trash. Kept hanging up.

Choke design on Holley is lazy. Needs a vacuum break. As-is it simply slobbers on gas until the coil unwinds a little.

And then this special gem:

I just sat and stared at that one for a solid 15 minutes after it happened. Thankfully I was able to drill out most of the old stud then use a tap to cut new threads. I had a replacement pivot for the pump swap. Turns out they're the same for the standard and 50cc pumps so you don't actually need to change them. And apparently they use Super Duper Locker on these from the factory.

What else...?

I thought something was wrong with the 200-4r - seemed like the driveline slipped quite a lot - so I put in a transgo kit. Didn't help and made shifts worse, so I removed almost all of the kit. In the process I tried to get the 700r4 filter to work with the standard PML pan. Got good gasket crush, but the trans just leaked like crazy. What to do?

Custom spacer, naturally.

How does one get a good fit on a custom spacer?

We probably shouldn't be allowed near machinery any more.

Now I'm pretty certain the slip is either the rear end, or these tires simply break loose easily but don't squeal.

And the last bit. I got swept up in Serpentine Fever, so working towards a conversion using some brackets made by a guy on ROP and using the early 90's Chevy truck v6 brackets. A couple of afternoons at the junkyard got us a good selection of brackets, braces and pulleys. Need to convert to an R4, get a spool mount alternator, and possibly a fancy type 2 PS pump conversion from Turn One.

One quirk is using a Ford 302 crank pulley. The ford hub snout is larger than the olds and the 4 bolt pattern is slightly smaller than the olds. And I'll be running an ATI damper which only has the Chevy 3 bolt pattern, but the Olds snout. While at Kim's talking about head stuff a guy Mark walked in who just so happened to run a machine shop out of his garage! So he took the pulley, used a spindexer to correctly drill the three holes, then made a precision spacer to shrink the ford hole to an olds snout. All for $65! And he's a pretty cool guy.

Now with the virus lockdown it's tough to know how things will progress. Still need caps and spacers from BTR, will need BTR to do machine work, need to get the guides sized, valve job and surfacing done on the heads, etc etc. But for now just back to messing with the carb and trying to have fun with it. And in the mean time we re-re-re-did the exhaust on the Town Car, replaced body mounts on the c10, and just tore the Chevelle down to bare frame. So at least we're not idle.