LOL jeez JD what a disappointment, we were all for giving you extra credit for original and creative--- hoping at the very least it was a Freudian
No kidding!!
Team member Dale Hays(BoredandStroked) has been busy -- made a set of aluminum 'FlowBench' lifters. They're designed to go into the lifter blocks - the top has a flange so they can't drop down. Joe Abbin, author of "Blown Flathead" is doing the flowbench work for us.
These make it easy to put some 'setup springs' on a couple valves and set the valve open height to be .100, .200, .300, .400 and .500 -- then test the flow with all the rest of the things we need to try. We'll be using a junk block as a guinea pig - so we have plenty of ports to try. One thing that is different on a FlatCad versus a flathead Ford is that the ports are not the same - front to back, there are actually 4 different intake port lengths/shapes, similar for the exhaust. ( Darn Cadillac engineers!).
Here is the type of stuff that will be done:
1) Base line numbers with stock ports, stock valve sizes, etc..
2) Rework the valve bowl areas (lots of room for improvement), start the porting procedure (doing all the normal 'short-side' radius work, hogging out the runners, etc).
3) Test a variety of larger valve sizes to determine when we are port restricted (with a competition port) - versus valve restricted. We can go up to about a 2.05 intake and a 1.75 exhaust -- though we may find that we run out of flow at smaller valve sizes. Dale Hays's guess (and that is what it is ) is that at about a 1.94 intake, we'll be done.Jimmy Stevens and Ron Main both said bigger is better, though, so we'll see what testing says. Keep in mind that we will have a large-bore 6-71 on the top with a Enderle Bugcatcher - so we'll be force-feeding it . . .
4) Test with our new combustion chamber designs and proposed block reliefs. We've carved up some prototype combustion chambers on a CNC mill - directly from the cool SolidWorks designs that Chris Daniels has done.
Flowbench testing isn't going to tell us exactly what works or how much HP we'll make -- but hopefully it will give us some dang good ideas to try . . . the dyno and the track will tell us if we did the right things.
The hard part is that we have NO real numbers for baselines for ANYTHING - other than the testing that was done about WW2 timeframe (see pics)--- so we'll just use the knowledge/experience of the group, throw a bit of luck in, send a few prayers to the Flathead Gods and see what happens. Time always gives us answers . . .