RE: Thanksgiving Forensics on the Condition of the FlatCad . . . Gobble Fricking Gobble! Been working over the holidays to clean up all the internals from the FlatCad, do some more forensics on the parts and get ready for the freshen up, numerous modifications and rebuild for next year.
A little history on the motor: This was the first year that it has been ran - just finished it in early spring, brought it to John Beck to dyno, managed to get it ready for Bonneville . . . ran it hard there and REALLY ran it hard at the Ohio Mile. It has gone through various issues with fuel problems, it has been over-revved (yes - I was the guy that floated the valves
), it was thrashed hard at the Ohio Mile to see if it could handle it, etc.. Buddy decided to 'see what it could do' . . . which makes me shiver and shake like an old dog passing razor blades . . . . God love him! All I could think about was the conversation of "Well - guess we need to make another one . . . ".
Frankly, when we took it apart . . . we had no clue as to what we were going to see.
We found that 5 of the intake lifters had adjuster issues and they'd backed off about .250 (out of .510) . . . which means not only did we have very little lift, we had very little duration - but it still ran really hard. Cheap repop lifters caused the issue - in 2013 we're going to a custom roller cam to hopefully give the valve train a bit more reliability and take some drama out of it.
Three Mains a Go Go . . .It was the lower end that Buddy and I were most worried about - as we'd thrashed it hard, had thrown a LOT of horsepower at it and we have no clue as to how strong these blocks actually are??? There is really no tribal knowledge on what was weak, what will fail first, etc . . . so it was a big ole' guessing game. Though - we'd done everything we could think of to design a really strong lower end . . . steel mains, big thick girdle, billet Crower crank, billet rods, etc.. Don did some unbelievably beautiful machine work . . . based on my 3D CAD designs - everything was spot on. With only 3 main bearings, 4 5/8 stroke, 8.75" rods, 6000+ RPM and 550+ horsepower . . . what were we in for?
Well - attached are the pictures of the key lower end components - everything looks really normal . . . better than we had expected.
You'll see the crankshaft journals -- the mains are in good shape, the rod journals have a bit of wear on the back side. After close inspection today, I believe that they'll need to be ground under size to .010 . . . as I can feel some grooves with my fingernails.
Take a look at the bearings - in pretty dang good shape. Maybe our 'priority main' oiling system kept them happy?
A piece of crap went through the center main, but all-in-all, they were in nice shape for what they went through.
You'll also see a couple pictures of the pistons. They were coated by our sponsor (Finishline Coatings - great people!) - with a ceramic coating on the tops, a friction reducing coating on the sides and a oil shedding coating on the undersides. Given the extreme piston speed we experienced, they look really good.
Even though we're running a dry sump and this beast has an extremely tall deck (8.75" rods), there was plenty of oil up in the pins, the skirts looked really good and the Akerly HTD rings showed a really consistent sealing surface all around.
Everything looked really normal/good - especially considering that this engine had quite a bit of time on it (for a 100% purpose-built race engine) . . . with no checks or freshening up since the dyno.
Good stuff gang . . . gives us a lot of encouragement for where we're headed. Hopefully - stronger, faster and with more HP . . . and still reliable!
We'll keep posting as we get into the next stage of things . . . should be some real fun!
Thanks for listening to my Holiday Babble . . . tell me when you've heard enough!
B&D