Because Build Threads Are A Thing

[Jeff23spl]

Originally Posted by Fstrnyou I don't plan on doing anything beyond catch cans, intercooler and a tune.

You probably know how many of us said that when buying a speed and ended up with a BT setup....

Keep an eye on your timing chain, i heard some story on these engine similar to us...

[Fstrnyou]

3.5 EB timing chain issues are 11-13 model years. The 2014's got the revised parts, so I shouldn't have a problem.

Also, after the tune, making more power on the EB becomes cost prohibitive. You don't get much from intake and exhaust. Turbo upgrades are small-ish and quite pricey with 2 turbos. Now I'm getting into the price range of: "should have bought a v8 and slapped a supercharger on it" territory.

[MadMaz]

Originally Posted by Fstrnyou No major updates. Hit 8000 miles on the forged build. Finally put in synthetic for the first time. If it ain't broke in by now, it won't ever be. I've been holding off on going synthetic because of the variance in compression numbers, cyl 1 being much higher than the other 3. I haven't rechecked it since then. I'm curious, but it doesn't really matter. Whether they're better or worse, I'm still going to send it. A few Mondays ago, pitch black dark, I managed to find a massive pothole. Remnant damage from the last wet freeze we had. Bent both passenger rims and damaged the sidewalls of both tires. Found a set of stock wheels with worn out, but usable, tires. I seized the opportunity to replace suspension parts. So I replaced inner & outer tie rods and front rearward control arms with urethane bushings installed. Both sides, all Moog.

Hey man where did you get those bushings?
I just placed an order to polyurethan.ru/en but I only bought everything to the rear of the car at this time.

[Fstrnyou]

All my bushings came from polyurethan.ru

[Fstrnyou]

I disassembled my original 157k mile engine last night because a local spun a rod bearing and needed a good crank.

Main bearings, aside from #2 , look damn near new.
Rod bearings all look the same...and horrible compared to the mains.
The crank journals all look great except for #2 , which has a fine line on it that can't be felt. Only visual. I'm sure it will polish out.

I needed to pull this thing apart anyways so I can use the block to rebuild my built motor. I'll be taking it to a different machine shop that's had good reviews. Hopefully they'll be more precise with the bore and I'll have them do .003 P2W (per Manley spec) instead of .0035 like I told the other shop (which came back with .0032-.0038).
Also, I may tighten up the ring gaps too. I did .024/.026.
There seemed to be a lot of blowby very early on, but I'm not certain if it was because of excessive P2W clearance, excessive ring gaps, or out-of-round cylinder bores...or I suppose a combination of all that.
When I say out-of-round, I'm only talking a few ten-thousandths. Could be a negligible amount.

Pics below after 157k miles original engine:
Girdle bearing halves 1 thru 5
Main journal #2
Random pick rod bearing.

[Db09ms3]

Man that blows but at least you'll be pretty efficient at throwing it all back together!

[Fstrnyou]

Well, I have an issue with recurring insanity with where I'm allocating funds with this build.

I could just pull my built motor, tear it down, take the rotating assy and this old block to the new machinist and be back up running "fairly quickly" and at a reasonable cost.

BUT....
I didn't want to reuse my 157k mile stock head with the last build and I REALLY don't want to transplant it to the rebuild. So I plan to get all of the head work done first before I even pull my built motor out for the rebuild.
This is where the insanity part starts. I have a belief that the exhaust side of our head (including the exhaust cam profile) is severely lacking. I mean FFS, our exhaust cam is the exact same as the N/A exhaust cam. So I'm working with Kelford Cams on a custom grind cam set which I believe I discussed details in an earlier post.
Additionally, I plan to install +2mm exhaust valves (keeping stock sized 35mm intake valves). That will obviously require some head work to fit and the some bowl porting to support it. This now requires me to verify piston-to-valve clearance and possibly have my pistons relief cut.

I haven't pulled the trigger on any of it yet and the $$ is adding up quick. Just getting the head/valvetrain where I want it will easily set me back $3000. WTF am I thinking!?

What I plan to do is one thing. What I actually do could be, and normally is, something more realistic.

[BlackEscortGT]

This whole thread is wack. #craiganeering

[Fstrnyou]

Minor update:
Supertech spring kit arrived about a month ago.
70lb dual spring - certainly overkill on stock and even mild cams, but IF I do end up getting Kelford cams, they should be good.

A few weeks back I received the Damond FoST PI adapter kit.
I scribed the port shape onto one of my spare heads. It appears the outter shape is nearly spot on to the stock ports. 95% of the porting will be massaging the divider.

32mm (+2) exhaust valves are on a very long backorder everywhere I looked. 31’s seems to be much more available, so that’s what I’ll be doing. I’ll be ordering all new valves in the next few weeks.

[Jeff23spl]

Very interested to hear about the upgrade results !

[Fstrnyou]

Went to the drag strip on Friday to support a local MS3 trying for a new personal best. Figured while I was there I may as well take a few spins myself.

This 5400lb brick is somewhat slow, but it was still a blast. Wanted to make a few more passes to get my 60’ a bit better, but rain shut it down.
It’s fully stock, so this will be my baseline.

[Fstrnyou]

Valves arrived the other day. Now I just need to get some porting done and then send the head off to the shop for a full refresh. Locals that have used this place said the head comes back looking brand new for a very good price.

[Fstrnyou]

Last night, I started taking the donor head apart to prep it for porting. Figured it would be a good time to weigh stuff.

Spring retainers:
OE - 10.3g
New - 6.6g

Spring set (value corrected for sprung weight):
OE - 17.9g
New - 22.3g

Intake Valves:
OE - 51g
New - 46.4g

Exhaust Valves
OE - 46.4g
New (+1mm) - 47.2g

Looking at the assemblies the intake side weight was reduced by 3.9g but the exhaust side weight increase by 1.5g.
OE Int 79.2g Exh 74.6 - the intake assembly being 4.6g heavier than the exhaust assembly
New Int 75.3g Exh 76.1g - the intake assembly now being 0.8g lighter than the exhaust assembly.

Seems like a lighter intake side, vs exhaust side, would make more sense anyways considering they use the same springs and the intake valve sees more lift.

Anyways, back to taking my sweet ass time getting this head done.

[Fstrnyou]

I suppose it's been a while. Been busy at work and not many funds to do fun things. I'm salary, so working more doesn't mean more money unfortunately.

Let me start off with this:
This is NOT a "how-to" port your cylinder head. I'm only showing how I went about it, whether it's right or wrong makes little difference to me. I'm just messing around with my internet education. My plan was to merely clean up the ports since the as-cast runners felt like 20 grit sandpaper. I didn't hog out the runners. I just took the tops off the mountains. There are several areas where the deepest parts of the rough casting is still there. It doesn't look pretty but it feels very smooth.
I won't have any before/after dyno numbers or before/after flowbench numbers.

I've never done this before so I started off with the exhaust runners since they were the easiest to access and have the least effect on HP if it gets out of hand while I get a feel for the grinder and how much pressure to apply. I was using an electric die-grinder with 80-120 grit cartridge rolls.

As I said, I started with the exhaust runners and they turned out pretty well. They feel better than they look. I didn't have anything to match the port openings to, so I left them alone.

Below is a before/after.

[Fstrnyou]

Next up, intake runners. The bonus here is I have the Damond FoST PI adapter, so I at least had that to match the runners to.

Same as the exhaust. This was just a cleanup to knock down the casting and blend the openings to the adapter plate. It took a bit to decide what to do with the runner dividers and settled on just rounding them over. No knife edge or single runner stuff.

Below is before/after runner and the before/after port match to the adapter plate.
The picture of the port match runners has a bad glare at the port roof. I can assure you the adapter and ports are aligned and flush.
Bonus shot from the viewpoint of the port injector.

[Fstrnyou]

Next step, the exhaust bowls.

These didn't seem to take much work. Partly because the runners are so short, I was able to get nearly all the way to the bowls from the manifold side. The most effort here was getting the steel valve seats flush with the port wall. It's not as important on the exhaust side because the air is going the other way, but I still wanted that transition to be smooth.

I've read that the bowl inside diameter should be 90% of the valve outside diameter. Since I'm running 31mm valves, that's 1.098" ID. I measured the ID of the valve seat to be 1.020, so I have a bit of opening up to do there. I'll get to that another day, but as of now, everything feels smooth.

Before/after

[Fstrnyou]

As you may have guessed, the intake bowls are next. By this time, I'm starting to run out of daylight. So I only managed to get one set of intake bowls completed. I didn't get around to measuring the ID of the valve seat to see how much work is needed to get to the 90% figure I mentioned earlier. I'll save that for another day too since I still have 3 more sets of intake bowls to do.

The big port bowl wasn't so bad. Just smoothed everything out like all the rest of the porting so far. The small port bowl took quite a bit of work to remove all the extra material that was visually unappealing and would seem to obstruct flow. I removed as much material as I felt necessary but didn't want to take it way too far. I figured the more material I remove, the greater the chance of inconsistency from one cylinder to the next. So I stopped when it seemed good enough.

Before/after

[Fstrnyou]

Okay. Only a sliver of daylight left and not enough time to finish the next set of intake bowls. But, there was time to see what could be done with the combustion chamber. There are sharp edges everywhere and the quench pad on the exhaust side does quite a bit of shrouding. I put in the old valves and started at it. I didn't really have a set plan. I just started removing material around the exhaust valves and stopped when I was satisfied. I softened the perimeter edge of the chamber and rounded off the areas around the injector port.

Before/after

[Fstrnyou]

I finished all the bowl work a few days ago on Saturday. It took another 10hrs if grinding away with cartridge rolls. The small runner intake port bowls take soo much time to remove all that material.

I had planned on taking the heads to the machine shop today for refurbishing/assembly but I made the mistake of watching more porting on YouTube. I decided to take the combustion chambers another step.

There is typically a ridge just outside the valve seat called Machinists Ridge. It’s very small and I didn’t consider it to be an issue. But head porters grind that ridge down for a smoother air flow at low valve lifts. So I spent another 3 hours today mostly on the exhaust side ridge. The intake side ridge is pretty good already, so I just buffed the edge smooth.

First pic shows the ridge around the exhaust valve seat on the right side. Left side is mostly smoothed out. All this was done with the intake valves installed, so as to not damage the valve seats since the stock size valves will be going back in. The exhaust valves are going to 31mm, so a scratch here and there on the exhaust seats will be ground down anyway.

[Jeff23spl]

Do you think the removed material on the head combustion chamber will affect your CR ?

[Fstrnyou]

So little was removed, it should be negligible.
And I'm not at all concerned with a very slightly lower CR.

[Fstrnyou]

Built motor/low comoression tear down update.
Big thanks to @BlackEscortGT; , @dagrimey1; , and a few other local NATOR fellas Brandon and The Beard.

Drove the car in the garage around 4:30p on Saturday and had the motor/trans/diff on the floor around the same time Sunday.
Dinner break.
Complete tear down to the bare block finished around 9.

Because I knew there was quite a bit of blowby that my PCV system wasn't able to handle (blowing dipsticks), I was leaning towards ring flutter being the issue so I was expecting broken rings. What I wasn't expecting was ring land damage. It seems because only a small piece of the top ring broke, it didn't have enough support to stay true in the groove so it bound up and smushed the ring land below it. The middle ring also broke, but they were equal since pieces (2 halves of the ring).
Sorry, I didn't get a pic of the rings last night. I will get one tonight and add it in.

[Jeff23spl]

it isn't the best thing to see but you are fixed on what is leaking...

Any idea of the route cause ?
Is your bloc cylinder grooved a lot ?

[Solarsurge]

Oof. Sorry for your loss.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Fstrnyou]

Originally Posted by Jeff23spl it isn't the best thing to see but you are fixed on what is leaking... Any idea of the route cause ? Is your bloc cylinder grooved a lot ?

Root cause, insufficient crankcase ventilation.
I didn't do a close inspection of cylinder wall. Once I found out what was broken, we rolled the block into the corner and cleaned up because I already have an 87.5mm block to bore out (the original block to my car).
Now I just need to order parts to rebuild plus build a better ventilation system.

[Fstrnyou]

A week or two ago, I got a good look at the cylinder walls. There is a very strange wear pattern at the same spot on every cylinder. Light wear in cylinder one and progressively gets worse towards cylinder 4. I haven't really put my finger on the cause.

The wear pattern on the piston skirts is indicative of too much P2W clearance which allowed the piston to rock a little. But the strange thing is, the piston with the most clearance (3.9 thou) seemed to have the least amount of piston-rock wear. The damaged cylinder 4 piston had 3.3 thou clearance that that skirt is wornn to hell and back. Strange indeed.

[Fstrnyou]

Okay. I got my head back from the shop today. Looks good as new. Except it came with some paperwork from the flow test place.

[Fstrnyou]

Referencing the MZR-DISI Head thread by Mazdazilla, I graphed the stock flow data and now I am able to plug in the flow data of my head for comparison.
Mazdazilla mentioned in the OP that his data came from testing at 25" of H2O.
My flow test sheet doesn't specify, so I will need to call tomorrow and get that number. BUT, it seems 28" H2O is pretty standard.
I found a website that shows how to convert 28" data to 25" data and it claims to be fairly accurate so I have adjusted my values in the graph using that conversion. Even if the conversion isn't perfectly accurate, this isn't a horseshoe/hand-grenade scenario. It should be close enough.

You've already seen the porting details earlier, so let's get right to it.
The exhaust flow increase is negligible. I failed to open up the throat under the valve seat to account for the larger valve. So the +1mm face is literally doing nothing but probably getting in the way. My bad. Flow is 3-5% better but that could simply be within acceptable tolerances of two different flow benches and possibly different ambient weather conditions (temp/humidity).
The intake...well here is where I have good news to report. It seems the bowl work did it's job. 13-15% increase in flow in the low lift area (.050"-.200") and increases to 37% improvement by high lift (.450").