Derek

Today....Was a good day... Got started on the first manifold. Probing the ports. This will establish my zero point. The cores were 3D printed and the ports ended up being 90.114mm apart. I can handle .114mm:) Action shot of the fly cutter doing the finish pass. on the flange. In order to make the linkage that came with my ITB kit work I needed to shift the ports .025” It is going to be a lot easier to blend the shift than rework the linkage. I didn’t have a CAD drawing of the ITB so I traced around it, scanned it and then imported it into my CAD program. I’m happy with the fit. WFO Working on the injector bungs. I drilled all the way through with a .4375” bit then opened it up to .655” part way down. I use the method described here: http://www.sdsefi.com/techinta.htm It leaves an air gap around the injector body and help guard against heat soak. It’s the same method I used on my manifold and it survives August heat in Florida. I pulled one of the injectors out of may car for a test fit. That’s going to look really good! Now that’s my kind of selfie:)

My ITBs are DCOE pattern and the cores are 3D printed so I would imagine it would be a case of printing cores with a larger bore. I think there will end up being a few choices for manifolds. That is one of the reasons I did 3 2 barrel manifolds. One pattern to carve. With the engine leaning towards the right space may get a little tight for some throttle bodies. Do you have a link to that video?

Finally got my intake castings in. They came out pretty good. I may need to tweak my pattern a bit. A good part of the flanges will be machined away. I purposely made the a lot larger than I needed. I like options. I left the intake to head port as an oval. I will machine in the injector port area after I have drilled the injector bung. While I was waiting for the castings I went ahead and made my injector caps for the hard lines. Not perfect but nothing I make is:) Here is a shot of the first two ops Next week I'll have time to get on the manifolds. I can then start to do the linkage and fuel delivery. Fun stuff!

I have the original straps and you aren't missing much:) I hope you and many others have the good fortune to have enough money to buy one of my heads. (ancient proverb)

I've been wanting to do this for years. I finally got around to it. Finished product: They were a little bigger that I would have liked but they were black. I got them at Harbor Freight. Made brackets out of aluminum and painted them black. I guess I could have dusted them off:) I cut the hooks out of the webbing. I cut the hooks themselves as I have an iron worker that will do that kind of thing. I left the loops in the webbing. I then used a soldering iron to burn holes through the strap. If you really wanted to get crazy you could slip a pin through the loop to keep it from pulling out but I really don't think you need it. Perfect for hauling around your twin cam L6 prototype head:)

Yes I had a nice conversation with Ron months ago. And ultimately that's the last time I would have liked to talk to him. If I'm listing things to him over the phone and he's not taking notes then what good is that. If he was answering my emails there would be a nice chain to reference. I'm all about personal relationships in business but unless you are brainstorming real time I feel email outweighs phone conversations hands down. Rant over:) Edit: I apologize to everyone hoping to see something new on the head and it's just me being cranky about email etiquette:)

Here is what I did for my center vents. Made a world of difference. http://forums.hybridz.org/topic/81658-dereks-custom-dash-work/

Thanks for the tip. No website though. Call me new fashioned but if a place can't be bothered to put up even a rudimentary site I tend to not be drawn to them. I work at a pretty high level of technology and it just becomes frustrating dealing with luddites. I'm already pulling my hair out as Ron at Isky doesn't seem to read his email or at least respond that he read it when you specifically ask that he respond. That means I need to get him on the phone every time. I then read him the email I had already sent twice. Drives me bananas. I threw my fax machine out 6 years ago and never looked back:)

They don't make their own cores so I hit a dead end. Now that I'm making cores it should open things up. Hopefully.

I gave them stock A2 cams to work with but they still have to measure everything and then tweak that data to suite my build. I may be worried about nothing but I've never ordered custom cams before so I have no idea what to expect.

Hi Tony I tried to get an estimate from Ron for doing the cams. He couldn't give me any kind of figure until he saw how much material he needed to remove during the roughing process. So I would say there is a high cost for roughing. All of the machine surfaces are oversized. He will rough them after coper plating and then bring them to size after heat treating. I'm hoping that they aren't too pricy or if they are he can give me some dimensions that are closer so he doesn't have to do so much grinding on the next ones. They don't do K20 grinds and grinders that do don't want to talk to me. So they have to come up with a profile as well. They are going to give me a price when they get the cores hopefully it will be workable. If they are going to charge me to develop a K20 profile on top of the grinding then that may bust the bank. I'll be really happy when this cam shaft drama is behind me. It's kind of sucking the fun out it.

Do a search on classicZ forum for vintage air and you'll get a pretty good idea.

Thanks. Xnke worked out the header design and came up with the intake length. 10.5" to the base of the valve including throttle body, velocity stack and manifold. Manifold is 2.125" long. Thanks Yea it can be a bit of a time vampire!

Cam cores done! Had a problem with my 3D model for the lobes. I didn't catch it until it messed up 2 lobes. It was right on the edge of not needing a weld but I figured better safe than sorry. They are boxed up and heading to Isky today. 6 days to get there, 6 to 8 weeks to grind, 6 days back. Now I know how my customers feel:) I've got plenty to do. The manifolds are on the way to me so I can get that all squared away. Then the valve cover.

Well the performance is stated to be the same by the MFG. I think most people have used the Mini and I certainly have no regrets. From what I understand they have the same evap so my advice now would be the Mini. Derek

My steady rest from the lathe is too tall for my A axis and I wasn't comfortable doing continuous motion roughing with just a V block and friction clamp. I'll do it on the finish pass. If I continue to make cores I'll make a steady for the 4th axis and go to town. Derek

Lobe work Got the 4th axis back up in the mill and decided it was time to do the lobes. My plan is to rough it out on one plane then rotate 90 degrees and rough again. Repeat at 180 and 270 degrees. I’m hoping there is enough material removed at that point to go straight to the grinder. First step key slot. After this is done I have a fixture that clamps on the front and keeps the cam indexed to the 4th axis. I machined a V block in line with the centerline of the cam and added a clamp. This is way too long to machine without a center support. First cut! This is after the first roughing pass. I’m using .035 depth of cut which is leaving a bit of a step. I may make it a little less on the next cut. If I decide to do a finish pass that will all go away. Here I’ve rotated it 90 degrees. I also rotate it in my CAM program so it’s looking at it from the new direction when I calculate the new code. 4th axis work can be tricky if everything isn’t setup properly. That's it till Monday.

Hey everyone. I now have a blog about this head on my site. I'm going to continue to post here but the blog is a condensed version of what you see here. There is a FAQ on the left side bar that has a lot of data. If you are new to this build you may want to come up to speed there and then start following it here as there is a lot of great back and forth that isn't on the blog. I will keep them updated in tandom but only with my progress posts. http://www.datsunworks.com/Blog/

Thanks for the offer! My plan is to put the head on my .040 over flat top and run it for a while. I'm then going to do a tear down for inspection. I will probably get it flowed then. That cam looks great!. Did you leave the gear area coper plated and then machined it after it was hardened and ground? Or is that the pre-grind we are looking at?

Hi Brian I didn't have the head flow tested. At this point with this head it may not be the most valid data. Plus I'm having to start to budget so I didn't want to pay to have it done. Thanks for the info on the cams. That seems to be considered the best way to have 8620 cores prepped. I was really surprised how well the lathe work went. I used a .25" round insert and was able to do all the roughing before I had to pull out the steady rest. The round insert let me run a zig zag pattern. I only use the lathe to do prototype and tool room work so I just did minimal cut depths ad let it whittle away!

Well it's moving along! Just picked it up from Mazworx. I came out really well considering what they had to work with. I was really happy to find out when I dropped the head off to find out that Jim Thompson formerly of Sunbelt Engines is now doing head work at Mazworx. He did all the work on the head. I wasn't in a position to post about it then as I didn't get his permission to mention it. It really felt good knowing "an old hand" was going to be doing the work. I knew there was going to be a little bit of an issue with the exhaust seats as I had to move the valves from their original position. There is a step on one side that I can blend and a ledge on the other side. None of us feel it's going to be a problem for this build. The next design will have a smaller as cast seat area so there will be more meat. The other issue is for some reason I felt it was a good idea to put a boss inside the port for the valve guides. They won't be in the next gen either. There is plenty of meat for the guides without the bosses. Top side shot. Nice view of my shitty attempt at tigging up a shrink cavity on #1. JB welt here I come:) I've waited a long time to see this: Yea I know they're not in the right holes:) So now we're in wait mode again as Ron Iskidarian is on vacation until the 10th and who knows how long it will take to get the cams done. I have plenty to keep me busy finishing everything else up so the timing may be fine. I can't tell you what a relief it is having the guides and seats in. There was no good plan B if they were off.

The process control after the cast was not so good. They normalized them in a non atmospherically controlled furnace so they developed a lot of scale. When they ground off the part lines they ground into the cam profile more than one time. They were really warped. I ordered a second set without part line cleanup and without normalizing but it was taking forever. I had to wait for them to have a full pour of 8625 before they would pour them. I got tired of waiting so I decided to take a crack at machining them. As my luck would have it I got an email that the second set was cast. I was waiting until I got further along with the machining to cancel the castings so now I have 8 cams:) There was a large portion of interested parties that were not going to use a cast cam no matter what. The pricing will be more than cast but I'm hoping a lot less than I was quoted. Also because they will be a known alloy it will open up the available pool of cam grinders willing to take them on. When I get the new castings in I will evaluate what direction I'm going. I'm going to use the machine cams in the prototype for sure. If using cast cores makes financial sense in the long run then I'll work with them. The next core I machine should give me a pretty good baseline for the lathe work.

Isky is going to do the heat treating and final grind. Finished all the lathe work on one cam. Pretty happy for a first effort. The blank started out weighing 22 lbs. The cam as you see it is now 7lbs. That's a lot of whittling! Now that the first one is done the second will go a lot quicker. Then I'll start on the lobes.

Guess what I'm making? So the cast steel camshafts have turned out to be a lot more trouble than they were worth. At least for now. After I'm through whittling on these I may have a different opinion. They start off as 2" OD 8620 tool steel. The lobe OD is 1.875" and the smaller sections go down to about 1" so that's a lot of cutting. Plus although my lathe is converted to CNC it's not exactly a production machine. But so far it's going better than I thought it would. Part of what made this more attractive to me was I added flood coolant and a partial enclosure. That makes a big difference with this kind of work on this kind of lathe. Tomorrow I'll back away the tail stock and drill and tap the snout for the timing gear bolt. Then I have to groove the bearing surfaces for the oil. When I get both blanks done the lobes will get profiled in the mill on the 4th axis. The head is still down at Mazworks and based on what I've seen so far I'm pretty confident That the valve seats are all going to be in the right place. Hopefully it will be done in the next week or so. One intake manifold is cast and I'm waiting on the other 2. The valve cover pattern is down at the foundry and I think they are pouring it next week. Xnke has been making progress on the header so that's a good thing as well. Lot's happening just happening slowly:)

Thanks for the links. That's pretty cool. My plan is to make sure there is enough material in the raw casting for people to be able to engineer a iVetc setup. That's a hill too high for me to climb. Probably the toughest area will be the variable cam gear hub as the stock Honda setup won't work on this motor. There seems to interest but It's going to take some deep pockets to make it happen.