Derek

How about now So nice of you. It'll go out today Probably not

Well it's out of the mill! OOPS Not enough clearance for the tool holder. Well that's it for a week or two. Got a bunch of pattern work that backed up so I have to get a handle on that. Also realized I need the front timing cover done before I have the head surfaced. I may machine that out of billet 6061 as I'm not too sure if the production heads will have the water outlet coming out of the front. I guess I could have cleaned that block up a bit

This man has balls of steel. I machine a lot of castings and I wouldn't touch that And now that "that cat is out of the bag" will the new owner allow you to post pics of the process? I would LOVE to see that happen. I'll PM you about the cams. Derek

Please do. Preferably in the mill you're using for the work. Must be a huge!

Where were you about 160 posts ago Basically although I could do it with the equipment I have it would be a stretch. Out of all the cam companies out there very few make their own cores and those that do had an attitude like "go away kid you bother me". The pricing I got pushed the overall price of the head out past where people could justify it. I'm having them cast out of 8625 so from a chemical (or metallurgical ???) sense it's close. I know it's not as strong as cold rolled but it will probably do for the lower HP units like mine. Ron Iskenderian will be taking the cast cores all the way from the rough state to final grind including hardening and straightening. NOW if you are interested in producing cores then I'm more than happy to talk to you about it. So much so that I'm going to PM you on it. Derek

Surface the top and bottom. Install the valve guides. Cut the pockets for the valve seats and install them. multi angle valve job. Line bore the cam towers if necessary.

Here's your daily fix Got all the intake valve work done. Got a little carried away with the machine allowance on the intake side! Had to take it down almost .375". I had to leave that wall around it because the mill was hitting the side of the head. You can see where it nicked the intake bolt boss. Every port looks just like this. Man I like digital mold making. The accuracy is just amazing. I should have the rest of the machine work on the four sides done tomorrow. Then it goes to get radiology testing. I would normally do that before machining but I was going to machine it regardless of the outcome. I don't foresee any problems and it's mainly an insurance policy at this point. After that I will send it to get impregnation and then it's off to Mazworx for the headwork. Cam design, cam core pattern and cast cam cores are next on the list.

yea you won't be lacking in surface area!

Well today was a big and stressful day. I got all of the exhaust valve work done. Drilled and reamed the valve guide holes and machined the valve spring bosses. Everything seems to be working out as I planned. This is the best part. The bores came through right where I needed them to. After I had printed the sand molds I realized my valve angle was off by half a degree. That's why the bore of the valve guide is not centered on the boss. Future heads won't even have that boss on there. I'm not really sure why I put it in as there is plenty of support for the guide without it. So far so good. Tomorrow is the intake valves and Wednesday should finish off the intake side of the head.

Thanks. I feel like people need to realize just how much work it is to bring projects like this to fruition. Of course if it wasn't for the sand printing none of this would be happening. I also look at it like I have a bunch of eye's on it that may spot potential problems.

Thanks Tim Well if everyone is going to see how much ultimate power it will make then it may fail as I don't have the time and the resources available for that. But since it's based on a known design and if this head has decent longevity I think it may work out. Who knows. I'm having a blast and that's what counts. For others it may be a leap of faith. Found time to map out the exhaust ports. They were all within .005" or .006" of where they should have been. A lot of that may have been the toughness of the casting affecting my touch probe accuracy. I can tell you that is pretty accurate for a sand casting. Here is a shot of me taking a skim pass for port matching to the flange. You can see I have a little hand work to do on a couple of the combustion chambers. Exhaust side all done Tomorrow I start on the valve guide bores.

There is a rendering on page 1. As soon as the head is done I'll start on that. Actually cams first then the valve cover. I ordered a piece of 29 mm drill rod to use as a gauge rod for the cams. This way I can check the alignment of the towers and decide if I need to have them line bored.

Here is a shot of my calculated standing oil level. The cam towers dictate how the draining works. The valve guides won't be standing in oil but they will be getting splashed a bit

I saw that the engines were tilted in the pictures during the design phase and wondered why. I figured it was for oil as I was having an issue using the stock L6 drain. Tony suggested a drain in the back of the head with a hose down to the oil pan and this is the direction I'm going to go. That is probably why he was asking about it in post #230 Does the induction side need to be higher than the exhaust side? Is this for carb cars? Thanks Derek

Thanks everyone for the encouraging words. They do mean a lot. So I got the top surface done. I started out with a modified spark plug stop to use as a gauge. I used the end of the threaded rod that goes up through the head to touch off from. This let me know where I was in relation to the combustion chamber. I surfaced the top,did all the cam tower work, spot faced the head bolt bosses, bored the spark plug tube bosses to the correct depth, tapped the bosses for the tubes and drilled the oil gallery. Had to relieve one side of the cam towers for the ARP washers to clear. Set a few towers on for fun. Probably won't get much done till Monday.

I'm going to need a lot of piston clearance for this to work Deep drilling the head bolt holes. This stuff make my butt hole clench. Bottom all done. (I think) This is the ground flat bar that I'll use to set the rotational angle when I roll it over. That way I'm indicating off of the bottom surface. Well that's it for today. Unfortunately real work has got in the way. Back at it tomorrow.

made some progress today. Got the chambers mapped out and ran a finish pass over them. I designed the chambers to be "as cast' but I knew that was a mistake as soon as I saw the casting. Since I didn't have any machine allowance to work with I did the best I could. There are a few spots I'll have to hand work. I finished the surfacing and recut the water passages to make sure they were in the right spot. They were off a hair. Really happy with the quality of the casting so far. I engineered the gating system to prioritize the combustion chambers and bottom of the head. The metal is super clean so far. Tomorrow is head bolts and spark plug holes and hopefully decent progress on the top side.

And so it begins. I had some imperfections in the bottom of the casting that I needed to weld up. I made a light cleanup pass to make sure I got everything filled. Next is mapping out the combustion chambers to see exactly where they ended up. Castings shrink when they cool. Although there are formulas to use as guidelines it's still a bit of a guessing game. All the core sand inside makes it especially hard. So far so good!

You should probably check out post#163

Thanks This head is about longevity as opposed to power. If the opportunity avails itself I'll get it flowed. Earlier in the thread flow numbers were discussed but I can't remember them off of the top of my head. Iron would be tougher to work with and would not offer any benefits.

Made some real progress. One of the biggest fears I’ve had about the machine work was getting the valves in the right place. Lined up on the rockers at the top and centered on the ports at the bottom. The choices were coming in from the bottom or drilling in from the top. My “brain trust” and I came to the conclusion the having the valves line up on the rockers was more important than having them line up on the ports. The method that seemed to work the best was machine the combustion chamber and drill the spark plug hole. Roll the head over 180 degrees and indicate off of the spark plug bore. I then faced the top surface and drilled, tapped and reamed the dowel holes for the cam towers. I rotated the head to the angle I wanted and found the center of the rocker shaft that corresponded with the guides I was drilling. By working from the shaft I knew that would give me the best consistency. I then stripped the cam towers from the head and drilled the holes. For the test I used a 5.5mm drill. Thats the diameter of the valve stems. Despite all my measuring I couldn’t decide whether they needed to be at 25 degrees or 25.5 degrees. I started at 25 and naturally 25.5 seemed to line up a lot better. The nice thing about the printed sand is when I finally get the right data it will remain consistent from casting to casting. Now that this hurdle is behind me I’ll finish up a few more things on the mockup and hopefully be loading up the casting next week. Really happy with what I ended up with. The valves are sitting up since the chamber is mimicking the raw casting but the spacing is great. I drilled out the original 25 degree holes and plugged them. I also bumped the exhaust valves outward a bit. Hard to see but the valves line up really well on the rockers. Hope it goes this well when it's in aluminum

Yes I'm going to proof out the head bolts and dowels and the intake and exhaust as well. Derek

Made a little progress. Finally got my 4th axis completed and the rest of the mods made to my second mill. I decided to machine a plastic mockup so I could practice on it as opposed to my only casting. Normally if this was a production casting I would have budgeted for at least one casting to practice the machining on. If the casting didn't run I was going to use it as my setup but since I have no budget and a good first casting I'm going with a plastic test head. I'm only doing as many cylinders as necessary to get my valve angles right. Hopefully I'll get things worked out in the first or second try. It's still rough as I ran out of time today. Hopefully if everything works out I'll be machining on the actual head later this week or the following week.

I bought one of these when nissan was liquidating them. Actually I missed out on the full engines and ended up with a short block. I was lucky I did as a lot of the full engines had a lot of cylinder wall rust. So based on the exterior and the fact that the inners are probably rusty as well I would not touch it.

On this head the combustion chamber is going to be larger than I would like. I designed it to be "as cast" but the surface finish of the printed sand is a little too rough. Each combustion chamber will need to be machined smooth. That is not such a bad thing as in the future I'll cast the chambers much smaller. This will allow for tailoring of the chambers for each build. I think this one going to end up in the 53cc range. Bolting it to my flat top piston motor isn't going to set the world on fire but when I build my stroker with custom pistons then it will start to come alive. And at the rate I'm going with this project we'll all be driving electrics I'll be doing a custom intake that will match the as cast port size and then becomes round. The size of that final round TBD. I tend to try to design manifold ports so that you can machine them to size with a regular 3 axis machine and then do a little hand blending. So if you are running 50MM like me then you would port match the manifold in the CNC mill to 50MM then hand blend the transition to the rest of the port.