Mechanical – Page 2 – Chamber of Understanding

RX8 Project – Part 15, Engine Strip #2

So having removed the timing chain and tensioners (see part 1) next we need to start looking at removing some more major parts of the engine.

Having already removed the cam covers already you should be looking at something like this:

Thanks to the Jag Motor Project for the image – hopefully they don’t mind me borrowing it! It seems I have misplaced my own photo of this!

You need to remove the cam bearing housings because the design of this engine has the head bolts directly under the cam making it impossible to remove the head with the cams still in place. This is worth remembering and is at least part of the reason stretch bolts are used for the head – it is impossible the re-torque them after an interval of use without removing all the timing gear. As you can see in the photo these are three smaller housings and one larger one at the front each held on with two small bolts. Basically you just need to carefully remove these bearing housings in order. I suggest marking the direction and its position on each one before removal. The position could be achieved by putting each into a small tub which is numbered. However you do this you need to know which is which and which way round they go. Remove them carefully and make sure you don’t drop any bits! Once you have removed the housings you’ll see this:

Now we have clear access to the head bolts which as you can see in the photo there are eight of. These are fairly easily removed except for one thing – the bolts are set well down into the head and there is very little room in the recess to put in a socket. You will need a 15mm socket for these bolts and a small breaker bar (or an impact gun) as they will be quite tight.

These bolts are not reusable – I mean you can but it’s a terrible idea particularly in such a critical location because odds are high it will not be up to the job. This is because “stretch” bolts rely on the material of the bolt reaching the yield point of the material at which it begins to exhibit a fairly constant elastic stretch. In effect once they start to deform they behave a bit like a very stiff spring and so if tightened correctly will hold a very accurate load without loosening and so do not need to be re-tightened after a run in period. That said hang onto them for now so you know what to order to replace them!

You can see how tight the casting is around the socket! Once all the bolts are gone you can lift the head away. It might take a little persuasion with a mallet. Make sure you have a suitable clear space to put it on once you remove it.

Now you should have this level of grime:

Obviously you can just pull off the head gasket now to improve the situation quite a bit and you can have a good look at the state of the engine:

Here you can see the cylinder bore actually looks in very good condition and even still has the factory honing marks on the bores which is a good sign it’s been working well and shouldn’t have suffered wear issues.

Now do all of that again for the other head and you should have something that looks a bit like this:

Congratulations now you have an engine with no heads but since my plan was to upgrade the rods I still needed to remove more so flip the engine over and we can get to it.

In the picture you can see the oil pump is just held on by four small black bolts. I put the crank bolt back in place just so I didn’t lose it but you would have removed this a long time ago. Once the four small bolts are out the oil pump can just be slid off the crank and put aside.

Next we need to remove the con rod bolts and this is where having the crank bolt comes in because you can put it back in finger tight and once it snugs up a bit you can turn over the engine to get access to all the rod bolts. Mark up each rod with a cylinder number and arrow for the front of the engine. I put sharpie marks across the split line of the rod to make it easier to match them up later. I had to use something to knock the piston out of the bore use something non metallic otherwise you will likely damage a surface you don’t want to damage. I used a length of wooden dowel. Do these carefully unbolting and removing one at a time. When knocking the piston out don’t forget to catch it before it falls on the floor!

So all we have left is the crank. If all you wanted to do was straight swap the rods this is as far as you need to get. Well I wanted to do a few other while I was at it (more on this in another post) so I carried on to remove the crank. This is actually pretty simple at this point, you just take out the 16 main bolts holding the lower block to the upper block along the bearings. The other thing you can see in the picture are the engine mounts, the rubbers here aren’t stock s-type, they’re actually from a V8 Land Rover (Discovery among many others). The reason for this is they’re very strong, extremely cheap (£7 a pair delivered from eBay) and have a stud each side which will fit straight onto the factory cast aluminium mounting arms and also make mounting onto the car really easy when we get to that stage!

It’s worth noting in the above picture not all the bolts are the same. This is because some have small studs on the top to allow the windage plate to be mounted (blue). Note which goes where so this can be put back later! Next you also need to remove the 6 outer bolts (red) before the block will separate.

Once all the bolts are out again you might need a gentle tap with a mallet and/or a scraper to get the block apart. Don’t drop the crank bearings!

If you’ve done all of this you should have something a bit like this in front of you:

And a heap of bits you just removed:

More to come on this project in my next post!

RX8 Project – Part 14, Engine Strip #1

After deciding to turbo the engine (see earlier posts) is became apparent I would have to upgrade the piston rods to make sure the engine wasn’t in danger of these failing and ruining the engine. This meant I needed to extract these from the engine Now bear in mind that this was the first time I’d ever taken the head off and engine before let alone removed a crank so it was likely to be quite a long and delicate process! Also accept that I was making this up as I went along, things may be in a strange order but it seemed to work!

First things first mount the engine to a suitable stand:

Here it is, it’s already upside down but that doesn’t matter! First off I took off the sump. On this engine it’s a cast alloy unit with a large front bulge which makes working around the front of the engine more awkward so I got it out the way early on.

Take off the oil pick up pipe (2xM6 bolts) to get room for the windage tray. The tray is held on by 5 nuts on some special studs on this engine, these are M10 one side to hold the lower block to the upper block but i think M5 on the top just to hold the windage tray.

Now we have exposed the moving parts of the engine and get the first look at the bits we are replacing but there’s a lot more before we get them all out. An interesting thing to note here is the absence of crank bearing caps. On this engine the block is formed in two cast pieces which joint along the crank centre line so the crank bearings are held in place by the substantial cast ribs you can see in the picture and each bearing has four M10 bolts to keep it in place with additional bolts around the outside of the casting.

Next move to the front of the engine and disconnect the hose from the block to the water pump then unbolt the water pump. On the Ford version of this engine the water pump is driven directly off one of the cams but on this Jaguar one it is a separate unit driven from the back side of the accessory belt and is held on by three small M6 bolts. Next up remove the crank bolt, there are a variety of ways to do this (the easiest probably being a decent impact gun but at this point in the project I’d not yet bought it) but the method I chose was to block the rotation of the crank using a block of wood. This is done by finding a suitable block that fits between the crank and the housing such that as the crank counterweight rotates round it is stopped by the wood. Just remember that the crank bolt undoes anticlockwise so make sure you put the block on the correct side(the bottom in the above image)!

Now you can flip the engine back up the correct way because we’re moving on to the heads This is because the cam covers need removing to take off the front engine cover.

This bit is again very simple, remove the bolts holding each coil unit in place. Again this being the Jaguar version of the engine is came from the factory with coil on plug. Next remove all the bolts around the cam cover and lift the cover away. Sometimes these get refitted with instant gasket to fix a failed cover gasket cheaply and quickly and so it may require some persuasion, I usually use a putty knife or a wallpaper scraper for this job but it can be easy to damage the faces if you’re not very careful. Alternatively plastic trim removal tools can work well. Obviously repeat the process for the other cover.

Next up we need to remove the front engine cover. This involves removing the bolts all the way round the edge, you can’t miss them, there’s loads and they’re all the same! Make sure you get them all, I think there’s 17 of them but don’t quote me on that, one is under the belt tensioner by the crank! This cover again might require a little help coming away due to the gasket but should be relatively easy. If it isn’t then you’ve missed a bolt so stop prying it!

It should look something like this! Now you can see the other feature these jag engines have – variable valve timing on the intake cams. An important point here is the crank timing wheel (the notched wheel on the crank). These have two key positions but only one is correct so carefully mark which position lines up with the key on the crank when you take it off. I recommend something permanent so when you clean all the oil residue off the mark is still visible, a centre punch mark should do it.

Next you need to remove the timing chain tensioners. These are small hydraulic cylinders that use engine oil pressure to maintain tension in the timing chain. They are held on by two bolts each. Just undo the bolts and carefully remove the tensioners from the tension arms.

Once the tension cylinders have been removed the tension arms can be lifted off their dowels and removed as well and then the chains can be lifted off and you should have something that looks a bit like this:

Now all that is clear the chain runners can be removed. These also hold the VVT solenoids and so are quite a complex bit of metal but are easily removed. I also took of the water hoses at this point just to simplicity.

Now you should be at this stage:

In the next part the engine strip will continue…

RX8 Project – Part 12, Turbos #3 – Flanges

This is a step that most people won’t need to do. Or rather there are usually easier alternatives to! When most people build a turbo manifold they simply buy pre-cut flanges for both the inlet and outlet and weld them onto the ends of whatever intricate bit of welded pipework they have devised and all is well. This is fine for the vast majority of turbos currently available but what if we have one that’s a bit more unusual, say one that most people would never even dream of using for a custom setup. For example the custom housing GT15 turbo used on a diesel Rover from about 20 years ago. That would present more of a challenge! Why do I never make these things simple!

So what we need to do is make some flanges, this isn’t a technically complex task but does take a little thought.

The first step is to carefully measure the size of either the fixed studs (or bolt holes). These are commonly M8 and so the bolt OD will be just under 8mm and if the flange has the holes will be more than the bolt size as they tend to be quite generous to aid alignment. M8 clearance hole might well be as much as 9mm but note these all down.

Next measure the distance between each of the holes/studs, adding half of each hole/stud diameter on these numbers will give you the distance between the centre of each fixing position. This gives the fixing positions and would allow a template for these to be drawn. If doing the job this way you just need to measure the main port diameter and its distance from the centre of each hole/stud position to the centre of the port. In my case one port was handily central in a triangle so I could just measure half way between each pair of stud and draw a line to the third stud and where they cross the port centre goes.

I also tried another approach which involved taking a thing piece of aluminium and physically imprinting it with the studs using a mallet. This can be handy for really irregular patterns but does mean you don’t have a nice dimensioned drawing to keep, but you do get an aluminium template. Basically you take your aluminium, lay it over the studs and tap it with a mallet. This leaves an impression for all the fixing positions. What you’d normally do here is just drill a small pilot hole where the centre of each stud is to use to mark up your steel. in my case I didn’t want to have to remove the studs from the turbo so I drilled them out full size.

At this stage I used the same method to indent the sheet metal for the port which was then drilled with a 3mm hole for later transfer.

The port mark was critical because the port was the largest hole and most likely to go wrong! After marking it up on the 10mm thick steel plate I was going to use as the flange and looking at my pillar drill I decided I needed a substantial clamp for safety! While I could have bought a suitable clamp kit I decided that since I already owned suitable tee nuts for the bed I could make it safely.

So this was the final drilling arrangement – and yes that is a hole saw! I feel at this point I should point out that not all hole saws are created equal. Most commonly found at DIY shops are only suitable for wood/plastic/plasterboard and maybe aluminium sheet which not unreasonably are the sort of things used in DIY. Proper tool shops will supply hole saws rated for steel but they will cost a little more the set I used was this one. It’s certainly not the most expensive out there and probably won’t last terribly long with this level of use but it’s rare I use them for anything like this and I can replace the individual saws in the set fairly cheaply.

You need to centre punch where the port centre is to locate then mount the plate onto the drill. Put a smallish drill bit (don’t go really small as you risk breaking it, I started at 3mm but you could easily go a little larger as this isn’t really precise work) into the chuck and carefully align the punched mark on the plate with the tip. Once you are happy with the location tighten the clamps down. Tighten a little each side at a time if you have an arrangement like mine as otherwise the high pressure on one side will tend to make the place slip out of position during tightening.

Next you need to lubricate! This is absolutely critical drilling metals otherwise you will spend a lot of time either sharpening worn drill bits or trying to extract broken ones! There’s a lot of debate on whats best, for most light work I use WD40 but you will get through it quite quickly as it will tend to vaporise with the heat, this is good in that it helps cool the metal and cutting tool but it must be replaced with more. With deeper holes or larger diameters I tend to use 3in1 as it seems to work well. For the hole saw here I actually started using car gearbox oil, this slows the cutting but protects the tool.

Once you have a pilot hole swap the small drill bit out for the hole saw, make sure you have the speed slow, cover everything in lubricant and gently start to cut. This will take a considerable amount of time, be patient and regularly stop the drill and clear the cut debris away from the saw. Try to avoid using your fingers to do this as the edges can be very sharp. An air compressor is great for this but I have found that cans of computer air duster work pretty well.

Once you have your main port drilled remove the plate from the drill and file back any sharp edges then use your template to mark the centres for all the other holes, these will then need to be centre punched as before and drilled out to size in stages, I went 4mm, 6.5mm, 8.5mm from what I remember. The only critical one being the final size with the earlier steps being arbitrary. If smaller increments are used the cuts are normally quicker and easier but it adds more operations and so will likely take longer. Also I drilled all the stages on a single hole and then moved the plate which adds many more drill changes but you could also drill all the holes to one size then change drills but this has the added risk of the alignment being off which increases the chance of the bit chattering and potentially breaking but can be done if you’re careful. For the level of precision we really need it doesn’t really matter.

By now you should have something a bit like this! At this stage with the new flange seated in place marking the outside edge of the flange becomes much easier – you simply bolt the flange in place and draw (or even better scribe) round it on the mating side. The flange then needs to be removed and trimmed back to the mark. I rough cut the bulk off this with and angle grinder and then tidied the edges back with a bench grinder. Again working 10mm plate takes a little time but it’s not too bad and the outside edge doesn’t need to be perfect just not look silly or clash with anything and still be wide enough to hold a gasket.

Here’s the result, two respectable looking turbo exhaust inlet flanges. The process for the exhaust outlets was exactly the same but the main port was 55mm diameter rather than 36mm diameter making the process take even longer! If you’re in a hurry get them laser/waterjet cut!

In another entry I’ll be looking at the process of making the custom exhaust gaskets I need to match.

RX8 Project – Part 11, Turbo’s #2 – Wastegates

So now the project is going in the turbo direction I need to be a bit wary with how I do it. The GT1549 turbo’s I chose had positives and negatives. They looked to be exactly the right size for the engine I had, they were fairly common in one form or another and importantly the price was spot on! I still don’t understand quite how but I managed to find someone on eBay with a matching pair of these turbos fully cleaned and rebuilt for £65 each delivered! So that’s the positives, now the negatives, firstly rather than the normal bracket bolted to rear of the compressor housing to hold the wastegate actuator. On these turbos it is actually cast into the housing and so it would make rotating the housing to fit the application considerably more difficult. The second problem is they have a factory fitted actuator which isn’t adjustable more than a small amount and I really didn’t want to start tweaking a completely untested engine with no idea what was going to happen with no way of keeping the boost below the 18 psi wastegate pressure!

So getting over these problems. Having looked at the rotation problem I came to the conclusion I should be able to make them both fit with no rotation changes needed. The backup plan here was to grind off the cast in mount and custom make a bracket using a bit of steel plate if it turned out I needed to later on. This takes us to the wastegate problem. I looked at a number of ways of providing a reduction in the actuator pressure including adding springs to the rod side of the actuator and even bolting the internal wastegate solid and fitting external wastegates to the manifolds I came to the conclusion the only real way of giving a wide but reliable range of adjustment while keeping the package as small as possible would be to replace the stock actuator with an aftermarket adjustable one.

Now this is where the plan goes a bit wrong about – after looking about for ages to find a sensible option at a half sensible price the best I could come up with was this : Kinugawa Actuator

I’m under no illusions here, this is a a cheapo unit! But I strongly object to spending the cost of the car on each wastegate. The problem is even though I got these for £68 each which really is very cheap they actually cost more then the pair of turbos! Considering all this it’s still a pretty good option because it is a ‘universal’ version. It comes with a range of springs for different pressures so I can start at just a few psi and swap the springs out as needed and also comes supplied with four different actuator rods.

So here we are – actuators!

So at first glance they look ideal, but don’t let that fool you! There’s a couple engineering problems to overcome.

The first problem is this; the hole in the supplied rod end isn’t large enough for the flap actuator on the turbo. The solution is simply to drill this out to fit. I didn’t note the sizes, but it was a standard drill size.

Next up was that this ‘universal’ actuator was never really intended for a turbo this small and as such the shortest actuator rod is too long to allow the wastegate flapper to close so I had to modify that as well. The rods are nominally 6mm diameter but the end the rod end has a fine pitch thread meaning modifying that would need me to buy a fine pitch die to extend the thread. Luckily the end that goes into the actuator is a standard M6x1mm metric thread so that was the easier option.

I measured how much I needed to shorten the rod to allow the flapper to just close at one end of the rod ends adjustment. The opening pressure of the actuator is set by preload so the more it is tightened greater the boost pressure. I then simply cut the thread down to the required point and then trimmed off the excess. The good news is if I made the rod too short I three more tries for each one!

And here is the difference – it’s actually about 25mm less than it started out! Reassemble the whole thing and magically it now fits where it needs to!

The other thing you will need to do potentially at this point is change the spring. Once the actuator rod is in the actuator this is actually not too bad but be a bit fiddly. First of position the actuator so the rod is sticking downward between the jaws of a vice. Tighened the vice to hold the rod in place then undo all the housing screws. Lift off the top housing and carefully remove the diaphragm underneath. Next you need to carefully release the rod to take the load off the spring. then you just unscrew the rod and take the aluminium piston and the spring underneath out the housing. Reassembly is just the reverse but the key is to put tension on the rod again and clamp it in place again before refitting the diaphragm and cap otherwise it’s very difficult to get the diaphragm correctly positioned without any wrinkles that could cause damage or leakage.

So now we have two turbos with adjustable wastegate actuators with a potential working range covering something like 3-30psi!

Engineering – Removing Stuck Bolts

This post seeks to record the ways I generally go about removing a stuck bolt using a particular repair I did – Skip further down if you don’t want the background.

I recently agreed to help out a friend with her first car which she had bought for a few hundred pounds and then found out how much a cam belt replacement actually costs when you get a garage to do it!

The car in question was a fairly common 2004 Fiesta 1.4 – this is the Ford Sigma engine which was also used in the Puma and Focus. Having done a few different cam belt changes over the years I figured it would be comparatively simple. Turns out that logic was badly flawed due to a design “feature” included by Ford which makes the job very difficult. This “feature” is a single bolt which can be almost impossible to remove – the crank bolt!

To explain the technical problem you need a bit of background knowledge on how pulleys are normally mounted on shafts. The method normally used is called a Woodruff key, this is a lump of metal which goes into a slot on the shaft. A corresponding slot is machined into the pulley/gear to be driven preventing any rotation. The key can be seen on the bottom left of the shaft in the photo.

Now the problem caused by Ford on the engine I was dealing with was that to save money (machining that slot adds a manufacturing operation) they did not use a key and instead relied solely on friction. The Ford engine uses the crank bolt to not only hold the pulleys on the crank but actually tighten it sufficiently that the friction between the pulley and the crank prevents rotation. The down side being that the bolt has to be incredibly tight so it can be very difficult to remove and if replaced must be absolutely torqued to specification because if it allows the timing gear to slip the engine would likely be destroyed!

Removing a stuck bolt…

In terms of getting out a bolt start small and build up. In this case there’s no chance a ratchet will do it so I started with a normal short breaker bar and an 18mm deep socket (a slighly unusual size not found in most smaller kits) so I had to buy one) and not terribly surprisingly nothing happened. So I got out my big breaker bar – it’s 800mm long so allows a significant amount of torque to be applied. To get clearance to use this I had to use two long 1/2″ drive extensions so the bar could be positioned outside the wheel arch. Again this didn’t do as much as I’d hoped…

Normally at this point the common next step is to put a bar in place resting against a cross member and then crank the engine. This uses the torque of the starter motor with the mechanical advantage resulting from the starter ring gear to apply a very large torque. Unfortunately you can’t do this with this engine because of the above issue with the crank not having a key. The moment the bolt undoes the engine would lose its relative timing and would probably be badly damaged or destroyed. Unfortunately at the time I wasn’t aware the crank had no key so we tried it anyway. After several goes on the starter and still having no luck I thought we might get more force into it by pushing the car rolling and having the driver let up the clutch like a bump start – using the inertia of the car as the force. Astonishingly even this didn’t get it moving (actually very lucky as it later turned out!).

Having exhausted hand tools I contacted a mate of mine who has an impact gun. It was a fairly basic one but rated at 220Nm should give the bolt a good beating and the percussive action will free up a good many stuck bolts but in this case it just wouldn’t do it!

I started drilling small holes in the bolt head to try to relieve some of the friction between the flange under the bolt head and the pulley. The idea being to remove enough material from the back of the bolt such that it relieves the force by the head flexing a little. After quite a bit of drilling and several goes with the gun it became apparent it just wasn’t going to cut it on this one!

Having accepted I needed a lot more force and having few ideas how to achieve this I decided I would finally splash out on a tool I’d been looking at for ages…

http://products.dewalt.co.uk/powertools/productdetails/catno/DCF899P2/

This is a Dewalt DCF899. The torque ratings for it are amazing for something of this size at 950 Nm continuous but it is a bit pricey. That said it will undo almost anything I’ve found and the batteries last forever!

So having bought this beast I gave it a go and after a number of goes at full power and some rust falling out the bolt still didn’t move! Careful inspection of the bolt head showed that the impact gun was hitting it so hard now for a comparatively small bolt head (18mm hex) the steel of both the bolt head and the socket we getting damaged. I made the choice to give it one last go and ended up rounding off the bolt head entirely!

Most people at this point would probably give up but I had one last idea I wanted to try! I realised that an M20 nut could be drilled out to a 20mm round hole and then it would fit over the rounded off bolt head. The benefit being an M20 nut is much larger hex than the original 18mm across flats bolt head at 30mm, this would replace the stripped head and resist a huge amount of torque before rounding off. I also needed to drill the nut half way through to 24mm as the m20 nut was much thicker and I needed clearance for the next part of the plan…At this point a mate of mine turned up so we broke out the welder and proceeded to join the combination of nut and bolt with weld. After a couple false starts where the new nut sheared off because we didn’t use enough weld we just filled up the head with weld as a last ditch attempt and once the whole bolt was glowing cherry red we used the big impact gun and out it came!

Spot the difference! The one on the left is the replacement ready to go in because on this engine the crank bolt should not be re-used.

RX8 Project – Part 9, Flywheels Part 3

So just to finish of the flywheel section here are the the finished custom parts :

Flywheel spacer on the crank, you can see the black dust seal in the centre covering the new pilot bearing underneath.

A wider shot showing the spacer in position among the currently disassembled state of the engine.

And finally the flywheel itself.

In this photo the ring gear and location dowels for the clutch basket have been fitted.

The ring gear was actually a lot easier to fit than it was to remove because you can just put the ring gear in the oven (at maximum, in my case 250°C+ off the end of the scale!) and put the flywheel in the freezer for an hour or so as well – this may not actually be necessary but you want the most possible room between the parts when you fit them together. If the ring gear snags on the way down it because there isn’t quite enough space it can be a real pain to get it off again. Before installing the ring make sure it is the correct way round – all the teeth should have a bevel on one side to help the starter engage cleanly this goes towards the position of the starter motor! Take the hot ring out the oven, check it and drop it into place as quickly as possible but make sure it’s right and fully seated to the shoulder of the flywheel. Once touching the flywheel the ring will cool rapidly and lock in place.

The dowels in question turned out to be the wrong size, I specified them as 1/4″ diameter (6.35mm) and this is what is still shown on the drawing but it turns out the ones I measured had more rust than I thought and the holes in the clutch basket are actually designed to locate on ~~6mm dowels – something I really should have checked!~~ From what I have since found out this is likely one of the many Ford engines which have special dowels ~~which are (from what I can find out) 8mm on the flywheel side but only 6mm on the clutch side.~~ The correct dowels are actually 6.30mm on the smaller diameter so my original measurement wasn’t actually too far off, I just shouldn’t make daft assumptions! Larger end is 7.97mm diameter by 6.5mm long on the ones I have, overall length is 18mm. Tolerances and fits are not my strong point but I’ll probably start with a 7.9mm drill and hope to press fit them.

For simplicity I recommend buying something like this available via eBay as Cosworth clutch dowels by x-power engines:

I’m planning to modify the appropriate holes on the flywheel to use the correct dowels I just haven’t quite got round to it yet!

I should probably also take a moment here to mention flywheel bolts. The Duratec crank has a slightly unusual thread which is M10x1.0mm (M10 Extra fine). This is as it happens the same thread commonly used on brake hydraulic components like bleed screws. Needless to say the stock bolts are far too short as the engine originally just had a thin flex plate so longer bolts were needed. Now various companies will sell flywheel bolts for almost any engine but not for something like this and they rarely specify the actual sizes of the bolts in a kit so I can’t just buy one for something else that will fit very easily. My solution was find the best standard bolt I could and so I am using some 12.9 high tensile socket cap bolts which I managed to find from a bolt supplier on eBay with the right thread. For anyone who doesn’t know 12.9 rated bolts are the highest rating before getting into one off special items (usually using exotic materials) and they really are very strong. As a comparison ARP gives their flywheel bolts as having a tensile strength of 180,000 PSI. The 12.9 bolts are rated to have a minimum tensile strength of 176,900 PSI – a number close enough it makes me think they are likely the same material! The strength figures for these bolts mean at the size I will be using each bolt can be safely loaded to in excess of 7000kg of tensile load indefinitely with no deformation. Their failure point being somewhere north of 9500kg each! Some time in the future I will do a full write up of nuts bolts and other fixtures it’s worth knowing about.

So that’s my shiny custom flywheel, next time you see it it should be bolted to a rebuild engine with a whole host of custom or cobbled bits on it!

RX8 Project – Part 8, Flywheels Part 2

Apologies for the long delay since my last post (more than a month!), life has been getting in the way of having time to do anything on blog of late. The good news is that the RX8 project has made some progress and this blog is still no-where near the current status so there’s still plenty to come!

In flywheels part one I mentioned how I ended up in a situation where I didn’t really think the cast flywheel was save to modify and how a chance encounter led me to a solution. The problem it presented is I’m primarily an electrical/electronic engineer, while I dabble fairly extensively in mechanical things designing a flywheel isn’t exactly something that comes up every day and the precision was critical so I spent a lot of time making sure I got it right!

Critical aspects as I saw them were the bolt pattern to match the crank, bolt points for a suitable clutch and and very accurate outer diameter to allow fitment of the RX8 starter ring gear.

Looking at these criteria one at a time the bolt pattern is an interesting one. At first glance all the 8 bolts appear to be evenly spaced around the crank on a PCD (Pitch Circle Diameter – this means the centre of each of the holes is placed on a circle). After checking my early flywheel model drawings against the real flywheel I noticed that all the bolts lined up except one which was just slightly wrong; ok, approximately 2mm, enough to be considered very wrong!

This suggested the pattern wasn’t exactly what I thought so I started checking exactly what the error was in different directions to figure out what was going on. After extensive measurement I managed to work out what was wrong, the bolts were indeed on a PCD they just weren’t evenly spaced. For even spacing the bolts would be at 45° intervals but one hole was shifted 4° round the PCD so it was 41° and 49° to the two nearest holes. Combined with a 76mm PCD this made the bolt pattern line up perfectly. This is actually quite useful because it means when the crank/flywheel are balanced they cannot be reassembled in the wrong alignment.

The crank also features a location register to make sure the centre of the flywheel is perfectly centred on the crank. The register is a raised lip accurately machined to a specific outer diameter so there is no lateral slop between the parts, in this case I measured this to be 44.40mm in diameter. when I trial fitted this it needed some emery on the crank to fit but this seemed due to surface rust where the engine had been stored in a damp room for a long time. Your mileage may vary!

Next up we had the clutch, I initially planned on using the RX8 clutch as I thought it would be stronger and have more options later but on further research it turned out RX8 clutches are very expensive indeed and anything other than a stock one gets very expensive very quickly and largely need to be imported so I started looking at other options. This took me back to the idea of using a Mondeo 240mm clutch, they’re cheap, readily available and the stock ones will handle a fair amount of power. Admittedly a stock kit is highly unlikely to last long with the amount of power this project could get to but there are readily available uprated covers and plates that could be used. Plus £50 on a project that may never really work isn’t too bad, £300 for a new RX8 stock clutch is more than the car cost! I also already head the factory Mondeo flywheel to take all the appropriate dimensions from which kept the process fairly simple.

The last issue was the ring gear, this is critical because the RX8 has its starter motor on the gearbox side and when because of this the options are either re-use the RX8 starter or butcher the RX8 bellhousing to allow an engine side starter to fit. For simplicity I figured I’d go with the RX8 starter since I was getting the flywheel made anyway. Starter ring gears are whats called an interference fit on the flywheel. In essence the ring gear is intentionally slightly smaller than the flywheel it is designed to fit onto and when the two parts are either pressed or heat fitted (heating up the ring so it expands and can be slipped into place) together. It is a tiny change in size when fitted and just the friction between the two parts that prevents the ring gear slipping when the engine is started hence why this is rather critical. To simplify this I modelled a nominal 290mm for the diameter of the lip this mounts on but supplied the ring gear to the machine shop and asked them to machine to an interference fit. This led to the following design:

RX8 Flywheel V6 – Machining Drawing

After a lot of double checking with these base measurements I needed to get the correct offset from the crank to make sure the clutch plate is in the correct position to be fully engaged with the gearbox splines. This led to me modelling everything to make sure it would all fit where it needed to:

Here you can see how everything stacks up. Between the bell housing and engine there is a 10mm spacer (grey) this represents the adaptor plate thickness. Clearly the bell housing has been simplified but the overall length is correct and the position of the splines (a little hard to see in the picture) and pilot bearing diameter (the reduced diameter) on the gearbox input shaft are correct.

Unfortunately having got all of this looking right and sent it over to the machinist and work starting on it I realised a couple minor mistakes, one was that I’d not offset the flywheel to match the spacing of the bell housing caused by the adaptor plate (shown above but this picture is from a later version) but related to that I hadn’t checked the offset to make sure the starter ring gear was actually in the right position to engage with the starter!

Turned out it was a little off and actually needed more offset but unfortunately the raw material for the flywheel had been delivered and machining had already begun and sadly it wasn’t big enough to allow for this extra thickness so I needed a new plan. The best I could come up with was to add a small spacer to correct this. Luckily this also allowed an opportunity to include a new pilot bearing location. This is a bearing that locates into the end of the crank to support the engine side of the gearbox input shaft and due to the gearbox adaptor plate thickness and the fact of it being a mismatched engine and gearbox the standard bearing was now too far away to support the shaft.

RX8 V6 Crank Spacer V1

This spacer corrects the problems above and still includes the correct bolt pattern, location diameters to keep everything centred. The 35mm internal diameter is the exact size of the bearing I used. This allowed a suitable bearing and a dust seal to be pressed into place and likely stay there, that said there’s a lip in the spacer to hold the bearing up and once the gearbox shaft is in place it physically can’t fall out. It’s probably worth pointing out here that this bearing only actually moves in use when the clutch is pressed, when driving along in a gear the clutch locks the crank and input shaft together and so the bearing is rotating overall but the inside and outside are rotating at the same speed so the vast majority of the time it shouldn’t experience any wear.

The final product to be coming in part 3!

RX8 Project – Part 7, Introduction to flywheels

Having decided what engine I was going to use and deciding to keep the existing gearbox so I could retain the factory carbon prop shaft the next logical step was to work out how exactly to achieve that…

First off the engine I had bought was from an automatic and so had a flex plate rather than a flywheel. This is a comparatively thin piece of steel which gives the starter ring gear, which would be on the outside of the flywheel on a manual, a fixing point and also mates the torque converter to the crank. In automatics the torque converter provides the rotating mass to smooth the engine pulses. So the first step was to get a flywheel that would work. My first idea was to take the factory RX8 flywheel which has quite a deep offset (i.e. it is quite dished) which would help correct for gearbox adapters which would space the gearbox off the engine. So I looked into simply machining off the back of the RX8 flywheel flat and drilling the bolt pattern from the V6 crank into it. While technically this would work there are a few problems.

(Taken from here : http://www.locostbuilders.co.uk/viewthread.php?tid=185939&page=2)

The image above shows exactly what I’m talking about, this is a factory RX8 flywheel modded onto a V6 crank. I believe the engine used in this case is the Mazda KLDE. While this all looks good there are a couple of issues. First is that the RX8 flywheel isn’t balanced as it stands, it forms a balanced arrangement with the rest of the engine and so needs modifying. I don’t have a picture of this but the weighted lip on the rear ranges from thin on one side to very thick the other. Aftermarket flywheels get round this by using balanced flywheel and a separate counterweight. Problem two is that the factory flywheel is cast iron, this has an irregular structure and can have flaws and other weaknesses from new but parts are generally made with a factor of safety to account for this but modification in this way will remove some of this additional strength and change areas of stress. I actually 3D modelled this change to see if it would work:

Original:

Modified:

Having modelled this I performed a stress analysis of this based on the force created by the flywheel spinning at 8000 RPM. This is more than redline as it stands but it seemed prudent to plan ahead! It turns out the stock flywheel is only about 20% stronger than required based on the nominal ‘standard’ properties of cast iron. The new version would be below strength at this speed, dropping to 7500 RPM gave something around 102% strength. Not a number I felt confident in at all! Just to make a point here as people argue the safety of modded flywheels a lot (mostly from “I’ve done it and it’s fine”). I’m not saying it will fail modded like this, in fact the numbers suggest it is (just) strong enough here but there is no margin for error even on the ‘ideal’ material and cast iron does vary significantly. A given flywheel might be fine like this for years, but get a weaker one or one with a flaw or even give it a hard jolt when it’s at full revs and it may just shatter. If it does, be somewhere else!

So after deciding the mod wasn’t really the best idea I realised that all I needed was a flywheel that would bolt up and work. A fairly easy task at face value since it turned out the the standard Ford clutch splines (1″ dia, 23 spline) match the gearbox the solution suddenly seemed simple and I just needed a stock Ford flywheel and clutch for that engine. It turns out there were a few variations of the Ford flywheel depending if you went for an ST200, ST220 or just a vanilla V6 Mondeo but the difference between them seems to be some are ‘lighter’ versions to make the more special cars rev a little more freely. This is achieved by leaving out sections of the outer lip on the flywheel. In my case I had no idea if this project would ever work so I bought the cheapest! This is when another problem emerged:

Note the starter ring gear on each. The top is the S-Type flex plate, the bottom is the Mondeo one. It seems the Ford and Jag use a different starter motor as well. Add to this that the Mondeo flywheel puts the clutch far too far forward to mate to the gearbox and because the starter is on the engine side on the Jag but on the top of the gearbox on the Mondeo (because it’s transverse) – something we can’t do on the RX8 as the gearbox is wrong and there isn’t the room in the tunnel the whole idea falls apart! Modifying the cast one seems to be the only sensible option.

Around this time I happened to have a chat with a colleague at work who is a professional mechanical engineer and 3D designer I know through the job I had at the time and explained the problem and he directed me towards a machinist who did a lot of work for him and was well into cars. By chance a few days later this machinist came into the office and as soon as I explained the problem he just said “ah, we’ll just make you a custom one if you do a design”…. So I found myself with the challenge of designing a custom flywheel which as per the machinists recommendation would be made out of EN24 steel. As a comparison changing the models above to EN24 changes the safety factor to something around 300% from memory meaning we can lighten it significantly later if required and not risk weakening it dangerously.

More to come…

RX8 Project – Part 4, The New Engine

Following part 3 where the original rotary engine proved to be a lost cause I decided to research possible engines that could be swapped in but there were a few criteria and limitations I had:

Size – The RX8 has a reasonable size engine bay overall but due to the size and position of the standard engine there are some limiting factors to consider. I’m aware others have swapped V8’s (among others) into RX8 shells but this generally involves extensive modification of the engine bay, steering rack and even front cross member due to the length of the engine.

Weight – The RX8 is famous for being very balanced largely due to the compact size and resulting low mounting position of the standard engine. No standard piston engine will quite match up but I wanted to get as close as reasonably possible.

Power – The standard RX8 was available with either 192 or 231 bhp and so I wanted to get to ideally the upper figure (even though mine actually started as the lower 192 model) or even exceed it if possible.

Cost & availibility – I wanted and engine that was cheap to buy and for which spares were cheap and readily available. This was always intended to be a budget project to swap the engine more cheaply than replacing it.

After considering a huge number of options from things people have done before (VW 1.8t engine) to completely off the wall ideas that would probably upset all the RX8 purists (1.9 turbo diesel?) I eventually came across a couple really promising candidates – the Mazda KLDE and Ford AJ series engines. These are both very compact aluminium construction V6’s which should be short enough that no modification to the front cross member should be needed. It became apparent pretty quickly that the KLDE was hard to find and attracted a comparatively high price so I ruled this out.

The AJ V6 is related to the older KLDE and is available in a few flavours. It was produced as the AJ25 and AJ30 (2.5 and 3.0 litre respectively) and were used in a a range of cars in slightly different configurations including the Ford Mondeo ST220 (along with US Contour and Taurus), Jaguar S-type and X-Type along with several others. Some (including the S-type version) have VVT.

So after an eBay search and a hard earned £165 (including delivery) later I had this prime example of an AJ25 from an S type Jag sat on my driveway. At this stage I went for the 2.5L because the 3.0L version attracts a more premium price and since I had no real idea if it I would ever get it all together I bought the cheap version. Since the block is identical for both the logic was if I made one fit and decided I just didn’t have enough power I could swap all the custom parts over to a 3.0. Clearly there’s a lot of extraneous parts on here I won’t be using and once much of this is stripped the true compact size of the engine is a bit clearer.

There are a few reasons I picked this version of this engine. One was that the Mondeo version, which is more common, has the water pump driven from and extended camshaft on the rear of the engine because in the Mondeo the engine is in a transverse orientation. To fit the engine to the RX8 the engine will need to be installed longitudinally and the rear will have to be very close to the firewall so this is a non-starter. The Jag version has the water pump front mounted so avoids this problem. The Jag version also includes direct acting mechanical bucket cam followers and VVT. Sadly the 2.5L generally only offers 200bhp in this configuration so it’s a little down on where I really wanted to be but the torque is 240 Nm compared to the 211 Nm peak of the 231 bhp RX8 and a considerably wider torque band so it should still go well.

Around this time I found out that the Noble M12 uses this same 2.5L engine running as a twin turbo at 325 bhp. The later M400 uses the 3.0L version of the engine but they again two turbos to it and get something in the order of 425 bhp out of it with minimal additional modifications. Reports from Noble suggest it is capable of even more but was limited because they were planning on upping the power later selling this as another model but due due to the change of direction and ford taking the engine out of production this never happened. More info can be found here : Noble M12 History

I also made the decision to keep the RX8 gearbox so I could retain the standard carbon prop shaft in the RX8 so next up is the challenge of making an engine made by Ford, which was salvaged from a Jag, fit the gearbox from a Mazda!

RX8 Project – Part 3, Engine Autopsy!

Rather long delay since the last post on this project mostly due to a server problem it took a while to resolve.

So here it is, the autopsy of a failed RX8 engine. First here’s how the engine looks freshly removed from the car.

The 13B rotary engine really is rather small and while it is true to say it is a comparatively light engine (I’ve heard figures around 130kg though I’ve not checked this) it is a solid lump with very little space inside. It’s also worth noting the four spark plugs at this point – this engine has leading and trailing plugs and actually fire the chamber twice during combustion phase which is a little unusual for an engine.

Here’s the next stage, strip all the supporting components from the engine. So the alternator, aux drive belt, manifolds, ignition coils, clutch and anything else bolted onto the main block.

13B Stripped Components — All the bits removed

So when you get to this point you will (if you haven’t already) realised the flywheel must be removed to break down the engine any further as the engine is built as a series of layers with long through bolts. These through bolts are all located under the flywheel hence why that needs removing.

The bad news here is that the flywheel is held on by a single very large nut, this nut is 54mm across flats. I have no idea what torque it is tightened to, but it’s very tight, very fine pitch and is installed with thread locker adhesive.

The first problem is locking the engine solid. I actually used a section of steel between two of the the clutch bolts and then another bolt through one of the bell housing bolt holes. Obviously the steel must be installed across two bolts so it doesn’t cross the nut you’re trying to remove. Alternatively proper locking tools can be bought but the ones I could find were quite pricey. As for the actual nut I ended up buying a 54mm impact socket which on its own was about £30.

For the actual removal I tried a long 1/2″ breaker with a big cheater bar and ended up shearing the end off the bar! The bolt didn’t budge! I ended up convincing a mechanical fitter where I worked who was well into cars to stay a little late one night, borrowed the company van to get the engine up to the workshop and borrowed his largest 1/2″ drive air impact gun to remove it. After a bit of an argument the nut eventually moved!

Next I took off the sump, while I could have done this earlier I was largely resting the engine on the sump so it made sense to leave it in place. This moment was a huge warning of what was to come!

So, apparently this was once oil! Judging from what came out it was something like 90% or more water at this stage suggesting a serious internal failure of a water seal. This is a known problem in these engines and if caught early is repairable. In this case unfortunately the engine had still been used for some time after the warning signs started appearing with the previous owner running the car until it wouldn’t idle at all or restart when warm. Expectations for the engine were not high at this point!

It’s worth pointing out at this stage you need to find a way to prop up the engine vertically to disassemble from the flywheel end. Again a guy at work helped me out here by building me a custom engine stand from offcuts in a quiet moment but other solutions could be used. the positions I used were the rear pair of air con mounts.

Seriously rusty rotor — Well that doesn’t look good!

On opening it I was met with this sight. Again this confirms very large amounts of water getting inside the engine. Several parts of the engine are cast iron and so will rust for a pass-time when exposed to water. Add to that the total lack of lubrication offered by the water and engines will basically overheat and the bearing surfaces will eat themselves alive.

Notice the scoring on the internal bearing surface on this rotor.

Here is the lobe on the eccentric shaft that the rotor locates on. This photo clearly shows the the lobe has experienced excessively high temperatures to such an extent the shaft has discoloured.

And the final shot shows the amount of scoring on the shaft. Clearly everything is not well.

So this is what actually caused the damage. These o-rings seal both the water from the combustion chamber (red) and from the outside world (black). As can clearly be seen in the photo the outer seal has degraded to the point of failure. The really unfortunate aspect here is is this seal failed at any point over most of its length the engine would leak coolant but this wouldn’t actively damage the engine. What happened here is the point of failure was above the sump so as the water leaked out it filled the sump with more water than oil progressively ruining the engine. The inner seal in this engine had also failed and this means that once the coolant is hot and under pressure it leaks into the combustion side. This is a common cause of the warm idle and restart problems.

More signs of running without oil - chatter marks in the housing — 13B Housing damage

So this was the final nail in the coffin for this 13B engine, both rotor housings were ruined with significant chatter marks, scoring and chipping of the hard chrome surface and these cannot be restored because the only people that have a specialist surface grinder to finish the hard chrome surface in the correct profile is Mazda. So at this point virtually everything needs replacing, effectively this is buying a new engine and costs a huge amount of money. for a £300 car it just isn’t worth it.

So now project moved onto what reasonably priced alternative engines could be fitted for less than the cost of replacing the proper engine….