Cylinder head Guru required!

[yorkie_chris]

Doing them all is safest.

[Red Herring]

Originally Posted by Lozzo

You never improve if you don't push your boundaries.

This is true, but you don't win races without recognizing your weakness either.

Much as I admire Berlins adventure there is no way i would be taking on this job myself, and I've been stripping and building my own engines for the past 20 years. It's one thing to strip a standard engine and rebuild it to manufactures specification, or even to replace tuned parts with similar parts from the same tuner, but to take various parts from different sources and put them together yourself you either need to be very very good at checking everything (and have all the necessary instruments to do it), and have some idea (usually from experience) what the relative gaps and clearances should be, or you'll end up with a very expensive pile of spares shortly afterwards.

The problem with tuning engines is everything has to be matched together to the optimum clearance, and these figures aren't written down anywhere, they are the closely guarded secrets of engine builders and are what their reputations are built on. Just about anybody can throw together a powerful engine, not many can make it last a race distance....and 20bhp on a 600 is right up there with the best of them.

I guess it depends on how much you have invested in this build Berlin, and what you want to use it for. If you look at the economics having it put together by an expert would cost you less than one race weekend, how many DNF's is that worth?

£160 for spare engine (std)
£65 delivery
£150 for sexy head, pistons and cams etc
£80 for new thin head gasket

Putting it together myself and finding out it does put out 120BHP at the rear wheel...

Priceless!

If it goes pop, its been a useful learning curve and I feel I should be able to get it to at least start being an engineer and all that

Optimising the exact valve timin to the half a degree may take a little while on the dyno.

I've also ahd a bit of a result identifying the cams. They're Kent cams and I now have the base settings for the angles. I've also found out the springs and valves are Crescent Suzuki monsters.
The cams were special order and not in the Kent catalogue! Someone knew what they were doing!

C

[yorkie_chris]

Chemical engineer?

Getting it to start is the easy bit, finding out whether it explodes when you hit rev limiter at full throttle...

And you think an engine is mechanical engineering?

Designing and machining the engine is mechanical engineering.

What happens after that is pure chemical engineering!

Fluid flow dynamics for both fuel and air, fuel injection, heat exchange, combustion, Oil pumps, fuel pumps, ram air, and thernodynamics are all chemical engineering.

You make the cogs, I'll make them turn

C

[fastdruid]

Both Mechanical and Chemical Engineering are nothing more than lots and lots of maths.

Druid

[yorkie_chris]

Originally Posted by Berlin

And you think an engine is mechanical engineering?

Designing and machining the engine is mechanical engineering.

What happens after that is pure chemical engineering!

Fluid flow dynamics for both fuel and air, fuel injection, heat exchange, combustion, Oil pumps, fuel pumps, ram air, and thernodynamics are all chemical engineering.

You make the cogs, I'll make them turn

C

Fuel can burn as much as it wants when valves just got eaten by piston, you won't go very far

We do fluid mechanics, basic heat exchange, turbomachinery inc pumps, compressible flow and thermodynamics as part of mechanical course
Thermodynamic cycle of how engine works is less interesting than it sounds!

Id love to be doing the course you are doing Chris.

As to Berlin, now you have a rough idea where you want to be im sure you will be fine!

[yorkie_chris]

+1 now you know where you're going with it rest is safety check.

Check squish and map piston-valve clearance with those degree numbers, I'd check one and if clearance is miles then leave others.