Steve,
Some more pictures of my build as I promised. I also included some descriptions on my build. I think you are doing a marvelous job on yours, I wish I had been in contect with you earlier!
I'll dig up more photos from the actual machining as well. I broke my phone a year ago (well.. actually it 'fell' very hard to the floor realizing we had made a mistake on the concrete pour on my holiday house I am building this year, so I have to figure out how to retreive some of the pictures from the backup one of these days)
- The block was fairly straight forward. Hard to get a grip on though I thought
. Boring went OK, I also had some chattermarks on the entrance of each bore.
- Crankshaft is press-fit and riveted through all connections. Not sure that is neccessary. Honestly I also put some loctite in there but I doubt very much got wettet in the end in due to that press-fit was fairly tight)
I chose to machine the center bearing surface after pressed togehter (see pic). Machined very slowly it was more of a rub to get the center aligned with the end bearing surfaces.
This is the reason I have a split in two-halfs center bearing, I also wanted to be able to change the bearing
- Pistons and piston rings more or less excectly as your build. When expanding the rings I had a water-bath below when heating the rings, that way when they stress-relaxed and fell of the fixture they got immediately quenched and hardened. Then I just annealed them by feel.
- Bearings etc: I also have pins to locate and fix the bearings & chamfered and drilled them for lubrication, nothing really intereting about those. For the camshaft I drilled and tapped holes for set-screws to fix those bearings. I did include a spacer between the first cam and the bearing to automatically fix the shaft axially.
- Cylinder liners: Here I did something I regret. I made the liners stick out 0.05" approx from the bottom of the cylinder block. I did this to center the cylinders in the block in a good fashion. The problem I had was the connecting rods interfered and 3 and 9 o'clock and wanted to lift the cylinders so I had to grind the a chamfer into the liners after a press-fitted them. Didnt realise this until I was assembling the engine with pistons.
- Rocker Arms: I wanted to really make them look slim and like forgings, and I had an idea that they would look unproportionally big (fat) if I machined them out, so I ended up silver-soldering each rocker out of 4 pieces (see pic). Not sure that was worth the effort in the end, but they look ok and works well.
- Carb: Here I made my own casing instead of using the aluminium casting block. I did this just because I thought it looked better in steel. The carb was somewhat of a pain I thought and ate up some spare drills for those really small longbore holes. Still not sure the carb works 100% as I do not have the engine running well yet.
-Exhausts: Here I silver-soldered two pieces together to get a sharp bend. I may redo these as I think I like plain tubes better,but focus is to get it running good first. The lock nuts were just milled out
- Valves: I made the shaft of the valve in regular steel and the sealing surface is stainless (soldered to the shaft). Then machined. I do have an issue getting them to seal 100%. This is largely (I think) due to my own fumble, as when I had lapped all valves I managed to tip out the assortment box I sued for the valves onto the floor so everything was mixed up. I then re-lapped them but I may have ruined the surfaces. I am currently re-lapping a couple of valves that I know leaks to see the result
- Ignition: I am currently using glow plugs. The idea is to get the settings of the carb worked out with glow and then focus on creating a working spark ignition. I am using regular fuel though, not glow fuel. But O dear do 4 glowplugs require alot of current! Sideproject is going to be creating a stable flow of voltage through regular power outlet transformation.
- Water cooling: Silversoldered tubes on the inlet and outled with a nut connection to the waterpump and future cooler (I have no cooler yet).
Well that is at least a short summary of my approach on this engine, it has been a really fun build so far!
I also include som pictures below (two posts).
Thank you guys and all the best!
Thank you