[Half-Inch Stud]

You intake project makes me pine for an OHC-6 to work on.

[TheSilverBuick]

I had to cut a bunch more material out of the exhaust manifold's heat cross over. I'm glad I had already started to do so because it turns out it would have been required. But I bolted it all together on the head and cleared up any interference's, so now the only place the exhaust manifold is connected with the intake manifold is at the head and hold down bolts. Now the next step is giving the welds a coat of epoxy, then a nice coating of Pontiac Blue engine paint.

[TheSilverBuick]

Gave the intake a nice coating of Pontiac Blue. Now that I have it painted, I'm thinking of making a red trim piece in red to lay over the weld just to pretty it up and match the cam housing.

[TheSilverBuick]

Getting closer! Installed the intake and exhaust back on the engine yesterday. There is a small list of things I need to do before I can fire it up. The fuel line may need to be slightly changed for the new fuel rail location, the throttle cable is too short so I need a new one, the TPS and possibly the IAC wiring needs to be extended and I need to figure out what I'm going to do for an air filter. Down the road I'll likely make changes to the injector wiring harness.

I've hose clamped a piece of aluminum trim to the top of the intake to help hide and draw eyes away from my welding, lol.


​

[Ron Landis]

Originally Posted by TheSilverBuick

Getting closer! Installed the intake and exhaust back on the engine yesterday. There is a small list of things I need to do before I can fire it up. The fuel line may need to be slightly changed for the new fuel rail location, the throttle cable is too short so I need a new one, the TPS and possibly the IAC wiring needs to be extended and I need to figure out what I'm going to do for an air filter. Down the road I'll likely make changes to the injector wiring harness.

I've hose clamped a piece of aluminum trim to the top of the intake to help hide and draw eyes away from my welding, lol.


​

now THAT'S impressive! Love to hear it run!

[GTOWAGON]

ok I gotta ask whats up with the upper hose/thermostat housing

[TheSilverBuick]

To fit the fuel rail on the factory intake it interfered with the thermostat housing. So with an electric water pump I reverse flowed the cooling system so the water now exits the water pump location. With this intake, there is room now to re-install the thermostat housing, etc and go back to conventional cooling, but as hard to find as these water pumps are, I'm practically still better off with an electric water pump I can order from Summit, Jegs or Amazon and know I'll get one that works.





And the water pump is mounted down on the cross member, below the radiator outlet.

[TheSilverBuick]

Contacted the E-bay shop and a throttle cable should be in the mail, but I'm going out of town for the next two weeks so no progress will be done for a while when it gets here. Being as it's still -12ºF outside at 8:30am, I'm less than inclined to go out to the shop to work today as well. But the elbow piece for my air filter setup arrived yesterday. Just need some clamps and it should be good to go. I trimmed about 1/4" off the throttle body end and it clears both the radiator and radiator hose without issue. Gravity is pulling it down a bit in this picture but clears everything fine when seated properly.

[rohrt]

love seeing new updates on this.

[TheSilverBuick]

In the background of things I've been working on trying to make a reasonable attempt at checking the flow of these heads using my spare block and David Vizard's shop vac setup (http://www.musclecardiy.com/cylinder...-heads-part-3/) and if I get reasonably repeatably result I'll see about having a cfm calibration plate made, but in the mean time I've wanted to work on a proof of concept as well as see if the $8 USB camera would work well enough to "watch" wet flow. Today's tests were interesting to say the least!

I'm still trying to figure out how to best seal the bottom of the chamber with the shop vac. My first, and only, test so far was with a cut up nerf foot ball with a hole sawed hole in the middle for the shop vac fitting. Because I wasn't looking for specific repeatable numbers yet I just stuck the camera cord through the hole too. When I got it reasonably positioned and turning the vacuum on I learned a few things. One it simply sucked the whole thing to the top of the chamber and two the test valve springs I am using are not strong enough and both the intake and exhaust valves are pulled off their seats. So I need stronger springs and to work on the seal still. The second thing I learned is the camera isn't quite good enough to see how water mist flows into the chamber when spraying water at the port. And the third thing I learned is when the shop is 10ºF, and the block and head probably is too, ice builds up! LOL! I'll call this a "COLD flow test" lol.

The test set up.


Now the ice may have been as much a blessing as a curse as it has there frozen the water (fuel?) spray direction/pattern.


So you can see why I opened it up on the sparkplug side of the intake valves (old photo).


I found it interesting that there was no ice build up on the cylinder wall side of the intake port or chamber. Basically confirms everything I've read.






A better view of the sparkplug. The ice had built up enough to keep the intake valve from seating.


I tried taking some video's of the water flow, but all of them have water hitting the camera and blurring out (possibly icing up the camera..). So I decided to put a cam housing on with a 1bbl cam in it and video the valve action. The chamber is already iced over but it's still kind of neat to see. The overlap between the intake and exhaust is very minimal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8FAxhOTcx0


I've built a 8ft tall manometer with $15 worth of tubing and measuring tape and a spare piece 8ft white baseboard trim, but I won't put water in it until I'm sure of the rest of the test rig AND I know it won't freeze up!

[Bzltyr1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXLa0lfWT8

[Formulabruce]

Originally Posted by Bzltyr1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXLa0lfWT8

Cool vid, awsome truck!! I don't know how hot it runs with ambient at 100, but I see a ton of unused radiator space ( no shrouds in those areas).. Looks like a Blast!!, grats!

[Formulabruce]

Originally Posted by TheSilverBuick

In the background of things I've been working on trying to make a reasonable attempt at checking the flow of these heads using my spare block and David Vizard's shop vac setup (http://www.musclecardiy.com/cylinder...-heads-part-3/) and if I get reasonably repeatably result I'll see about having a cfm calibration plate made, but in the mean time I've wanted to work on a proof of concept as well as see if the $8 USB camera would work well enough to "watch" wet flow. Today's tests were interesting to say the least!

I'm still trying to figure out how to best seal the bottom of the chamber with the shop vac. My first, and only, test so far was with a cut up nerf foot ball with a hole sawed hole in the middle for the shop vac fitting. Because I wasn't looking for specific repeatable numbers yet I just stuck the camera cord through the hole too. When I got it reasonably positioned and turning the vacuum on I learned a few things. One it simply sucked the whole thing to the top of the chamber and two the test valve springs I am using are not strong enough and both the intake and exhaust valves are pulled off their seats. So I need stronger springs and to work on the seal still. The second thing I learned is the camera isn't quite good enough to see how water mist flows into the chamber when spraying water at the port. And the third thing I learned is when the shop is 10ºF, and the block and head probably is too, ice builds up! LOL! I'll call this a "COLD flow test" lol.

The test set up.


Now the ice may have been as much a blessing as a curse as it has there frozen the water (fuel?) spray direction/pattern.


So you can see why I opened it up on the sparkplug side of the intake valves (old photo).


I found it interesting that there was no ice build up on the cylinder wall side of the intake port or chamber. Basically confirms everything I've read.






A better view of the sparkplug. The ice had built up enough to keep the intake valve from seating.


I tried taking some video's of the water flow, but all of them have water hitting the camera and blurring out (possibly icing up the camera..). So I decided to put a cam housing on with a 1bbl cam in it and video the valve action. The chamber is already iced over but it's still kind of neat to see. The overlap between the intake and exhaust is very minimal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8FAxhOTcx0


I've built a 8ft tall manometer with $15 worth of tubing and measuring tape and a spare piece 8ft white baseboard trim, but I won't put water in it until I'm sure of the rest of the test rig AND I know it won't freeze up!

very interesting!! wow..

[TheSilverBuick]

I thought so too!

After a couple week vacation I went back out to the barn today and hooked up the new throttle cable, then instead of doing the other work required (like hooking up the TPS or exhaust...) I decided I wanted to fire it up, lol.

So I did =D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q146q1bw_00


So it seems my IAC is directional, and how I had it mounted was backwards initially causing the idle to be around 2,500rpm, so turning it around knocked the idle down to ~1,200rpm, and with the TPS disconnected it's not going into closed loop idle and giving it low-mid 20's ignition timing when normal ~600rpm idle is usually 5-8º of timing. After the exhaust is hooked up and the timing lowered back down (via TPS being wired in) I may still have to chase a small vacuum leak here or there, but will cross that path when I get there. Otherwise, stoked it fired up and doesn't leak fuel!

[66sprint]

That is pretty cool. Get that dialed in and hit the road!

[TheSilverBuick]

Hopefully I'll be out driving it next week, and heard from one of the NAPA guys that the Eureka airport where I ran the car last summer posted up they are having a run whatcha brung event on Friday May 6, so I may try and make that. I'm supposed to work that day but can likely get it off.

http://www.eurekacarshow.info/drags.html

[TheSilverBuick]

Drove the car and it really seems to have quite a bit more power from the seat of the pants feel. I had initially re-used the fiber gasket because I liked how thick it was, but it really hadn't come apart clean, so the vacuum leak at the manifold wasn't surprising at all. I replaced it with a new thin tin one from NAPA and it still has a little vacuum leak issue, which isn't surprising given I never had the intake flange surfaced, but it idles down to 600-700rpm in neutral so it's not too bad. I'm going to pull the intake one more time, it only takes about ten minutes since the bolts are easy to get to and it's only the intake, and "Right Stuff" the intake flange and see if that cures it.

I tried using a high speed datalog to see if one cylinder has a greater leak than another, but no such luck. The only thing that came out of it was it "appears" cylinder three pulls the most vacuum, but is likely just a result of the vacuum port being right across from cylinder 3's runner entrance.

The for some reason log is read right to left (as determined by as time increased the logged value was to the left).
​

[Formulabruce]

getting vacuum balanced will be really hard to get it dead on.. Looks good though.. Very interesting project!

[TheSilverBuick]

I'd never expect it to balance since it has a common plenum for the intake pulses to resonate back into, and then their is the differences in each chamber's ability to pull air/fuel since it never actually got a bore work done to it. My hypothesis was that one or two cylinders would have a noticeable decrease in how much was pulled, the Y-axis range there is from basically 39kPa to 40.7KPa (which is a small number!) and I was thinking a leaky runner may have a 2+ kPa shift upwards, but that didn't happen. Number 3 just pulls slightly longer than the others.

[TheSilverBuick]

This last weekend I pulled the intake, cleaned up the surface of the bit of copper RTV, which clearly showed some failings, and put a bead of Right Stuff around the port and then skimmed it off with a metal putty knife, leaving a coating of the Right Stuff in the low spots. I let that sit about an hour and then ran a bead of Right Stuff on the outer edge of the tin intake gasket's raised grooves. So the bead should contact the intake flange first and anywhere the gasket isn't enough the Right Stuff should play filler and shouldn't squeeze its way to the runner. Then let it sit for a couple hours even though Right Stuff says it should be able to go right back into service.

It seemed to have worked. Unfortunately after about a ten minutes of run time it started to leak fuel at two injectors. I the repeated removal and installation of the fuel rail had compromised a couple O-rings which I found upon inspection. Found two of them nicked, this one was the worse, but I replaced all of the upper o-rings just to be sure. The risk ran when removing the fuel rail a few times. The injectors usually stay with the rail, but sometimes they stay with the intake and I had to re-install them into the rail, that's how this happened. I just didn't take enough care installing it last time.



It still has an audible vacuum leak, and it appears to be narrowed down to between the ports, where I wasn't able to effectively coat the welds in epoxy... I used a screw driver to attempt to paste in some Right Stuff between the ports, but only had marginal success. So the intake may yet come off again... Got to love R&D, if it was easy everyone would be doing it =P Prototype #1 is about done.