Drying out the Duratec

[David]

I had to do a few days at work so some time to pause and contemplate the new sump. In classic Caterham style, there were no instructions or diagrams so I thought a telephone call would be a good place to start. This immediately highlighted that a few bits were missing (well it was Caterham!) but the next day a new set of hoses, sprocket, blanking plate and chain arrived. I had also been warned to 'clean up' the drive shaft and pay particular attention to the sealing of the drive shaft bung.


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First job - clean the drive shaft.


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This was a black oxide finish and had a couple of manufacturing 'hammer' marks. the best way I could think of to clean it was to put it in the drill and uses metal polish and some oiled wet an dry on the hammer marks. I ended up with a nice shiny shaft!

The assembled sump without the windage plate, nylon tension block and chain.


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Putting it together was straight forward once I’d worked out how the gauze filters were fitted in the pick-up tubes. Worryingly I was left with 3 'O' rings

Next stage bolting it to the sump . . . .

[Rich H]

Bits left over = lighter.
You have added lightness

[David]

Bolting the sump on seemed a nice simple task - squirt some RTV sealant on the matting surfaces and torque it down. First thing to do was to clean the old sealant off. Alloy surfaces don’t like mechanical removal so I used this . . . .



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Before . . . . .



On with the gel . . . .



Wipe it off two hours later and you get this . . . . .



With Caterham’s warnings in mind, I soon realised that I had to work out were to put the sealant bead as the two castings were not the same shape and missing the overlap was a real possibility. The solution was to make a template and then mark the overlap on the block. It may seem a lot of work but there’s nothing more annoying than an oil leak.


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There is a little adapter that joins the sump to the oil pump. Here’s Ford’s low volume production example



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And the with the Titan example


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. . . . the sump in place. One bolt was too short so I used the old raceline bolt.


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And finally the drive arrangement


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Starting the valve timing next . . . .

[David]

Ok the first cock-up. Whilst tidying up, a small bag of washers fell out from under a flap in the bottom of a box. Oh dear, lots of spring locking washers. Now, I had wondered about the lack of washers but Caterham often don’t specify them - and as for Ford, not a washer in sight.

Judging by the numbers, they were meant for the windage plate and pickup pipes. I did used Loctite but it played on my mind and I thought long and hard about the consequences of not fitting them. In the end, doubt got the better of me and I decided to strip it all back and do it again. And there were also those three O rings, and I was curious about how well the RTV sealant worked!

It didn’t take long and I was soon back to where I started. And as for those O rings? They seemed to be for the Aero pipe adapters for the oil tank - which could have been put right at anytime.

Tomorrow a day off and time to think about cams and timing.

[David]

The noisy tappet

When the engine was cold there was an irritation ticking from the front inlet side of the engine. It normally disappeared within a few minutes. A browse of the internet revealed that this was not uncommon on the Duratec.


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The strip down showed number 3 inlet lifter had a badly hammered ring near it’s outer edge. This had started to produce a groove to a noticeable depth and was a much larger diameter than the cam lobe so must be happening either at the start or end on the lift.


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The side of the lifter showed some distress too. My logic suggest that it had been sticking when closing and then hammering the lobe as it frees itself .

I’m not sure what can be done to cure this as it suggests the head is a bit tight on the lifter. I think it is just a case of monitoring and hoping it will settle down. Maybe fit a new lifter when it does. The cam lobe shows not distress.

Another curiosity was the valve clearances on the inlet side seemed a bit low - all were in tollerance, but just below the nominal 0.25 mm quoted by Ford. Maybe a deliberate setup to maximise valve lift? Exhaust clearances seemed OK.

[Great Pretender]

Fascinating stuff

[David]

Number 3 lifter was bothering me – I had to do something, so I spent some time polishing the sides. If nothing else it would help the clearances.


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The wear on the cam journals was greater than anticipated. Not a problem, just more than you would expect on a 4000 mile engine. Maybe the up-rated valve springs don’t help as they must increase the bearing loads


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With the lifters back in, the cams went on without any issues. Ford specify lubricating the cams with hypoid oil – I think it provides better lubrication during the first start up.

Setting up the timing was next. First find TDC, then set the cams for TDC, and finally tighten all the bolts.

This shows how you calculate TDC. With a timing disc on the crank and a dial gauge poking down the spark plug hole to touch the piston you pick a reading before TDC on the dial gauge and measure the same reading on the other side of TDC. TDC is in the middle of the two angle readings. The Ford method is to use a calibrated peg that screws in to the block and touches the crank web.


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The crank is then locked off.


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The cams have a slot in their ends and are lined up with a straight edge – or locked with the Ford tool, if you have one.


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The original setting (by Ford) was not that good – the inlet was about 2-3 degrees out so I had to loosen one cam to reset it.

Next job is to tighten the pulley bolt – this is crucial. I’m operating this engine at a considerably higher RPM than Ford intended, so it's got to be as good as it can be. If it slips it will be the end of the engine.

It uses friction washers and I had ordered some new ones from Caterham but something went wrong with the quantities so I’ve had to reorder some more – but the're now closed till the 4th January, so I think I’ll take a break over Christmas and the New Year.

[David]

Metal Fume Fever is something you don't want to suffer from - trust me, it's not nice.

While waiting for the parts from Caterham, I decided to make a pulley holding tool. The basics components were an old galvanised scaffold pole and some old bolts. It was a straight forward job of welding them to the pole and then making a right angle joint. Tucked up nice and warm in the garage, the job was soon done and it was off to watch the 'Day of the Triffids' and then bed.

A couple of hours later I woke, frozen to the bone, with my brain stuck in an endless loop of abstract thoughts. I needed to drink . . . . . but was shaking too much to hold the glass. Struggling back to bed, it progressed to a fever, nausea and a splitting headache. By the morning I was soaked in sweat but felt surprisingly better.

I thought it was flue but with no coughs, sneezes, or soar throat, it seemed unlikely – on the web, and all became clear – I was suffering from Metal Fume Fever (zinc oxide poisoning). Fortunately no long term effects, and may even be therapeutic . But from now on I will be welding in well ventilated areas only.

[cla5h]

Ulp.

Sounds like a life in hands situation.

[mac]

Sounds like the time I painted with 2 pack paint instead of the base & Clear coat I was told to get

[David]

After 48 hours to recover from my poisoning episode it was time to move on. As I was still waiting for the friction washers I decided to start the next upgrade – roller barrels.


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These are advertised to give an extra 10 BHP and, to be honest, are a bit expensive for such a small amount. The reason I was keen on the upgrade was more to do with the throttle response. The plenum on the original spec is quite big and is rumored to dull the whole response. If nothing else it will sound better!

The ECU needs to be remapped so it was sent off to Caterham just before they closed for Christmas.

Caterham’s philosophy with the R400 seems to be to use as many OE Ford parts as possible (as far as I can tell the only changes seem to be to the cams, valve springs, and the ARP big end bolts). Surprisingly the injectors are also standard OE Ford Focus. And not surprisingly they run out of puff at 200 BHP.


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As this dyno run shows, an injection time of 15.18 ms at 7800 RPM is a duty cycle of 98%. (7800/60 = 130 Rev per second, 130/2= 65 firing strokes per second, 65 x 0.01518 secs = 0.98) . I understand that rule of thumb says maximum BHP should be around 80% duty cycle.

Also of interest here is what appears to be a soft cut to the fuel by the limiter at 7800 – as seen by the sloping line before the throttle is lifted. I thought limiters normally work just on ignition – does anyone knows anything about this?

So, for even a modest 10 BHP, the injectors need to be changed for bigger green ones.


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The replacement Bosch injectors are good for 300BHP but have a different connector – not a problem say Caterham, they’d supplied a nice new injector sub loom – except my car which was built before the CPT R500 era when sub looms were introduced. Out with the soldering iron.


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The Fuel rail – there's no return feed or pressure regulator – it’s all done by the two stage pump in the fuel tank.


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Fitting it together next . . . .

[David]

A trial fitting of the roller barrels . . . .


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The barrels are not identical as they are handed left and right. Also they seemed to be have been made slightly differently, one had the barrel edges rounded and the other was left sharp. I was concerned that this would produce different flow characteristics at idle but, thinking again about it, this would be adjusted out when they were set up.


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They were visually set up to match the aperture and estimate the idle setting.



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The barrels are connected by a dog clutch arrangement with three adjustment screws - for idle, full throttle, and matching.

Putting it on was straight forward with the only problem being that the alternator belt tensioner fouled the air box. This rang a few bells as I remember reading something about this on the web. The best solution seemed to be to modify the tensioner


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And fitted


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Hope to go back to the pulley bolt next

[David]

The friction washers finally arrived from Caterham


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They have an encrusted finish like a very fine nail file. Comparing new and old, they seem very similar so I think you could probably get away with reusing them, but better safe than sorry.

With the crank still locked up and the pulley on the crank, you use a M6 bolt through the hole in the pulley to lock it at TDC (the position sensor uses the pulley)


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It was then in with the bolt and nip it up to it’s snug torque of 100 Nm. I then painted a line across it as a double check to the angle gauge.


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The general arrangement to tighten it was as shown below. It shows the pulley holding tool that made me so ill .


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The torque wrench was rated at 350 Nm and I was hoping to measure the torque needed to get the 90 degrees specified

I didn’t have the strength to do it in a scissor action so with my son holding (sitting on) the scaffold pole, I applied my weight to the wrench at 180 degrees to the pole.

Generally I don’t like using the angle torque method as it often feels totally wrong as the bolt stretches, but this seemed quite measured and progressive and soon it was done. About 350 Nm needed (strange coincidence )



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It was then down to re-checking all alignments and unlocking the engine. A few turns to check all was well – job done.

[weemark]

Wow! Thats a home-made tool and a half! Good work on the build

[David]

Sorry for the lack of posts this week - I had to take some time out to earn some money!

The few hours I have been able to put in have been to prep the chassis for the dry sump tank, swap the oil cooler, relocate the header tank plate (bottom left of pic), and put the gearbox back on the engine.


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The oil cooler is swapped for no other reason than the Aeroquip pipes have different threads.


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Some nice detail on the tank


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And then disaster

This . . . . . .


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. . . . no longer fits this . . .


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The Titan sump has different bolt positions to the Raceline bell housing.


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I’m not sure what Caterham are going to say about this but if there’s not a neat solution (new bell housing?) then it might be possible to run a drill through the flange as, fortunately, the holes would miss the cooling fins on the other side.


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Not a good show Caterham !!!