3D Printing

Having decided to enter the world of 3D printing after printing a couple of owls I made the first part for the car.

When I first built the car I fitted a Hella hi-level rear brake light to the roll bar unfortunately it was flat against a round bar so I filled the gap with self adhesive foam that's got shabby over the years.  Quinten - a regular poster on the WSCC Forum had the same problem and designed a filler plate that he provided me a copy of the design.  After downloading the CAD file I loaded it into the slicer software - Cura - to make it compatible with the printer.  Once copied onto an SD card and loaded into the printer you select the file and off it goes - well once you've levelled it and the plate and nozzle are up to temperature.

halfway through the print of one half

 The old foam

The new filler fitted, needs to be moved to the o/s slightly

Isle of Man and Crashbox Historic Car Show

Another trip to the Isle of Man, the weather was much better than last time and the gripper tyres and camshafts made the Mountain Road much more fun.

Day 1 was a long boring run up the M5/M6

to Heysham via Taff's for a coffee

and then 4 hours on the ferry, after unpacking we did a run on the Mountain Road and had supper at the Creg.

Day 2 we completed the TT course and then when back to the cottage for a BBQ and some beers/cider/G&Ts

Day 3 was a trip to the South of the Island including Peel, Calf of Man and watching Southern 100 qualifying (in light rain).

Day 4 we stayed in the North of the Island visiting the Motor Museum - much more stuff than 2015 and well worth the visit, we then went back to Laxey and took the railway up to the top of Snaefell, views of the Island were good but we couldn't see Ireland/England.

Day 5 - After a 'fireman's' breakfast and the Railway Station in Douglas,

 the weather was perfect so we based ourselves at the Creg and did multiple runs on the Mountain Road

followed by a pub crawl around Laxey.

Day 6 - early start to the ferry then the reverse M6/M5 journey home.  The car performed superbly for the whole week, with only a loose headlight and covered ~1000 miles.

On the Sunday I took the Eleven, we all met up at the Honiton Services on the A30 and headed to Powderham, excellent show and a good rest day to recover for the IOM, we shared a pitch with KitNet,UK.

Oil Cooler and radiator ducting

At Llandow we had to slow down towards the end of a session because the oil temperature alarm kept coming on meaning that temperatures were exceeding 120 deg C, no problem with the water which stayed at just over 90 deg C and was controlled by the fan.  As the weather was overcast and not particularly warm I decided that oil cooling would be worth while.

After researching options I decided that I'd go for a mocal sandwich plate with 92 deg C thermostat, 16 row radiator and a remote oil filter as there wasn't enough clearance to the steering column to fit the sandwich plate and even the small filter.  I bought a selection of push on adapters and a couple of metres of blue hose.

The instructions stated that the cooler need to be in air flow, after looking around the engine bay I decided that the best option would be in front of the radiator so I fitted the Westfield ally ducting kit, cut it down to allow the bonnet to close and then fabricated a bracket that went under the cooler and was rivetted to the ducting.

Ducting and cooler mounting

Cooler hoses and remote filter

hose P clips

U section bracket

Sandwich plate and hoses clearing the steering column

Once the cooler was in place I fabricated a bracket from alloy U section to mount the remote filter and fitted the sandwich plate and 'mushroom' cover to the engine.  I then made up the hoses and held them in place with a selection of p clips, separator clamps and ty-wraps.

Out on the road the oil is now typically 5-6 degrees lower than the water as apposed to 5-6 degrees higher but lower than the 92 degs C of the sandwich plate thermostat.  The weather has been unseasonably cool so hopefully I'll get a better idea of the effectiveness at the Isle of Man and on some track days later in the year.  Filling up with oil I added and extra 0.5 Litre to fill the oil cooler and extra hoses.

OMEX/Complete Kit Car Track Day at Llandow

The MOD's reluctance to allow their airfields in the South West for Track Days has resulted in little opportunity to try the car out.  Omex and Complete Kit Car were sponsoring a day at the Llandow Circuit and it was close to James' birthday, so an opportunity for him to drive the car for first time.

Having packed the car the night before we left for Llandow at just after 6am and arrived at the circuit just after 8am - nice to go over the bridge and not have £4.50 extracted from my wallet.  We unpacked the car and I headed off to Bridgend to fill the car and a couple of jerry cans with petrol driving past the Ford Engine Plant where the Zetec rolled off the line in 2004.

After the morning briefing we waited our turn for the ability controlled groups swapping over driver  in the pits lane half way through the sessions.  After 2 sets of ability sessions the day became open pit with 10 cars on circuit at any time.  The car went well with the tyres and engine upgrades all giving plenty of confidence to push on.  Towards the end of the afternoon James went out on his own and , apparently, noticed a significant difference in performance without me in the car.

Another Trip to Northampton Motorsports

Having fitted the Newman camshafts it was recommended that to finalise the timing the car should be run on a rolling road and the camshafts advanced/retarded using the Vernier pulleys until the best fit performance achieved followed by a remap of the ignition timing and fuelling.

Adge as if he could come along for the ride so arrived just before 6am and we headed off arriving just before 9am.  Troy strapped down the car and we removed the bonnet to give easy access to the Verniers.  After the first run there was clearly something wrong, the engine wasn't pulling well over 4,500 rpm and by 6,300 rpm it seemed like it was only running on 3 cylinders.  We then spent 3 hours checking the camshaft installation, adjusting the camshaft timing, checking the cylinders compression, pistons for valve contact, etc.  By backing off the fuel map over 5,000 rpm it stopped the misfire but whilst there was a power and torque improvement below 4,500 rpm this was dwarfed by the reduction above.  We even removed the exhaust to see if it was restricting the flow with no improvement.  Eventually we found the best compromise that would allow the car to be driven and stopped having run out of time on the rolling road, any further investigation requiring measurement of the camshafts and more strip-down of the engine.

I contacted David and Richard Newman and they were very helpful, firstly they'd supplied hundreds of sets of the cams so were confident in the design, and secondly they'd happily take the cams back for examination and measurement and would report back; luckily I still had a record of all the shimming changes and all the parts to go back to the original cams.  Whilst driving home from work I had the thought that perhaps the over fuelling might be the opposite, ie a lack of air, Troy had checked the throttle bodies to confirm that the butterflies were fully open at max throttle pedal so it was clutching at straws (I really didn't want to swap the cams over again, and potentially again).

I fully opened the butterflies and did a thorough examination of each of the TBs, Cylinder 3 looked okay, Cylinder 2 again looked okay but there seemed to be a small amount of gasket melted and slightly flowed into the port, Cylinders 1 & 4 appeared to have significant amounts of gasket partially blocking the ports.  I removed the TBs and confirmed this, the middle 2 cylinders appeared to have got hotter than the outer and the material was missing where as the outers being cooler the gasket had melted and flowed into the port.

I'd fitted the gasket principally to stop heat transfer to the Inlet Air Temperature but it obviously wasn't up to the job, the consensus was to use the original Ford gasket so I ordered one from Burtons.

I also took the opportunity to fit the Raceline sump, do an oil change and put the mapping back to the original NMS map.  Once this was completed the car appeared to be running well, I also took the opportunity to re-setup the DigiDash and Freewheel finding that the oil pressure sensor had failed so I fitted a remote sensor.

A few weeks later I headed back to NMS, this time the cam timing and mapping was straight forward and there was a good increase in power (20 bhp) and torque (15 lb ft) from 2600 rpm from both the cams and exhaust changes since the original mapping.