tortuga

Yep, same here. I love working in the garage while it rains. As long as the lights dont go out!

+1 On the rain thing, even if the power goes out.

Opel engineering didn't have any solution I was happy with to stop the seals from coming off. Ted told me that that just roughing up the guide surface where the seal fits onto so it's not smooth helps a lot but I wanted to do something kinda more certain so I pulled a special tool out of my ass. I guess my profession really paid off on this one. haha

So here's the explanation of the tool I made..


That's just a 5/16 socket head cap screw that will serve as the pilot for the tool


thrust bearing


tool arm holder


another thrust bearing and nut so that it's solidly held to the right depth but can still spin on the pilot


the tool arm
I cut a simple form tool to make the barb groove in the valve guide. The tool arm lets you set final cut depth of the form tool to whatever you want and then tighten with the set screw. Clearance between the guide and the cylinder head casting limits how much can stick out though.


the aluminum arm there is just a lever to walk the tool around by hand
not in view of the picture is a spring and screw holding the tool arm to the holder so that it can kinda feed its self in automatically. That worked alright but you still have to fuss with it a little. It likes to deflect and then suddenly plunge in. It's not a big deal since the groove depth is shallow and the guide is an easy to machine material.


If the form tool depth is preset right, you just keep going until there's no gap between the holder and the arm and done.


that's finished. There's the original chamfer they machined on all the guides for lead-in and then right underneath is the next step for a barb. The extra mark on that original lead-in chamfer is from getting hit by the seal after it came off.


in action


This was my test. I installed an old seal. It went on just as easily as any and was more difficult to get off than before. Obviously the barb shaved up the seal from taking it off. It seems to be doing it's job. In addition to the barb itself keeping the seal down, I can safely put a little bit of rtv under the barb to help glue it on and I don't have to worry about any getting squeezed up towards the valve stem area.

oooo! Custom, high precision, purpose built, fancy! I love it! Should do the trick!

Karma wrote:

oooo! Custom, high precision, purpose built, fancy!  I love it! Should do the trick!

Say prayers!!!

some more stuffs for show and tell


Since I went pretty hard cleaning everything with the various steel wirebrushes I figured it'd be appropriate to lap the valves to get a nicer sealing surface there and also check the pattern and stuff for reference.


James decided to come over last weekend and join my misery and good thing too because he had a valve seal protection tool - a mcdonalds straw. This just keeps the lip of the seal from getting chafed by the keeper groove as it slides onto the valve.



I made up a simple tool to seat the seals. Actually these pictures are before I drilled the deep hole for the valve stem to run into but you get the idea. Not really something that's normally critical but with my barbs I wanted to make sure they go on perfectly square and whatnot because any off-ward motion will tear of the seal. worked like butter



installed a sensor for post-intercooled intake temp which will provide some great data I think. It'd be nice to have pre-IC as well but that would require a much smaller thermocouple style sensor and driver for that and whatnot. Maybe in the future. I was thinkin about something along the lines of taking another one of those 3/8npt IAT sensors like what i put in my lower intake and just making a smaller two-piece 1/16npt housing for it to fit at the discharge of the blower. It'd be about the size of a nitrous nozzel. The main issue that worries me is the temps exiting the blower under boost are higher than the charted working range of those IATs so I dunno.

turtleman wrote:

James decided to come over last weekend and join my misery and good thing too because he had a valve seal protection tool - a mcdonalds straw. This just keeps the lip of the seal from getting chafed by the keeper groove as it slides onto the valve.

That is actually really clever!

turtleman wrote:

Agh! the tap threads! (I know its the only way to really get in there..)

You gonna eat that banana?

I saw an article about people eating the peels. WTF is with that?

Cody, where can I find your coverage on your vacuum actuated cutout on the forum? Thank you

charlieRobinson wrote:

Cody, where can I find your coverage on your vacuum actuated cutout on the forum? Thank you

I'm pretty sure all I posted about it is on page44 of the this thread from when I replaced the headers and stuff.
It's boost actuated btw. I didn't post about it (I don't think) but I also set up a control valve (using an extra boost bypass control solenoid off a blower) to allow or prevent the cutout from working. It'd incredibly loud and I don't necessarily want that every time I go into 6-7+psi boost.

Once I have the tortuga running again I can take a video or something for you. I don't think really got to that because I kinda had the cutout off and on figuring out other stuff and whatnot.

Got the car officially up an running again a couple weeks ago before my sisters big wedding. Last week I took care of little odds and ends. Initially I had a small vacuum leak that was just local damage on one of the silicone sheet blower gaskets. I just rtv'd it. I damaged it from scraping all the old rtv off that I put on during the first re-install (I had a vac leak that was found elsewhere and chose to rtv the gaskets to make sure it wasn't them since it was kind of experimental and I didn't trust them right away). If I hadn't rtv'd them in the first place, it would have been gravy. I highly recommend cutting your own silicone gaskets particularly if you are running an intercooler. I also had a tiny leak from the reused thermostat seal - replaced the seal. That's about it. I let the smoke from the wrapped/seal coated headers burn off before putting the hood back on. The accessory belt squealing is gone! Oh my god! It's gone! My s/c belt tensioner is getting worse allthewhile. I have one or two pulley shims on it right now because it's cocked out from the force of the belt and makes it want to ride on the outside of the pulley. Need to come up with a solution to that bugger. A lower mile/new replacement would obviously be good but I would like to come up with a more positive fix and get more tension at the same time. James & I will have to work on that.

So now, I'll be slowly working on tuning it again. I have a fresh o2 sensor and presumably good wideband. I am not really planning on going to the track this year because I want to catch up financially and handle other things and I'll need to buy a new set of tires too but who knows.

And he didn't even post pictures....

matt270avian wrote:

And he didn't even post pictures....

It's a Riv...with an engine...and it runs...again. Did that paint a picture for you? Oh, and it's GREEN!!!!

time for some geeking out



It's not quality data yet (lousy 5 frames/sec during this scan) but the trend I was looking for seems to be there. I just did some pulls on the highway real quick to compare maf vs rpm at WOT with the cutout closed & open. It looks like the motor flows quite a bit more with the exhaust un-corked and this is only with a 3.2 pulley


boost vs rpm tells the same story

please post more info on the cutout. im trying to get these gains too

Soo.... Just to clarify, you're still running the V right now right?

matt270avian wrote:

Soo.... Just to clarify, you're still running the V right now right?

yeah
I will be running the V for a while yet. Still a lot to do for the FGT blower and anyway I wanna accomplish more with the V at the track anyway. I still haven't gotten a clean nitrous run.

my max boost went down to only 2-3psi when I drove my riv without the exhaust system from the downpipe back.

Updates?

turtleman wrote:

some more stuffs for show and tell


Since I went pretty hard cleaning everything with the various steel wirebrushes I figured it'd be appropriate to lap the valves to get a nicer sealing surface there and also check the pattern and stuff for reference.

I've just started reading this post and haven't gone back to the beginning. Just picked it up about 4 or 5 pages back. Some very good reading and great photo's of your work and modifications.

From my previous experience working in an engine machine shop the lapped surface on the valve, looks to be quite a bit larger than it should be on the valves. Normally you want to see about 1/32" to 1/16".

What do the seats look like after lapping.?

Could just be the camera shot of what your dealing with.

Did you measure, with calipers, the width of the lapped mark on the valve seating surface.?

Your exhaust valve is showing a wide lapped surface in the middle of the valve. The middle is good. But too wide.

And the intake is showing a seating surface that is sitting high on the valve seat. Is that your intention, to have the intake sit high due to valve length.??

The following is a quote from another forum and the engine builder is responding to a guy trying to lap his valves and valve seats into spec without having them done at a machine shop.

"Over time/miles, the different angles on the seats will wear into one big angle(basically) and your lapping efforts will result in the entire valve seat and valve face area being lapped instead of the 1/16" width that you would normally want on the bottom third of the valves face."

Just added that for what it's worth. I learned to check the valves and seat's by using a fine lapping compound on the valve or seat and twisting the valve 45% and pulling the valve to see if you had the correct width and depth as well as if the visible marks from the compound was 360* around the valve. This was done after the valves and seats had been cut by precision equipment using a multi-angle performance cut.

I didn't think to measure the seating surface width. I knew there wasn't going to be anything further for me to do about it anyway. The machine shop had performed all that work over a year prior - I was just cleaning and lapping. They were all about the same as pictured. The lapped marks are on the head there too.

matt270avian wrote:

Updates?

When I went to go reinstall the rocker pair on cylinder#1 with replacement fasteners I realized that the rockers' common trunion had been bent. It's axially twisted and bent outward. That's more complex a part than I want to undertake making and I more than doubt a replacement piece from compcams is available so I guess I'm just gonna switch all the rockers out for a set of stock and hope one of my two sets of 3/8 pushrods will work. I'm not buying any more damn roller rockers.

There's the alignment issue I was talking about resulting from the broken screw. Additionally the rocker arms were spread too far apart from eachother on the joining shaft. The good news is I was able to twist them back into alignment by hand with some force and then I stood them up on end and tapped the top trunion down to get the spacing back right and so I was able to fix them. I got it back together and the engine runs nicely once again.


random new engine bay shot just 'cause i was happy to see it running again and it's decently clean still


On another note, while I was looking under the car for a dropped washer I found out this happened.
My best guess is the tires were bottoming out on the ground while on the wheel chucks being towed 180mi. If it weren't for the fact that these tires were pretty much cashed anyway, I'd probably try to make a fuss about it with the towing company.

Good lord.. that engine bay looks wild Cody haha. :

There are things stirring once again with el tortuga..


I'll just leave this here