Flatisfaction And Other Tangents.

With the heads assembled and mocked up on the block it was onto measuring the push rod length and setting the rocker sweep across the valve tip.
These engines have a long push rod at nearly 8 1/2” long. The longest adjustable push rod available for setting up is is just over 8 1/2”. Lucky.



Then things didn’t quite go to the plan.
What I’m trying to achieve is the optimum movement of the rocker roller across the tip of the valve. The reasons for this are to achieve the least amount of lost motion and to locate the movement as close to centre as possible to stop excessive side loads on the valve stem which prematurely wears the valve guides. In extreme cases it’s even possible to roll the rocker right off the edge of the valve tip.
To test you simply engineer blue the valve tip and cycle the valvetrain a couple of times and then inspect and measure the sweep that shows in the blue.
What you want is a central sweep that is no more than 0.050” in width.



This is the best I could get no matter what I did. Off centre and around 0.100” width.
I changed the pushrod length changed +/-. I tried shimming the rocker stands up. I even made caps for the valve stems out of shim stock to change the valve length to no avail.

It seemed to me that there was a fundamental design issue going on and that the real problem was that the whole rocker assembly was in the wrong place i.e it needed shoving back.
Myth and lore with these engines is they have a habit of breaking rocker shafts in high stress (racing) applications. I can believe it after going through this.
Its not unknown to slot mounting holes in rocker assemblies to be able move stuff around but that was a no go with this as the rocker assemblies are bolted down and oiled via the head bolts. Slotting the stands would lose oiling to the rockers and create a pressure loss in the oil system.

What to do?

Nothing!

It is what is. It’s not a race engine. It’s going in a road car with a slush box. It might not be great but it’s not terrible either. Sometimes you just have to accept and move on and it’s probably better now than it’s ever been.

On to the finishing touches.
The engine comes with a rudimentary sump baffle that bolts to the block. I simply added some extra baffles to contain the forward and back movement of oil.
Also made a new dipstick tube to replace the broken, bodged up one that was on it.



An oil filter wasn’t standard but you could have a bolt-on bypass filter fitted by the Dealer.
This engine had the filter fitted but the oil lines were a mess with most of the fittings rounded off.



I couldn’t live with this so I replaced the fittings and remade the lines.



Converted the road draft breather system (rubbish) to PCV instead.



The original dizzy got canned and a brand new Pertronix billet one with igniter II and fully adjustable ignition got fitted instead.
But before it went in I changed the stops and advance springs from the short, lazy curve that aftermarket dizzy’s always seem to evidently come with.



One final job before first start was to make a oil priming tool as funny enough they’re not available for these engines.



After having this engine so long I was determined for it go back in and be started.



We blitzed it one Saturday and done…

Thanks!

I had to look that one up.
The Aquarama didn't come out to '62, so no it wouldn't have been this engine as '55 was the last year. It did live on with capacity increases into the early 60's though.
I would think you could have specified any engine you wanted from Riva if you was buying new but Riva seem to have their own design V8.

A turbo flathead?! just sounds do wrong and dirty if that makes any sense. Winner winner chicken dinner on a hot rod then.
Thanks for sharing.
James

The valvetrain was refitted from the previous build unaltered.
The valve springs were fitted with an installed height of 1.900” which was in the middle of the Isky Cams recommendation.
The first time round I used internal callipers to measure the spring height. Not terrible but not the most accurate either.
You may of noticed in previous photos of a valve spring micrometer, which I had obtained since the first build.
I tried the micrometer on the first valve and it was 0.060” over on what it should have been. The second 0.060”, the third 0.060” etc etc!
Ok, they are all out but all out by the same amount.
This is well within shimming so I ordered 32 0.030” shims.
Remember the 3/8” spring spacers?
Yep, the shims didn’t fit over the shoulder of the spacer.

Some time later…



That brings things full circle.

Next step, turbo.
Where do I even start?
No knowledge of turbo sizing, no experience from others, can’t read boost maps.
What I did know was I wanted to start with cheap Chinese turbo. I didn’t want to throw a load of money at a genuine Garret or other for something that might never see the of day at this point.
At around this time Richard Holdener posted a video on YouTube where he fitted a Chinese GT3582 Garret copy on a 3.0 V6 and was very complimentary to the sizing/combo.
At a guess I’d say 3.0 V6 is probably fairly well matched to a 3.9 sidevalve V8 in breathing capacity and power output.

There we are, £145 of your finest EBay Wuhan Whirly Boi.



Moving onto the inlet.
I had in stock a factory inlet that had been modified for a Weber 38 and a near new Weber 38 jetted for a Flathead. Initial thoughts were for a blow thru set-up that must have been done a X100 with a Weber so the info must already be out there, right?

The whole Weber thing came about sometime ago when I was competing regularly on the hills with the Class Z Flatheads.
I had the standard dual Stromberg 97’s which were fine but wanted more.
The brief was,
- Replace the complexity of dual carbs with a single, large cfm carb.
- Move away from the basic 1930’s technology carburettors to a more modern, more tunable carb.
- Gain MPG with a single, more sophisticated carburettor.

I got an old factory, aluminium, 4 bolt carb, dual plane manifold off the scrap pile that a friend then modified for me by turning it into a Weber bolt pattern, single plane design.



But there was a sting in the tail.

Competing with the coupe against the roadsters always had me at a massive disadvantage as I had the biggest, heaviest car and the smallest engine (Great combo).
I always felt my biggest time loss was in initial acceleration wether that be start line or exiting corners.
My down and dirty idea was to hit it with a small (25-50hp) shot of nitrous oxide on full throttle which would give that much needed boost at the right moment.

Nitrous plates aren’t available for Weber 38’s, funny enough. The same friend that did the manifold conversion also made me this one off nitrous plate that also doubled as a 1” carb spacer for linkage clearance.





With the hard part done it was plumbed and wired.

At this point I had an epiphany. This idea is genius, why has nobody already thought of it?
I picked up the Motorsort UK blue book and there it was in black and white, “no oxygent’s”.

Bo**ocks.

I was so far into it at this point that I decided to continue and had everything ready, I just needed the N2O.
I tried and tried and tried. I couldn’t get gas anywhere even vaguely local. The closest place was like a 100+ mile round trip which at this point I said another bo**ocks to it all and binned the whole idea.





The Weber set-up did live on and worked well. I got it dialled in and headed to the rolling road were it produced the exact same bhp to the dual Strombergs!
The Strombergs produced a better torque curve, so overall the dual Strombergs were a better package.
Oh, and the Weber did the exact same MPG as the Strombergs as well.

I think this is the only picture I have that shows it was ever a thing.

With the inlet and turbo decided on next decision was what to do about exhaust manifolds.
Running a single turbo I would need to have a crossover from one bank to the other with the combined exhaust then feeding into the turbo.
Space and packaging were going to be a major issue.
The ‘36 Ford has the smallest engine bay of all the pre-war V8’s as the engine bay tapers into the narrow grille. If I could manage to package it into the ‘36 then it would fit into any of the other Early Ford V8 cars.
Add also that I was doing this without the car present and purely working from memory!

A full tubular manifold was out of the question due to cost and skill level so the only other option was factory cast iron manifolds.
This isn’t so bad.
They are very compact, almost indestructible , abundant as most people swap them out and due to the Flatty running for so long and in so many applications there are multiple options for inlet/outlet positions and configurations.

My first choice was the last generation of passenger car manifolds from the early 50’s as their layout was perfect.



I obtained a nice matched pair and was rather impressed with them. They were a much larger bore than earlier versions and had the internal ports angled for the direction of flow. I then spent a good chunk of time port matching them and cleaning up the castings.
I mocked them up, as can be seen above, but the outlet angle wasn’t optimal. The real kicker was the crossover inlet/outlets. The early 50’s cars had a different water pump/engine mount layout which meant that when I bolted the earlier style water pumps on they completely clashed.

Attempt two consisted of digging out the stock of manifolds but nothing really worked.



Attempt three I just started looking at images of exhaust manifolds in the hope that something may be workable. I found a listing on EBay that had the same style paired manifolds but with the crossover in a much more usable place for me.



They are I believe early 50’s pickup and though not as free flowing as the passenger car versions worked out rather well for what I wanted.

I'll second horrido in that!

Excellent, thanks

I had been researching using Weber 38’s in blow thru applications and it was all looking very grim.
Endless opinions on why it doesn’t work but I thought I knew better until someone, somewhere on a long dead forum thread explained it perfect.

“A carburettor has a fixed jet. It can be tuned for no boost or it can tuned for maximum boost but you can’t have both”

This leads to the situation where you set-up fuelling for off boost and it leans out under boost or you set-up fuelling for maximum boost and it runs rich everywhere else.
Then throw in the infinite variables of on/off load, variable throttle positions and boost output not related to engine demand and it all gets very messy for a carb.

So, fuel injection it is.

Ignition was also something I hadn’t really thought about up to this point.

Basically there was only direction to go. Fuel injection and fully mappable ignition.
It’s all getting a little serious now!

I had built myself into a corner at this point as the system had been built around the modified inlet for the Weber.
I remembered that Webcon did a replacement fuel injection unit for the Weber.



The Retroject unit was perfect for my application. Dimensionally identical to the Weber and uses the same throttle arms so I could use all my previously made throttle linkage.
The Retroject includes fuel injectors, fuel pressure regulator, air temp sensor, throttle position sensor and idle air control valve all built in. This greatly simplified installation for me.



How to control all this? An ECU. So many to choose from now and they’re all pretty good.
I wasn’t that excited with the DIY end of the market (mega squirt/megajolt) or becoming a laptop w****r!
I found myself drawn to Haltech. I like them as a company and I like the way they have simplified everything and made it very user friendly.
The UK dealer was very helpful and had what I wanted in stock.



This will be fun.

Fuel injection decided on and a fully capable ECU the no brainer for the ignition side was to go full mappable which would mean dumping the dizzy completely and going to a trigger wheel set-up.

I had a dual crank pulley from a early 40’s Ford. The rear pulley drives the water pumps and alternator and the front pulley drives the mechanical cooling fan in its original application.
I don’t run mechanical fans so the front pulley is redundant.



The first thing I needed to do was mount a 36-1 trigger wheel to the pulley.



What is a 36-1 trigger wheel?
Its a wheel of 36 teeth with 1 tooth missing. 360/36 =10. Each tooth equals 10 degrees of crank rotation.
A magnetic pickup is triggered with the passing of each tooth with the missing tooth being the base line position for the ECU to know where the crank is in its rotation.
Simple, huh?

I purchased a laser cut trigger wheel for adapting to the pulley but the stock pulley doesn’t lend itself well because of its stamped steel construction.
On closer inspection I found that the pulley had a machined steel centre with the stamped pulleys spot welded to the centre.
I carefully removed the welds with a spot weld drill bit but still couldn’t get the pulley off without wrecking it.
I had an idea and put the pulley in the press and with a small amount of pressure and loud bang the two separated with barely a scratch.



I now had something I could mount a hub to for the trigger wheel.

I started turning up an aluminium hub that sat the trigger wheel in as close to the engine as possible.



The toothed wheel I chose had pre-cut slots for adjustability. This isn’t really necessary as once the wheel position is set it doesn’t move and any decrepences in position can be trimmed out via the ECU.
The reason I went for this particular one was the overall diameter was right and, well, speed holes!

I now had to mount the wheel to my hub with 3 perfectly spaced holes.
First job was to mount my degree wheel to the lathe. I used some scrap nylon to create a holder and mounted it to the back of the spindle with a bent wire pointer.
I also mounted a scribe in the tool post and centred it the spindle.



The idea of mounting the degree wheel is so I can now accurately mark off 3 holes exactly 120 degrees apart.

The hub was chucked back in the lathe and the scribe positioned to mark the hub on the centre line of the slots.
With a centre line marked on the hub I then had to scribe across at 0, 120*, 240* and back to 0 to check for accuracy for my own sanity!



This was the outcome ready to be centre popped, drilled and tapped for 1/4” UNC hardware.
The slots were actually 8mm but I didn’t want the weight or size of 3 M8 bolts so I also made 3 bushes to take up the gap between the 1/4” bolt and the 8mm slot and to also act as a washer under the head of the bolts.



And done.



Next was to mount the trigger wheel hub to the pulley.
I again repeated the above lathe method to mark 3 hole positions on the outer edge of the hub this time.
You’ll notice a theme of 3’s and conscious effort to reduce mass/weight.
This is because the whole engine rotating assembly had been balanced and I was now adding all this extra junk on the front that had never been accounted for. To minimise it’s effects as much as possible I went with groups of 3’s so they hopefully balance each other out and to use as small fixings as possible to add the least amount of extra weight.
Each hole was carefully set-up in the drill press and drilled and tapped through to the centre for 1/4” UNC set screws.



A simple blanking plate with a right angle bracket was made to hold the magnetic pickup and placed where the original dizzy would go.
To finish the missing tooth had to removed. The “standard” is 50* BTDC. With the engine at TDC is was a matter of counting 5 teeth round cockwise from the pickup and removing that tooth.