FrankenFerrari - V12 Ferrari 308

This morning it was torque the heads down, then give the cams some love.  First was just confirm that the lapping bar still fit and turned freely with the heads on, which it did. and since the bar is a little larger and stiffer than the cams, I now the cams will spin free were the valve removed. 

My biggest concern was the journal sizing.  Way back I borrowed a head reamer that look like this:

All the welding I did warped the heads in both x and y...I forget...but 15-20 though each comes to mind.  I welded up the journals then ball milled them straight but undersize and used the ferrari tool reamer that hits them all at the same time with the head torqued in place to finish it off.....but the reamer was a bit dull and I never actually checked the finished size, I just said "I reamed it, it has to be right!" which I know fully understand is not true.  

With the head on the bench and no valves installed  the cams didn't seem to really sit in properly so a few months back I lapped the journals and then the cams di drop in nice....but I really had no idea what size the journals now were because for a second time, I didn't measure them.  Yes, I am that stupid it seems and its started to worry me a bit because if they were right before, after all I reamed them, so now  Today I didn't measure exactly but I did at least plastigauge them and they were all in spec....which is great but I'm pretty sure means they were undersize before and they are using the full spec range but I hesitate to tighten up the loser ones because lose means the lapping was trying to straighten  them out I'm pretty sure so I'm calling them good.

So now its sitting with the heads on and cams in.  Tomorrow I'll measure to see if the crank will fit with the journals as-is so I can have a look at the timing chain while i wait for the lapping bar metal.

I've often defined "expertise" as "building up a long list of the ways you can get screwed doing something". It seems you've added quite a bit to your list in this project. Thanks so much for sharing - it's a good reminder for those of us who want to do ambitious things but have urges to cut corners.

I don't want to open a rabbit hole, but I'm curious.  On a block like this where the crank isn't sandwiched by the lower half of the block and the head studs go super deep, what is the proper order of torqueing major components to be sure that all of the distortion in the crank journals, bores, and cam journals all end up where they are supposed to be after all your hard work?

sobe_death said:

I don't want to open a rabbit hole, but I'm curious.  On a block like this where the crank isn't sandwiched by the lower half of the block and the head studs go super deep, what is the proper order of torqueing major components to be sure that all of the distortion in the crank journals, bores, and cam journals all end up where they are supposed to be after all your hard work?

Interesting question.  The manual talks about doing what I'm doing.  It says install the heads, blue the mains, set the lapping bar on and scrape/lap until there is contact on all the journals, then install the caps and lap to size.  but to your point that is not how th engine gets assembled, normally the mains are torqued first then the heads.

Putting in the liners Saturday, with the main caps still on from the machineshop trip, it was clear that the block deck was deformed a touch and I almost cut the OD of the liners to clear before continuing but decided to press on and recheck once the heads were on and cams in (so when I fip it over all the buckets don't fall out) so that is probably next. I they are just as out of round as they were before the heads went on I'll pull the liners back out adjust the ODs that mate to the deck. to try to improve it....it was only about 10-15 teths and maybe totally normal, I've been told they end up about 2 thou (20 tenths) out but I'll look at it.

In reply to mke :

You weren't stupid, merely insufficiently educated.

Hopefully people reading will gain a greater appreciation of why good machine shops are expensive, and don't need to advertise.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

In reply to mke :

You weren't stupid, merely insufficiently educated.

 

Hopefully people reading will gain a greater appreciation of why good machine shops are expensive, and don't need to advertise.

Sadly I did know better.....I'm not great with details, more a big picture idea guy which is not the ideal skill set for finish work :(

The stupid bore gauge gave me a lot of bad news today....i do not like this tool  :( 

Last time when I went to assemble the engine the mains were pretty loose when I plastigauged them.  I had the bearing coated and it was bettersih but..now I understand why.  I had the block linebored and honed so I believed it to be correct.....my stupid bore gauge says they are 1-3 thou oversize, which of course explains the loose bearings.  This is checking perpendicular to the bolts/split line, they are 0-1 over as close to the split as I can check.  to be fair to the shop they didn't have the heads to install but to be fair to me, the average is still +0.5-1.5 thou over which is where they must have finished it.  I'll deal with this once the lapping bar arrives I guess.

The other bad news is liner bores....they aren't round.  I was told to expect 2 thou out and that is true for some, the worst is closer to 10 and totally unacceptable. hmmmmm.........the why things worked out the 12 liners that finished up the best was a set of 6 new and 6 old.  The 6 new are much rounder than the 6 old over-all.  I had 1 old left on the floor (I pitched the rest months ago) and 6 new to look at.  A change that I remember making is the spigot OD...the new is 1 thou larger nominal and even at that it might be looser than it should be and the one old I picked up had some taper in the spigot too.  So they are all tight at the deck which is easy enough to correct (remember I said they went in tight and I thought about fixing right then but waited to measure), and 6 have pretty loose spigots which seems like a job for JBweld since there is really no load, it just needs to fill the space and Amazon is bringing a pro size tube Thursday.  Hopefully that correct this issue.

Popped the bearing caps off and remembered some super important work....a few of the sleeves that are supposed to stay in the block were stuck in the caps.  No doubt this is related to me having to re-do them all way back as part of straightening out the block after welding the shot out of it. Probably makes no difference at all but just looks wrong and since I know I need to cut the caps to fix the bearing clearance now seemed the time to fix it.    Anyway, locited into the block and tomorrow when that is full strength I'll make sure the caps slip on properly.

Rather than doing anything really useful yesterday I went ahead and let myself get distracted a bit.  I was reading a thread on a ferrari sight about quicker steering racks and electric power steering.....expensive though.  The rack is like $500 and like $1800 for the power parts....but a 308 at an autoX is a workout.....

On alibaba I found a pretty small 80Nm assist unit and they will ship a sample for $250

80Nm Power assist

That seems about perfect......and if I put a 2:1 steering quickener in front of it like this:

keyser 2:1 quickener

That's about $200 and the shortest I could find but there are $100 units too, just a bit longer which might be ok....it will be about space.

With this stuff I would have easy turning and about 1.6 turns lock to lock which seems about autoX perfect....so yeah....I order the sample power unit. 

In reply to mke :

Well, the order has not gone smoothly.  250 is really 280 and then 120 for air freight....400 is a lot more than the 250 I was planning to explain to Lana so the order is on hold while they look at other shipping options tomorrow once China is awake.

You can pick up GM Torrent/Equinox/Vue electric PS devices for about $150, standalone controllers are cheap too. If those are too big I think there are RoW Fiesta devices that work well standalone.

paddygarcia said:

You can pick up GM Torrent/Equinox/Vue electric PS devices for about $150, standalone controllers are cheap too. If those are too big I think there are RoW Fiesta devices that work well standalone.

I found kits for about $650 that have a rebuild equinox unit and control and I think a couple ujoints.  I didn't see standalone controlers though?    That would probably work....its like 9.25" whihc by itself would be fine but is a challenge if I also add the gearbox in front of it, I'd have to shorten the steering column itself.  

RoW Fiesta???  Google would not tell me what that is?  I found electric fiesta steering racks, is that what you mean? 

RoW would refer to Rest of World market, as opposed to North America market vehicles. Program codes B479 B562 and B299.

Ahh.

I found the controller guy on ebay

automatic fiesta controller

and a $90 US fiesta box looks like the picture.  Interesting......

21571 said:

Program codes B479 B562 and B299.

hmmm....where is that info located?

The controller add doesn't say anything about that so I'm hoping the steering box I now own works with the controller.   

In reply to mke :

I'm just looking through the CAD at work......

mke said:

I found kits for about $650 that have a rebuild equinox unit and control and I think a couple ujoints.  I didn't see standalone controlers though?    That would probably work....its like 9.25" whihc by itself would be fine but is a challenge if I also add the gearbox in front of it, I'd have to shorten the steering column itself. 

Good point. I bought a second steering shaft to cut up for my Volvo Amazon, which was probably much cheaper than a Ferrari piece.

Pretty sure that the long shaft of the GM unit can actually be removed. Happy to post some pix of the internals of mine if helpful.

Related, the controllers don't seem to be super sophisticated, but there's clearly some knowledge and experience baked into them that you're paying for. If not compatible with a US unit its probably not the most heinous thing you'd have reengineered on this project :)

Here in europe one of the most commonly used electric racks are the one from Opel Corsa, the mk3 has tilt aswell. Normaly the whole rack is used, it has a couple of joint's and is pretty short so easy to adapt. One can often find them for what would be roughly 150 USD + shipping. These adapt the force acording to speed, you can either buy a cheap threeway controller with off/50%/100% or you can hook it up to a wheel speed sensor and then adjust the signal t match your actual speed (I'm assuming that 100 wheel revs wont be the same distance on your Ferrari as it is on a tiny old Opel Corsa :))

As for the steering quickener, I have never liked those boxes... Doesn't te Ferarri have bolted steering arms? If so you could just fabricate new ones that are shorter, especially if you are taking the electric powersteering route! :) Just don't forget to get the ackerman angle correct in the process ;)

paddygarcia said:

Related, the controllers don't seem to be super sophisticated, but there's clearly some knowledge and experience baked into them that you're paying for. If not compatible with a US unit its probably not the most heinous thing you'd have reengineered on this project :)

I'm talking to the controller guy now to see if he can add a couple things for me, if not I'll probably buy one to see what its doing then setup the ECU to replace it.

Cassius said:

As for the steering quickener, I have never liked those boxes... Doesn't te Ferarri have bolted steering arms? If so you could just fabricate new ones that are shorter, especially if you are taking the electric powersteering route! :) Just don't forget to get the ackerman angle correct in the process ;)

Yes, the steering arms bolt on so replacing them is easy and was my first though....but then setting the correct ackerman would mean moving the rack into the footwells and screwing up the pedals on 1 side and the subwoofer on the other, I don't mind losing the speaker but I kind of like the pedals :(  the rack is not bolted directly to the front firewall so there is a little gain possible there....but not enough to bother going after it doesn't look like.

The other path is a replacement rack/pinon which would give me 2.5 lock to lock, better than 3.2 for sure......this is all what got me to a gearbox.  I've never even driven anything that had one so I have no idea what I'd be getting into but was thinking if I buy on of the higher-end units it will hopefully be tight enough to not make me angry.

mke said:

I'm talking to the controller guy now to see if he can add a couple things for me, if not I'll probably buy one to see what its doing then setup the ECU to replace it.

Controller guy is not interested in changing anything.....I bough one but most likely its just for R&D and will end up back on ebay rather than in my car.

I'm thinking I was planning to spend a couple hundred bucks installing a steering position sensor somehow.....but I'm pretty sure the steering unit is outputting that info to the CAN buss so money wise this could be near a wash $$ wise if I can make it work.  I do have an unused CAN line sitting coiled up over the fuse box for just such an emergency and now I"m a CAN master after making 1 thing work 1 time this should be easy 

My thought at the moment is to basically build a new steering column from the dash to the first u-join to let the power assist sit right behind the dash and in front of the firewall/cowl.  There is an $1800 kit that installs by replace a coupling shaft between the column and rack  by cutting out a big chunk of firewall/cowl to make room which is also possible but seems suboptimal. We'll see.

But for now, back to the engine. I dropped the crank in last night so I can start playing with the timing chain. When I torn it apart I dropped the timing chain drive and it broke.....I suspect it was already cracked and for sure I could have welded it but I had a weak moment a couple years ago and bought a replacement ($100! from the salvage yard for just the housing....basically nothing ferrari is under $100 at the salvage yard -we aren't even allowed to call then junkyards ) so last night I swapped the bits over. It probably won't fit.....I remember having trouble with the gears being too tight and binding on the 1st assemble and using a mallet and a couple other "ticks" to sort it.....which is probably how the housing got cracked in the first place. 1st up today is make sure that's working right without involving any hammers to speed thing up.

I was reading the manual( I know, right!) and they talked about always replacing 4 o-rings I didn't know I had on 2 little tubes I didn't know I had

My first thought was "what kind of a dipsh*t runs the oil the full length of the block and up through the coolant thru little tubes that have no obvious way to be removed?"

In a conversation about it, the intent of the system  became clear... it has to be an oil cooler.  The little tubes don't do much alone, but if you look,  the oil is flowing nearly the full length of the block surrounded by a nice rough internal surface (its cast) to stir and suck heat from the oil into a huge aluminum heat sink (block) with tons of area exposed to coolant in the galley. I suspect it probably works pretty well, not massive NASCAR oil cooler well, but way better than nothing. Now I'm happier about having to figure out how to change the o-rings :)

I love that you're replacing the standalone box that fakes out being on the CANbus with ... actual CANbus.

paddygarcia said:

You can pick up GM Torrent/Equinox/Vue electric PS devices for about $150, standalone controllers are cheap too. If those are too big I think there are RoW Fiesta devices that work well standalone.

I got a Vue column for $40ish and a Prius controller (doesn't have the return issues of GM controllers) for $26 shipped.

I'll sell it for way under $1800