Building a dry sump system

A lot of the mod class BMW racers put the tank in the spare tire well and plumb it thru the interior (in a tube) to help alleviate/balance the extra nose weight.

In reply to Keith Tanner:

I personally wouldn't want a container full of hot oil next to the driver's or passenger's seat, for the same reason I don't like mechanical oil pressure gauges.

That's a good point.

That tank gets hot! Need a heater in your car ;)

I have a friend with a dry sump set up in a E30 M3 with an S54 motor. The oil tank in the trunk was actually heating the ATL fuel cell until he created vents in the floor and license plate area.

If you are looking to build your own system Armstrong Race Engineering http://www.drysump.com/index.htm sells whole systems as well as seperate components. I've talked to Gary Armstrong at the PRI Trade Shows a few times and he is an easy guy to talk to and I think they have been in business since 1974.

To add to this, I sold some wheels and have been searching around at used pumps.

I ended up getting a 3-stage Stock Car Product pump, and a Coleman 3-gallon tank. 

It looks like I can mount this in the rear of the car *lotus clone*.  I've also modded a oil pump I have laying around to make it not pump.  Since its a Zetec, the pump is also the piece that seals the crank area.  So I cannot just remove it.

My question, has anyone put together a home brew system?  I am working on the pulley setup and drive system and just curious what everyone has done to get to the crank pulley.  I have a feeling that I may need to go ahead and custom build a pulley or something to allow for this.

If you've got a Zetec, I'd be asking the Brits. They hotrodded that engine pretty heavily.

Six years on, I haven't touched the oil system. The car has seen a lot of track time and is healthy as a horse. It appears that a good oil pan (baffled with swinging doors to hold oil at the pickup) is sufficient to keep my LS3 happy (touch wood).

Tilton and some others make kits, though its tough to get now.  It sounds like most of them have ceased production.  The duratecs are the new rage.

Plus, because........well me, I bought stuff way cheaper.  Am going to custom weld up the pan, and see how I can do this.  I may have afriend that an do a pulley setup.  So working that direction.

Armstrong Race Engineering (ARE) has (/had) a kit. You might be able to just purchase the the pan.

I've considered chopping the bottom of the steel pan off like, I think, you were doing. My thought was to find an uprated oil pump for the zetec and use that as the pressure/supply pump. The scavenge pump sucks everything out of the cut steel pan. I was thinking about using a Duratec oil pump as a scavenge pump, but you have a real one. Plumb the stock located zetec pump through the oil pan (either upper AL one or the lower steel one) then to the tank.

https://www.drysump.com/index.php/oil-pans/ford/94-ford-zetec-dry-sump-pan-1050

If you wiped out the lobes of the Zetec's pump, you might just be able to pipe it into the filter location and relocate the filter.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

What pan is on your LS3, Keith? For my Challenge car I'm building an LM4 with a C5 Vette "batwing" pan, hoping it's good enough.

Surprisingly, it's the one sold by Flyin' Miata. Not the cheapest on the market, but proven and less expensive than a dry sump :)

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Long engines such as in line 6's and V12's really benefit from dry sumps. What happens is the oil when it gets hot turns into a watery consistency actually thinner,  closer to gasoline.
 
Under hard braking the oil splashes into the front of the engine and stays there, away from the pick up tube.  Due to the space for timing chains etc. oil is really far away from the pickup tube. 
Now  street tires don't afford the same level of braking force as race tires do. But When you add cornering force after braking those 4-5 quarts have plenty of places to hide.  Baffles, check valves, swinging pickups, oil reservoirs ( accusump) have all been tried and found wanting. 
Tried by me that is.  Also Group 44 and just about everybody who has successfully raced a Jaguar including Jaguar themselves. They went to dry sump back in the early 1950's and since then nothing the factory raced ran without a Dry Sump. 
The early Jaguars used an oil pan that held 23 quarts , later XKE's used 18 quarts .  I used to rebuild the engine in my Jaguar after every race until I finally went to a dry sump.
You need the biggest pump made to keep oil around those big bearings and wear surfaces.  I settled on a 4 stage Weaver but small block  Chevies/ Fords  can live with a 3 stage.  
I looked for the big 4 stage Weavers but they weren't all that much cheaper used than new. By the time you rebuilt one it often would be cheaper to start with new.  
While  you can weld up a tank yourself. Without careful planning it won't de-aireate the oil the way the better tanks will. A dry sump adds  plenty of air into the oil.  And air doesn't  work well as a lubricant. I used a 5 gallon Peterson tank.  The oil enters tangentially and swirls around on the sides removing air as it goes.  

My mistake was to use aeroquipt lines. While they work well and look sexy they are much heavier than thin-wall aluminum tubing.  Plus Aluminum tubing helps cool the oil.  
When I switched to aluminum tubing I saved 23 pounds and used the next size smaller oil cooler. 
I would have saved more but I retained in line filters to protect the pump in the event of a catastrophic engine failure.  Use a filter on every line out of the engine,  then pump the oil into the engine oil filter(s)  next into the oil tank  and finally the line from the bottom of the tank leads to the oil cooler and finally into the engine. 
 
 

Frenchy,

That is an intersting point.  I had not thought about running those.

I guess you can even take these and bead roll the ends more or less to use some hose to conect these together.

In reply to Thinkkker : I cheated,  Welded AN fittings to the ends of tubes.  I always intended to polish the aluminum, but everything took longer than planned and wound up assembling everything as is to bring down to the Bahama's.   
But yes I could have bead rolled and used hose clamps to keep everything together.  

Found this thread after the Corvette dry sump article. And it got me to thinking: It looks like a dry sump just needs a pump, belt drive, some mods to the oil pan, reservoir, and some external plumbing. Most of those look pretty straightforward - except the oil pan mods. Most of the pictures in the threads this originally linked to are gone, and trying to find pictures of DIY dry sump pans hasn't, well, panned out. Not sure if I'd go through with this - even used NASCAR dry sump pumps are several hundred dollars - but I did want to have a look at it.

Instead of DIY dry sump pans I guess you could look at ones available from the pros. I think the fundamental difference is that it doesn't have a sump so it's pretty much the same depth all the way back. You just need enough of a collector for the pump to suck from.

I'm in the middle of plotting the 350Z's course through a dry sump, as I'm pretty sure that's the next thing I need to do to the engine. Nine Lives Racing is a forum sponsor and also a pretty good resource for budget dry sump stuff:

How to dry sump LS on a budget.

MadScientistMatt said:

Most of the pictures in the threads this originally linked to are gone, and trying to find pictures of DIY dry sump pans hasn't, well, panned out. 

What I did in my E30 with a dry-sumped SBF was take a stock pan and welded in a flat piece of steel covering the sump area, essentially making it a flat floor internally. Then just welded AN fittings on the side for the pickups. 

Im at the point of building the remainder of the lines on my setup.  I just read through the Nine Lives setup and now I think I should go ahead and get the filters coming in.

 

Thinkkker said:

Im at the point of building the remainder of the lines on my setup.  I just read through the Nine Lives setup and now I think I should go ahead and get the filters coming in.