Any one interested in the oiling mods I did?

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Here's Charles Sanborn's oil mods to oil the front of the right side oil gallery. You can use a sandwich adapter from Derale, Moroso or Canton to supply the oil from the filter.


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Looking at your pics and re read some of the Sanborn thread he specifically state that crossover line should be 3/16 to avoid front main starvation, front feed to be 1/2 inch. Hard to tell from the pics but your crossover line looks to big. Again, restrictions in the correct size and location are important.
 
Man you are splitting hairs on this AN stuff aren't you? It's been sized this way for 90 years....you can create your own standard I guess. I'm just going by the way the Army and Navy spec'd it before WWII. There are subtle size differences between hose manufacturers but they are all based on the AN standard.

All the oil cares about is the actual size. It doesn't care about standards or name . And its especially bad when every hose maker uses their own actual dimensions.
 
When you use the Sanborn bulkhead feed, you still have an external line connected to it so you dont really gain anything in terms of not dumping oil on the tires.
 
There is some confusion in these last 2-3 posts about Sanborns mods. If you can, go over to Mopar chat and read his complete mods. On my engine, the line going to the front oil boss is 8an which is 1/2 inch.
The pictures shown are how to front oil a stock block. Sanborn rarely used stock blocks and when he front oiled a race block like an X block or a r block, the feed lines were external directly from the oil filter supply. He shows how he threads the passages that enter and leave the oil filter area.
Second the front oiling is not to oil number one main only.
Sanborn does block the feed passage from number one over to the drivers side galley as he claimed repeated failure of the front rods if you don't.
But the front oiling according to Sanborn was to stop what he called turbulence in the galley. He used that word. So even his theory was that there is distribution issues in the galley. The second oil feed to the front was to send a second supply of oil to disrupt that turbulence and even out the supply to the main bearings.
The pictures shown, show that Sanborn used a bulkhead fitting to bring the supply to the front of a stock block. On a race block, his front feeds were 8an and done externally to the front feed boss that those blocks have cast in.
His supply lines came directly from the oil filter area and those lines go to an external large oil filter using 12an hose. This is how I have done my engine using a nascar race filter with 12an lines and an accumulator. On an X block it is difficult to use a hose larger than 8 an because you have to make hard turn in the fuel pump area to connect to the galley. If you use a motor plate it is even more difficult. I believe that's why that boss was moved to the china wall on the r blocks, easier access.
The crossover line to the drivers side galley was optional as Sanborns racing class required wet lifters, so in this case the crossover was only meant to get some oil over there. Not to help the bottom end oiling like the Atherton crossover.


I can’t find bupkis over on MoPar chat. So I have a question (not sure if you know, but I find it interesting) about the rule of running wet lifters.

Did the class mandate wet lifters because everyone had to run pushrod oiling or did they do it as a punishment because Chrysler didn’t use PR oiling?

That seems to me an arbitrary rule. I’ve seen some local tracks do stupid crap like that, just to be punitive so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reason.

BTW, what was the RPM range Sanborn used?

All in all, it seems to me to get the lifters dry, or as dry as you can like gregcon has done and that solves many issues.

I’d love to data log some of the engines where guys are claiming high RPM because I doubt they actually do it. Most tachs are an approximation. The tach on my distributor machine is accurate to about 25 RPM. I checked it with a known ignition box so I’m 100% sure of it. Most tach’s I’ve checked are off near idle and by about 7000 they start getting off again.

So I’m not sure how many guys actually do it.
 
I agree techs and eyeballs are often 'off' but I'd guess most techs are slow to respond and a lot of guys are actually hitting a higher rpm for a brief while.
 
When you use the Sanborn bulkhead feed, you still have an external line connected to it so you dont really gain anything in terms of not dumping oil on the tires.


And that’s why the system I bought with my first W2 engine had all the hoses in the pan.

It drove me wild that only half the oil got filtered at any given time. Obviously it all got filtered at some point, but you always had some trash in the bearings.

I can say I never failed a hose or had a fitting leak, but I had a maintainance schedule and I kept it. When I got the thing back to where it wouldn’t kill bearings every couple of runs (if that...sometimes it would get through a burnout and the I could feel it getting a bearing at the tree...I happened enough I could feel it coming and that saved several blocks because the rods stayed on the crank and it saves the pan too) I pulled the pan every 20-25 runs. I eventually went to 100 runs before I pulled the pan, but I was always looking at the hoses, the distribution can and the fittings like a hawk.
 
I agree techs and eyeballs are often 'off' but I'd guess most techs are slow to respond and a lot of guys are actually hitting a higher rpm for a brief while.


That’s possible, but I see more needle whip than anything. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still there, especially when you free Rev the engine with no load on it. They don’t RPM like that when they have a load on them.
 
I always felt there were two kinds of people in this world....those who tach up their engines in Neutral and those who don't.....
 
I can’t find bupkis over on MoPar chat. So I have a question (not sure if you know, but I find it interesting) about the rule of running wet lifters.

Did the class mandate wet lifters because everyone had to run pushrod oiling or did they do it as a punishment because Chrysler didn’t use PR oiling?

That seems to me an arbitrary rule. I’ve seen some local tracks do stupid crap like that, just to be punitive so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reason.

BTW, what was the RPM range Sanborn used?

All in all, it seems to me to get the lifters dry, or as dry as you can like gregcon has done and that solves many issues.

I’d love to data log some of the engines where guys are claiming high RPM because I doubt they actually do it. Most tachs are an approximation. The tach on my distributor machine is accurate to about 25 RPM. I checked it with a known ignition box so I’m 100% sure of it. Most tach’s I’ve checked are off near idle and by about 7000 they start getting off again.

So I’m not sure how many guys actually do it.
I cannot answer that but Sanborn was using pushrod oil and he had bushed lifters with a very small feed hole.
 
When you use the Sanborn bulkhead feed, you still have an external line connected to it so you dont really gain anything in terms of not dumping oil on the tires.
Agree but not as many lines. With my accumulator in the system there are many large external lines.
 
That's why I'm not crazy about using a remote filter. That, and the extra linear feet the oil has to travel. Plus the expense of it.
 
I cannot answer that but Sanborn was using pushrod oil and he had bushed lifters with a very small feed hole.


Ok, then what he did makes sense. He HAD to have some oil on the drivers side. I’m still not sure about needing the feed up at number 1 but I will say it didn’t evidently hurt anything.

I know when I get the mains from the OE feeds and the feeds through the cap we could never get steady oil pressure on the dyno. I wasn’t data logging at the time, but on the dyno you can monitor it.

It was about a 16-18 lb swing, and the funny thing was at lower RPM (IIRC this was a long time ago and what notes I took are either gone or went with some part of the engine when I sold it) the pressure was pretty steady. Once you got up to 6500ish it got worse and again IIRC anything over 7500 the swings were pretty significant. And the higher the RPM went, the quicker the pressure moved. There was a ton of discussion about whether the sensor/computer was monitoring the pressure at a high enough rate, so we got on the phone and made some calls and were told it’s plenty fast to keep up with that.

Again, the oil pressure gauge was way too slow to respond to catch it. When we first looked at it, the dyno guy said WTF is wrong with this thing. I said I have no idea. First I’ve seen of this crap.

I lived with it because I had no idea what was going on, and neither did anyone else. AFAIK, I was the only one using that system, but I suspect the Modifed and Super Stock guys were doing it or similar. Anyone I got on the phone was tight lipped like a crooked politician.

When I finally put the system back the way it was when I bought the thing, the oil pressure quit doing it. Even up to 9000 on a couple of hero pulls on the dyno. Even with 110 psi at that RPM.

So the inference that I made (because that’s all I have as I have yet to find anyone who can say otherwise) is that the oil pressure coming in from the caps was at least 20 psi higher than the oil coming down from the passenger side oil gallery. It could be a greater pressure drop than that, but I know we had 110 psi at 9k to the bearings (or damn close to it because I pulled the pressure from the line at the pan that fed the number 3 main) and those feeds had much less distance to travel to the bearings and quite a few less 90 corners to travel.

My assumption is at that point, it was easier for the oil coming in from the cap to back feed into the OE oil passages because of the pressure differences.
 
Tell me again how big your oil 'manifold' with the main cap feed was?
 
Tell me again how big your oil 'manifold' with the main cap feed was?

It was 4 inches in diameter, 8 inches long with IIRC a number 8 hose feeding it (could have been 10 but I doubt that because the hole in the fitting is the flow limit at that point). It was just bigger than an oil filter.

And the five number 4 hoses came out of the bottom of the can. The cam was .125 wall mild steel. I did the first one in .125 aluminum and it split the can at about 90 psi. I could have used a thicker wall aluminum but I wasn’t about to make 3 if that bugger failed. I actually though about starting with a 4 inch diameter round bar of aluminum and machining it to about .250 wall to eliminate the seam, but I talked myself off that ledge pretty quickly and just made it from MS.
 
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That big manifold helps explain it, to me. That's a lot of reserve and pressure-equalization on tap.
 
That's why I'm not crazy about using a remote filter. That, and the extra linear feet the oil has to travel. Plus the expense of it.
Well the accumulator has many benefits and the nascar filter is not your run of the mill filter by a long stretch. If you want a good flowing system you need unrestrictive filters. It is not possible to put in an accumulator without some external plumbing. I use a one quart for pre oil, and to help in the shutdown at the end of a run.
You can,t be afraid of external lines if you want to use the good stuff.
 
And that’s why the system I bought with my first W2 engine had all the hoses in the pan.

It drove me wild that only half the oil got filtered at any given time. Obviously it all got filtered at some point, but you always had some trash in the bearings.

I can say I never failed a hose or had a fitting leak, but I had a maintainance schedule and I kept it. When I got the thing back to where it wouldn’t kill bearings every couple of runs (if that...sometimes it would get through a burnout and the I could feel it getting a bearing at the tree...I happened enough I could feel it coming and that saved several blocks because the rods stayed on the crank and it saves the pan too) I pulled the pan every 20-25 runs. I eventually went to 100 runs before I pulled the pan, but I was always looking at the hoses, the distribution can and the fittings like a hawk.
Did you have a scraper or a windage tray in the pan?
 
I'm not afraid of external lines, I just like to avoid the clutter and 'possibility' of a leak. Mostly the clutter. Then the, expense too. I won't use anything but XRP or Earl's products and running a couple simple lines can hit you $300 before you're done.

Oil filters...uh-oh! Another topic....I'll say this much...Most 'race' filters I've seen are far too focused on hi-flow and achieve that by letting too much 'bad stuff' pass through. If it's not rated right around 40 microns, I don't want it for any engine I don't plan to rebuild pretty often. Like a lot of race parts, they compromise the long term for short term results.
 
Did you have a scraper or a windage tray in the pan?


When I had the Milodon Super Stock pan I just had the windage tray.

When I went to the Milodon box pan it had a small kick out and a built in windage tray.

When I bought the virtually WORTHLESS Stefs pan it had a built in windage tray, and full length kick out and I made up a steel crank scraper for that engine.

The pan was a parts breaker. What baffles they sent it out with were useless. They had the baffle on the back of the pan opposite side of the pump was pretty small. I called them on it and of course, I was the only guy that ever questioned it, I wasn’t an oiling engineer and I should stick to driving truck. What a bunch of dicks.

I fixed what I knew was wrong which was all of it except the baffle in the back. I could see the oil pressure gauge drop by 30 pounds on the launch so I aborted the run. Everyone said add more oil, add more oil. Didn’t matter. So I doubled the size of the baffle and that cured it. What a piece of crap that pan was.

As for the scraper, I’d never use another all steel type. I’m now using the Isahara-Johnson Teflon scraper and it’s worth every penny.

The pan is a big deal.
 
When I had the Milodon Super Stock pan I just had the windage tray.

When I went to the Milodon box pan it had a small kick out and a built in windage tray.

When I bought the virtually WORTHLESS Stefs pan it had a built in windage tray, and full length kick out and I made up a steel crank scraper for that engine.

The pan was a parts breaker. What baffles they sent it out with were useless. They had the baffle on the back of the pan opposite side of the pump was pretty small. I called them on it and of course, I was the only guy that ever questioned it, I wasn’t an oiling engineer and I should stick to driving truck. What a bunch of dicks.

I fixed what I knew was wrong which was all of it except the baffle in the back. I could see the oil pressure gauge drop by 30 pounds on the launch so I aborted the run. Everyone said add more oil, add more oil. Didn’t matter. So I doubled the size of the baffle and that cured it. What a piece of crap that pan was.

As for the scraper, I’d never use another all steel type. I’m now using the Isahara-Johnson Teflon scraper and it’s worth every penny.

The pan is a big deal.


I'm not wild about scrapers that mount to the pan rail using the pan bolts. But it seems the only way.... need to investigate that more
 
I'm not wild about scrapers that mount to the pan rail using the pan bolts. But it seems the only way.... need to investigate that more


Yeah, I want either and the all steel scrapers are a PITA to fit. The I-J scraper with Teflon is self fitting. You get it close and let the crank and rods clearance themselves. Works very well. They also make a down scraper for the drivers side and I use that as well.

You don’t use any gaskets with the scraper. A thin bead of silicone on the pan rail, add the scraper and the another thin layer of silicone and bolt the pan on.

Seems a bit crude, but I just used clear RTV silicone and mine sealed up nicely.

If I get the chance I’ll take some pictures of what I have in the morning and post them here.

Kevin Johnson makes some very nice stuff. If you get him in the phone, take notes. He is one smart cat.
 
When I had the Milodon Super Stock pan I just had the windage tray.

When I went to the Milodon box pan it had a small kick out and a built in windage tray.

When I bought the virtually WORTHLESS Stefs pan it had a built in windage tray, and full length kick out and I made up a steel crank scraper for that engine.

The pan was a parts breaker. What baffles they sent it out with were useless. They had the baffle on the back of the pan opposite side of the pump was pretty small. I called them on it and of course, I was the only guy that ever questioned it, I wasn’t an oiling engineer and I should stick to driving truck. What a bunch of dicks.

I fixed what I knew was wrong which was all of it except the baffle in the back. I could see the oil pressure gauge drop by 30 pounds on the launch so I aborted the run. Everyone said add more oil, add more oil. Didn’t matter. So I doubled the size of the baffle and that cured it. What a piece of crap that pan was.

As for the scraper, I’d never use another all steel type. I’m now using the Isahara-Johnson Teflon scraper and it’s worth every penny.

The pan is a big deal.
I am glad you know of Isahara Johnson. My current motor has a scraper from him. I have never used a scraper before. Mine is not Teflon but it fits very nice. He is good to deal with him and his wife.
I integrated that scraper with a windage tray. Welded together and bolts right on the pan rails, both sides.Locomotion put me on to him.
 
I'm not afraid of external lines, I just like to avoid the clutter and 'possibility' of a leak. Mostly the clutter. Then the, expense too. I won't use anything but XRP or Earl's products and running a couple simple lines can hit you $300 before you're done.

Oil filters...uh-oh! Another topic....I'll say this much...Most 'race' filters I've seen are far too focused on hi-flow and achieve that by letting too much 'bad stuff' pass through. If it's not rated right around 40 microns, I don't want it for any engine I don't plan to rebuild pretty often. Like a lot of race parts, they compromise the long term for short term results.
I hear you on the cost. Some pics of my junk for you. Most ideas from Sanborn, even the cooling, yes the big msd cap adapt clears the line. Lol

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I hear you on the cost. Some pics of my junk for you. Most ideas from Sanborn, even the cooling, yes the big msd cap adapt clears the line. Lol

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So you have the SS pan. Hard to beat that pan. For drawbacks (big size and center link going through it) that pan kicks arse. I used to think the box pan was an improvement, but I have long since dropped that opinion.

The only time I’d use a box pan is with a dry sump.

Do you have the static pick up or the swinging one?
 
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