R3W7 Assembly

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gregcon

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I'm at a point where I can start some assembly on my engine so I thought I'd start this thread to document some of it....I still need some parts/time/money so it won't be a fast job but I'm getting closer.

I ordered some Diamond piston from Ray Barton; they came in today and look very nice. I talked to Ray a bit and followed his advice to use Diamond - they have very modern tooling and seem to be at the top of the game right now. These are custom in a few ways...4.07" bore, 15 degree valve angle, .927 pin, and made to give 11:1 CR based on my deck height, 6.25" rods and 3.79" crank. They also use the rings Ray recommended which are a 1.5MM thickness. Last, tool steel wrist pins made in Michigan, USA.

Now that the pistons are here, I can finally take the block in for boring/honing.

The heads are Chapman CNC ported W7's with 2.15 / 1.60 valves. I have a solid roller Bullet cam of just under .700 lift which matches well with the head flow numbers.

I'll probably run in the engine on a carb then switch over to a FAST EFI system once I'm ready.
Diamond.jpg
Hilborn 48 degree.jpg
 
I'm at a point where I can start some assembly on my engine so I thought I'd start this thread to document some of it....I still need some parts/time/money so it won't be a fast job but I'm getting closer.

I ordered some Diamond piston from Ray Barton; they came in today and look very nice. I talked to Ray a bit and followed his advice to use Diamond - they have very modern tooling and seem to be at the top of the game right now. These are custom in a few ways...4.07" bore, 15 degree valve angle, .927 pin, and made to give 11:1 CR based on my deck height, 6.25" rods and 3.79" crank. They also use the rings Ray recommended which are a 1.5MM thickness. Last, tool steel wrist pins made in Michigan, USA.

Now that the pistons are here, I can finally take the block in for boring/honing.

The heads are Chapman CNC ported W7's with 2.15 / 1.60 valves. I have a solid roller Bullet cam of just under .700 lift which matches well with the head flow numbers.

I'll probably run in the engine on a carb then switch over to a FAST EFI system once I'm ready.View attachment 1715625905 View attachment 1715625907
I gotta have more pics than that! That's cruel & unusual punishment to not supply a crapload of pics here.
 
I’m surprised by the 1.5 mm rings. Pretty thick by today’s standards. Did Barton give you the reasons why he wanted that ring.
 
Wait are those hemi valve covers on the wall ?
 
We talked about the 1/16" rings (.062) and the .043" rings and he said they had seen good results with the 1.5mm. I didn't press it much further as I am generally not that ring-specific to begin with. I sort of think he said the Total Seal rings he liked were sold in 1.5MM so that's why, but I could be mis-remembering that.

He surprised me a bit in the rod and piston areas...we talked about having Diamond lighten the pistons and using lighter rods but he said at the power levels I'd be at...he's seen too many of them come apart. So I used the Molnar 'Power Adder' rods which are their heaviest (but still lighter than a stock rod) and left the pistons un-lightened. This is a 504 gram piston and is made on their basic lightweight profile, but no additional material is removed.
 
We talked about the 1/16" rings (.062) and the .043" rings and he said they had seen good results with the 1.5mm. I didn't press it much further as I am generally not that ring-specific to begin with. I sort of think he said the Total Seal rings he liked were sold in 1.5MM so that's why, but I could be mis-remembering that.

He surprised me a bit in the rod and piston areas...we talked about having Diamond lighten the pistons and using lighter rods but he said at the power levels I'd be at...he's seen too many of them come apart. So I used the Molnar 'Power Adder' rods which are their heaviest (but still lighter than a stock rod) and left the pistons un-lightened. This is a 504 gram piston and is made on their basic lightweight profile, but no additional material is removed.




So what is the deck height you are working with ?
 
lol. I needed a timing cover to measure some stuff and I didn't have one so I ordered a cheap Dorman cover off of Rock Auto, figuring I would toss it when I no longer needed it. But I agree, it does look like a well made part so it might stay around!
 
This shows the Hilborn injectors where I machined them for electronic injectors and tipped the injector angle up from 45 degrees to 37 degrees. This will spray the fuel directly at the back of the intake valve head (when I mount the injectors on a 22 degree manifold). The theory behind this is something I read on Indy car engines where they spray the raw fuel on the valve head....apparently the 'cold' fuel hits the hot valve head and vaporizes as it's being sucked into the cylinder. I guess that sounds good....

I probably would not bother with the expense of EFI but there's no intake manifold that will fit under the hood. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's only 1 (or possibly 2) intake manifold made for these heads and it's a tall one. Plus, I've run the Hilborn in the years past on other engines and I'm a big believer in the straight shot air flow they provide.

Those are the Corvette LS7 type injectors, I like them as they are small.

37 inj.jpg
 
This shows the Hilborn injectors where I machined them for electronic injectors and tipped the injector angle up from 45 degrees to 37 degrees. This will spray the fuel directly at the back of the intake valve head (when I mount the injectors on a 22 degree manifold). The theory behind this is something I read on Indy car engines where they spray the raw fuel on the valve head....apparently the 'cold' fuel hits the hot valve head and vaporizes as it's being sucked into the cylinder. I guess that sounds good....

I probably would not bother with the expense of EFI but there's no intake manifold that will fit under the hood. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's only 1 (or possibly 2) intake manifold made for these heads and it's a tall one. Plus, I've run the Hilborn in the years past on other engines and I'm a big believer in the straight shot air flow they provide.

Those are the Corvette LS7 type injectors, I like them as they are small.

View attachment 1715626187


Can’t say for sure about EFI and injector placement, but when I ran MFI and alcohol, the nozzles were at the valve cover rail. It’s hard to explain, but on the dyno, loading the engine you could see and feel it struggle a bit. I fought it for a bit but just said screw it, it’s just pig rich until it starts the pull.

In the car, I could “feel” that same thing letting the clutch out and, I could feel it in the 3-4 shift. It would almost vibrate.

I forget what happened but I was at work dealing with a TR and it hit me that I never made the HP/CID I thought I should, and the TR engine I just built was about where I’d thought it should be.

So, I got on the phone and called every MFI guru, whiz bang, bubble gummer and Pro I could find regarding nozzle placement.

Every single one of them, to a man said do NOT move the nozzles up the manifold. They all said the further the nozzle is from the valve, the more chance of fuel/air seperation, which means wall flow, fuel stratification in the chamber and a big loss of power.

Then I asked how a carb can put the fuel in that far away from the valve and not have the same issues, yet everything I’ve seen is the MFI is down on HP/CID to carbs. Most were honest and said they weren’t carb experts so they couldn’t say. One guy, who is a “go to” MFI tuning expert said that carbs make LESS HP, and they have more issues with stratification and wall flow than MFI with correctly placed nozzles. His suggestion was to up the pressure the the nozzles. When I told him I’m at 100 psi at the nozzles at 8500 and how much more pressure should I use he said 60 was plenty.

So I yanked the manifold and moved the nozzles up and inch. You could tell when it first fired it was cleaner. It was a bit fat, so I leaked the barrel valve about 1% less and threw .006 more bypass and .012 more high speed at it, and picked up a fat .1 off the trailer.

That was all in the gear changes. Most of the weird feeling was gone.

Before I went back on the dyno that winter I moved the nozzles up another inch. At that point IIRC we were up 25 HP across the RPM range and that weird vibration/feel was gone.

The time slips matched the dyno numbers. My next move was going to be to move the injectors up into the plenum and put them right over the port. I was going to fab up something to let me put the nozzle further into it was directly over the port.

I think that like the other moves, it would have made more power and I think the gear changes would have been even better.

But, I got sick and quit racing so I never did that.

The interesting thing is when NHRA shoved EFI up Pro Stock’s butt, the big complaint was they couldn’t move the injectors where they wanted them.

I said all that to say that I’m not sure that moving the nozzle closer to the valve is always the best thing. In fact, in an MFI application I know it’s not. It’s not even close.

On the last dyno pulls I was getting close to the HP/CID number I thought I should be making.

I think at this point, I can make more HP/CID with carbs and gas than I can with MFI and alcohol.

Not sure how EFI would respond, but it would be interesting to test. Expensive, but interesting.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the one thing that did occur when moving the nozzles up was idle quality. I could get the engine happy at about 1200 with the nozzles at the VC rail. When I moved the nozzles up, the best I could do was about 1400ish and that was after I leaned the idle out as far as I could. No matter what I did, if I closed the butterflies enough to slow the idle down, and set the BV accordingly it would be lean and stumble giving it throttle. Adding fuel never cleaned it up, and made the oil dirty.

Long after the fact, I decided that the issue was in the ramp of the BV and what position it was in relative to butterfly opening at idle. The higher nozzle placement required less fuel to achieve the same RPM. Leaning out the BV at idle sped the RPM idle up, so you close the butterflies and now the BV is even closer to the lean end of the ramp on the BV. I was going to make another BV but I never go around to it. So moving the nozzles away from the valve MAY cause issues with idle quality. It may not be affected with EFI, or maybe it can be tuned out.
 
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Fuel closer to valve is good for part throttle and transients and idle quality (metering is always better).

Fuel farther from the valve increases torque and hp at higher revs because it's cooling the intake charge as the fuel evaporates, but the metering can be less than ideal due to wet flow, wet walls, etc.

The optimum placement depends on the application. A dedicated drag car that never sees under 4k should (theoretically) have the fuel way up the runner. The more it's driven on the street, the closer to the valve it should be.

This of course ignores whether the intake tract is decent or not. If it's a twisty-turvy flow path with a tight radius port then obviously the net effect will be different.
 
It's worth noting that with the Hilborn injectors I have, there are really two choices - the way I repositioned the injectors to fire at the valve, or leave them alone and let them spray against the opposite port wall. There isn't any real way to move the injector up or down, even if I wanted to.

I believe the modern EFI injector has no comparison to the old style constant flow mechanical nozzle. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one lies in the 'constant' part. A flow stream that is not being shut on and off all the time will be much nicer in terms of atomization and pattern. I've seen some videos of constant flow nozzles at full song and they are really putting out a beautiful fog of gas. I've seen similar videos of EFI nozzles and it ain't pretty...especially at lower pulse levels. It's curious that the old Lucas style disc injectors were said to have a better pattern than the pintle style Bosch injectors...yet the Bosch seems to have come out as the dominant style, at least in production cars.

I think a lot of benefit comes from the straight-shot airflow into the port, with no plenum to have to run to, or other cylinders to cause pulsations or rob the air/fuel charge.

This engine won't be held to the same standards of manners that I usually expect when I put something together. But I do think with the EFI I will have at least an acceptable idle. And with the mapping you can do now, there should be no reason I would have any flat spots or stumbles, etc.

This pic shows the injector on backwards; the nozzles are on the outside, near the valve covers. In reality, they will be on the inside, near the lifter valley.
Hilborn top.jpg
 
It's worth noting that with the Hilborn injectors I have, there are really two choices - the way I repositioned the injectors to fire at the valve, or leave them alone and let them spray against the opposite port wall. There isn't any real way to move the injector up or down, even if I wanted to.

I believe the modern EFI injector has no comparison to the old style constant flow mechanical nozzle. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one lies in the 'constant' part. A flow stream that is not being shut on and off all the time will be much nicer in terms of atomization and pattern. I've seen some videos of constant flow nozzles at full song and they are really putting out a beautiful fog of gas. I've seen similar videos of EFI nozzles and it ain't pretty...especially at lower pulse levels. It's curious that the old Lucas style disc injectors were said to have a better pattern than the pintle style Bosch injectors...yet the Bosch seems to have come out as the dominant style, at least in production cars.

I think a lot of benefit comes from the straight-shot airflow into the port, with no plenum to have to run to, or other cylinders to cause pulsations or rob the air/fuel charge.

This engine won't be held to the same standards of manners that I usually expect when I put something together. But I do think with the EFI I will have at least an acceptable idle. And with the mapping you can do now, there should be no reason I would have any flat spots or stumbles, etc.

This pic shows the injector on backwards; the nozzles are on the outside, near the valve covers. In reality, they will be on the inside, near the lifter valley.View attachment 1715626353
Way too Cool
If you would supply more cam spec's and info on the application of this engine would be great.
 
The cam is 263/265 degrees @ .050 and .687 lift at the valve. The LSA is 108 degrees.

I'll tell you something...unlike most engines, you can only get a limited number of grinds for the R3. That's because the cores can only be ground so much. If you wanted a mild cam, like a 'Hemi' grind...forget it. Well, don't forget it but be prepared to get sent to the custom custom department where they will create a complete core for you...at least $1,000. So the grind I bought is not exactly what I wanted but it's what they would make.

I don't have any particular application for this engine...I'll put it in the Valiant in my profile pic initially then eventually use it in a 68 cuda I need to get working on. It'll be a 'hot street' type car, I guess. Mostly I'm doing it to have a small block project as I haven't done one in many years.
 
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It's worth noting that with the Hilborn injectors I have, there are really two choices - the way I repositioned the injectors to fire at the valve, or leave them alone and let them spray against the opposite port wall. There isn't any real way to move the injector up or down, even if I wanted to.

I believe the modern EFI injector has no comparison to the old style constant flow mechanical nozzle. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one lies in the 'constant' part. A flow stream that is not being shut on and off all the time will be much nicer in terms of atomization and pattern. I've seen some videos of constant flow nozzles at full song and they are really putting out a beautiful fog of gas. I've seen similar videos of EFI nozzles and it ain't pretty...especially at lower pulse levels. It's curious that the old Lucas style disc injectors were said to have a better pattern than the pintle style Bosch injectors...yet the Bosch seems to have come out as the dominant style, at least in production cars.

I think a lot of benefit comes from the straight-shot airflow into the port, with no plenum to have to run to, or other cylinders to cause pulsations or rob the air/fuel charge.

This engine won't be held to the same standards of manners that I usually expect when I put something together. But I do think with the EFI I will have at least an acceptable idle. And with the mapping you can do now, there should be no reason I would have any flat spots or stumbles, etc.

This pic shows the injector on backwards; the nozzles are on the outside, near the valve covers. In reality, they will be on the inside, near the lifter valley.View attachment 1715626353
why are the exhaust guides a different color? different material?
 
The cam is 263/265 degrees @ .050 and .687 lift at the valve. The LSA is 108 degrees.

I'll tell you something...unlike most engines, you can only get a limited number of grinds for the R3. That's because the cores can only be round so much. If you wanted a mild cam, like a 'Hemi' grind...forget it. Well, don't forget it but be prepared to get sent to the custom custom department where they will create a complete core for you...at least $1,000. So the grind I bought is not exactly what I wanted but it's what they would make.

I don't have any particular application for this engine...I'll put it in the Valiant in my profile pic initially then eventually use it in a 68 cuda I need to get working on. It'll be a 'hot street' type car, I guess. Mostly I'm doing it to have a small block project as I haven't done one in many years.
Would you consider adopting an "older" Son who has a car that needs a "hot street" engine?
 
why are the exhaust guides a different color? different material?


Good question. I don't know. Even the valve seats are a different color between exh and intake. I suppose I put my faith in the Chapman people knowing what they're doing. If these heads had come out of a 'mystery' shop, I'd be a lot more concerned but at the time, anyway, Chapman was considered top shelf. They still might be, I dunno. I've done some additional machining in non-performance affected areas and now I just need to order the valve springs and retainers to be done.

On these heads, I added some external drain lines that will reduce puddling of oil around the valve pockets. Without these drains (which will connect near the top rail of the oil pan) quite a bit of oil will sit until it reaches a level that allow it to run back through the lifter valley. By using the drain lines, the oil will stay away from the lifter valley altogether.

W7 oil drain npt.jpg


W7 oil drain ports.jpg
 
Good question. I don't know. Even the valve seats are a different color between exh and intake. I suppose I put my faith in the Chapman people knowing what they're doing. If these heads had come out of a 'mystery' shop, I'd be a lot more concerned but at the time, anyway, Chapman was considered top shelf. They still might be, I dunno. I've done some additional machining in non-performance affected areas and now I just need to order the valve springs and retainers to be done.

On these heads, I added some external drain lines that will reduce puddling of oil around the valve pockets. Without these drains (which will connect near the top rail of the oil pan) quite a bit of oil will sit until it reaches a level that allow it to run back through the lifter valley. By using the drain lines, the oil will stay away from the lifter valley altogether.

View attachment 1715626645

View attachment 1715626646
yeah, I was wondering about oil drainback, too, before you posted the most recent close-up pics.
Hard to tell from the pics, but the exhaust guides look more like silicon bronze, while intakes look more like regular yellow bronze.
 
I can’t remember where I read it, maybe in a book by Corky Bell called “supercharged”, where he described some testing they had done with injector placement. I’ll see if I can find it and reference it here. It was specifically regarding EFI, and the results really surprised me. In some tests they turned the injector 180 degrees and faced it UP in to the runner kind of smashing the fuel in to the charge of air and saw good results at some rpm range and negative results at other rpm ranges. It was really a fairly extensive test and super interesting.
 
So, tomorrow I take the block in to get bored and honed.


Ordered the remainder of the valvetrain today after talking to Isky. These heads use a 2.00" installed height, so I went with the 9985RAD springs; these are their 'toolroom' steel springs. I used these as I had a few guys tell me they last and last and last. I discussed the pressures of 245/600lbs and Isky said that 600lbs was heavy but not super-heavy. They're using 1000lbs springs pretty commonly now. I should note that even 600lbs is about 200lbs more than recommended by the various Mopar books I have. I mentioned this and they said, "Those guys are 20 years behind the times" lol.

The retainers are their 92-ST, which are also 'toolroom' steel and are only a tiny bit heavier than titanium. I used these as I am not wild about the long term prospects of titanium retainers.

The locks are VL-700, which are their 7 degree chrome moly steel locks. The Isky guys told me 7 degree locks are their top choice; they sell 10 degree locks to stay in the market but their own testing shows 7 degree locks are best. They did qualify this with the usual 'as long as you're not buying junk parts".

Valve pocket locators are Isky 800-VSL; these work on the W7 head with the 1.565" pocket size.

Shim kit #8, 72 shims in 3 different thicknesses will allow me to set the final compressed height where I want it.

Last, Crower .090 deep lash caps.

Isky head parts.jpg
 
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