Whineing Fan Housing and Drag Torque Bar

31st May 2009
After nearly a year of the Drag Bar Linkage setup sitting in my garage I had to take the temporary engine out I was using as I was getting a very large wine noise from the fan housing. The engine was a single port 1300 engine which had a surprising amount of talk. Some months back I did not have time to write the dynamo failed and I had fitted my alternator from my previous engine. The problem with this was that there was not enough depth in the single port fan housing to take the fan and alternator backing plate. I presume from this there must be four different types of backing plates although I have only ever seen two. The result of this was the back of the fan was scraping on the fan housing an emitting a horrible wine. As a result of this I decided to remove the engine and at the same time fit the drag linkage kit.

The drag linkage kit fitting was described here http://martinsswbratrestoration.blogspot.com/2008/10/installing-csp-torque-bar.html

If have to add to this that the new rhino mounts that I bought to remount the gearbox where firstly not exactly what I thought they should be . The rear mounts looked very similar to the urethane ones and the front mount was missing the tab that fits into the chassis on the back of its bracket. In addition to this the rear mounts fitted extremely tightly in to the gearbox mount to a degree that made them very hard to fit. I new from fitting the gearbox that the gearbox strap was very tight to bolt into the frame arms for this propose I changed over the brackets first. The downside of this is that you cannot move the bracket to help get the mounts in. After struggling , Jacking up the gearbox etc I found a solution that worked. I used a clamp to clamp the bell housing to the bracket . This had the result of pulling the gearbox down onto the mounts . With the combination of a screwdriver in the mount bolt hole I was able to slowly tighten the clamp enough to allow the bolts to be placed in situe.

The fan housing issue in the single port 1300 engine was not so easy to resolve. I have tried the pack the front of the backing plate with small washers to push the front of the fan away from the back of the fan housing . If this fails to work I would have to find a temporary twin port engine to run in the buggy.

Straight -cut or Cross-cut Cam Gears

17th may 2008

The debate between strait-cut gears and regular cross-cut gears has been ongoing for some years and is something that many engine builders will come up against and will have to make and educated guess based on the information that is available to them.

Certainly the pros of the straight cut system are the increase in performance that the straight cut gears low friction give. The Cross cut gears however seem to have a much stronger build quality usually made from aircraft gauge billet Aluminium or Magnesium where as the straight cut gears are noticeably thinner and made from steel or use a steel gear and alloy drive gear. I originally elected for the Cross-cut gear system as I was also aware that the straight cuts system gave the engine an odd wine as the gears spun together.

The two featured camshafts are on the straight cut gear above left an Engle FK8 and on the crosscut to the lower right a Bugpack high lift cam.

The use of this lightweight and narrowed straight cut cam and crank gear set will virtually eliminate all cam bearing thrust wear created by high lift cams and high pressure springs. Straight cut gears are also available in an adjustable type witch allows fine tuning of the valve timing from the cam. A typical engine built with a straight cut cam can be heard here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SynhO3LoJsA. The wine is very noticble and can be mistaken as the sound of a supercharger.

The Cross-cut gear type apparently wears better and is now also available in adjustable models and also some with steel and alloy mixed gearing sets.

Personally I am going to fit the Straight cut gears and see how they fair in my new engine. I will write in another blog on how to set up the cam with the correct the adjustments when I get to the pre-build make up.

MOT the real deal

15th May 2007

Some serious time has passed since I last wrote on this blog leaving me feeling a little busy and feed up with the garage that had mot'ed my buggy way back in March. My buggy had been sitting in the garage for most of this time waiting for me to get motivated again and to have it retested. I had contacted DVLA regarding the garage in Ford garage in Battle that had mot'ed the Buggy in March but I had no response regarding my claim that the MOT had been done unfairly and my request for the test fee to be returned. I decided enough was enough and took the buggy in for a retest at Leaders Engineering in Hastings, I had been told that they had some experience in Kit cars and tried to make an appointment to have the buggy mot'ed. The weather was not on my side and I could not seem to get a day that was not raining to go. Eventually I plumped for Friday and took the vehicle into Hastings to have it Re-tested. The MOT started off well and the engineer was very thorough going all over the vehicle. Watching this I was worried as the Ford Garage in Battle had stated that the front Calliper was leaking amongst other faults. To my amazement the car went through the MOT with a totally clean bill of help.

Now seeing the car had been in the garage since its last MOT and nothing had been done to it I can not understand why the Ford Garage was stating there was a fault with the calliper that seemingly repaired itself. I will leave this for my readers to ponder on as I have already made up my mind.