Excellent! They even show Made in Italy on them!! :)
Can you use the Ducati inlet manifolds? ... I thought they looked pretty much the same as what you are trying to make? Desperately trying to save you some effort ... wasting my time though Pete
I was thinking the same thing....except the top of the plenum would be the deck lid so don't even have to open it to gaze upon the awesomeness of the TBs
Help to save effort is always welcome but I don't thing I can use them. They are for the 50mm TBs, the flange angle is wrong and I don't knowhow I'd work out the bolts. I'll take some pictures the next time I'm in the shop
How the heck are you going to make the manifolds then?, get some alloy curved tube and cut and weld on a flange? Maybe you could start with the Ducati ones and cut and reweld those puppies? Pete ps: I think you need to add a furnace to your workshop and start casting your own stuff ... plenty of sites on the internet ...
Probably some heavy wall straight tube welded to a flange. The runners will be almost straight so I can machine the ends and blend the middle with the die grinder....but you might be right about the ducati manifolds. I'll have a good look at it tomorrow night. I like the furnace idea...I'll have to try and warm Lana up to it.
Someone had given me a small kiln once and it had been standing around for quite a while already when one day I needed a large piece of aluminum round stock to make a pulley. Looking through the scrap barrel I couldn't find anything big enough so I got the bright idea to make a tray out of plate steel that would fit in the kiln, melt some scrap aluminum and pour it into a crude mold to make the pulley blank. Unfortunately, there was some magnesium mixed in with the scrap aluminum which caught fire and destroyed the whole kiln!
A little more software talk for Hans I finally got in contact with the "Accelerator" software guy .and he confirmed the 4V head part of the program does not work right. The software is aimed at the Harley market and only the V-rod uses 4V heads and apparently not many people who buy the software have V-rods. He said he'll try to get it fixed today and get a new copy out to me and gave me a couple suggestions for how to get around the bug in the meantime. He also pointed me to a couple cams grinds that work well in V-rods. The mildest has about the lift I'm thinking but 250 duration (at .053 lift) or about 10 degrees more duration then I was thinking. I'll play with it tonight, but I think it's too much duration. Steve sent me a 245 cam, but even that seemed like too much and the 240 he sent first seemed about optimal. The V-rod, like all Harleys has big valves. The stock V-rod intakes are 42mm each .like 2 308 2V intake valves. The stock V-rod head flows 180cfm, making the velocity at the seat about 120 ft/s .the same as a stock 308 head that flows about 90cfm (at 10"). I think this is why they like so much duration. A good head will be over 180 ft/s and an excellent head up around 200 and the higher the velocity the better the cylinder fills and the less total duration you need. My head is at about 190 ft/s right now and will be right at 200 if I get the 160 cfm I'm looking for without having to bump up the valve size anymore. I was playing with a carbed 2V 308 this week in the software. I found that if I take out the 42mm intake valve and put in a 34mm valve like the math says you need for the stock 90cfm of flow. Use the stock early carb cams, the stock intake, and the stock 40mm webers the engine will make about 300 hp because the parts are all matched and the flow velocity is up where it should be. Going to a P6 cam makes 10 less peak hp and 50 less hp fro about idle up to 5000 rpm because it have way to much duration to work with the new high velocity ports. I think this is the same effect I'm seeing with other people liking longer duration cams when my engine say it hates them.
Oh...I don't want to burn the house down, maybe I don't need a furnace. On another topic. Do you have an oven that will hold a TR head to try and bake to straight if/when I warp it?
Hang on, we are trying to make an efficient big power engine here and I keep reading the word Harley and software that we are designing this engine for is mainly for Harley's, etc.! :0 Gee unless you want to make the most powerful v12 in the world that makes peak power at like 4500rpm, I can't understand the Harley relevance?. Why Harley's don't run on diesel I still cannot understand, makes perfect sense as they only want tree stump pulling torque and heck would make them almost efficient, and work well with their long stroke, etc. Pete
Oh, don't be like that. My old pushrod 2V harely made an honest 125hp/liter at 8500 rpm just like the software said it would. An engine is an engine. This software has quite a bit of emplerical content the best I can tell and that is from HD dynos and all the preloaded stuff is HD, but it works well on any engine. It gives the info in a slightly different form, like it spits out optimal head flow vs me having to play a trial and error game and a second opinion is always good.
Most impressive ... no Harley that I've seen, heard, etc. made that sort of power, let alone was still running at those revs ... but to be 100% fair I've not seen many. Agree, but some have designed in limits (like vibration issues) that mean you can only tune so far ... but again 125hp/litre is impressive for any engine. Pete
You just have to trust the numbers, it always works. A big part of the reason I bought this new version is the V-rod is a short stroke, big bore 4V engine and the Buells now comes was a rotex engine, again short stroke, big bore high out putmuch more similar to what I'm building here than HD has had in the past. Again, this software is just for a second opinion, I don't want to have to build stuff twice.
There are some very good resources on the net dealing with casting your own aluminum. Not very difficult to do simple castings (which the manifolds should be). try www.backyardmetalcasting.com I'm working on a project trying to resurrect an old SOHC pontiac engine with only a single brabham cylinder head as a starting point and none of the small parts - luckily most of the plans for the small parts are available but I'm looking at getting a few copies made of the head and casting my own small parts; timing cover, cam covers etc. Quite a project but I'm confident I can cast most of the small parts myself with very little $$ involved and less time/effort than trying to machine it out of solid aluminum.
Here's the ducati manifold sitting ont he head. You can see the angle is off quite a bit and fixing it would remove most of the flange. I've got a chunck of heavy wall tubing I'll use for the test manifold. It's a big enough OD so it can be machined to have the TB slip in and small enough ID so I can shape it however I like. When I get a change to get into the shop I'll weld it to a plate so I can bolt it to the head and start grinding. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
I haven't been able to get much time inthe shop this week, but I got a little tonight. This barely rates picture worthy, but here is the beginning for the test intake manifold. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Although labor intensive with all of the porting and shaping required this will offer the fewest (if any) compromises of design. After seeing this engine concept manifest itself into what it has become so far I will never ever consider myself OCD.
Would a simple solution be to cut a spacer to go between the manifold and the head which would shim out the lower portion of the manifold to get the angle you need? Does that make any sense? Once you have the desired “shim/spacer” designed they should all be the same so crank out as many as you need?
Exactly. It will be as good as I can make it.....and I good example of why I hate building naturally aspirated engines. A series of small compromises end up costing so what hp in the end and not compromising cost massive amounts of time and effort. At this point I'll get double bonus cool points when it runs......or triples bonus dumb*ss point if it doesn't If worse comes to worse a 400i engine now fits in the car. The headers I build for this engine will still work with a 400 if I weld on new flanges then I hang a blower on it and drive so this won't be a total loss, but this NA engine will sound so much better....if it runs
