V-12 Engine into 308 Build, over on Grassroots

I don't understand how anyone can make a statement as above. I would say that the 'tires' don't have a particular preference. It would be the combination of tires and suspension geometry, and wheel rates, and vehicle weight, and F/R balance, and intended use, etc-etc-etc that would determine what the 'system' likes.

If someone told me the tires like -x degrees of camber with no other context I would ignore them because they obviously have no idea what they are talking about. But if they said something like "on a 308 with stock geometry, increased rate springs and lowered 1", these tires will work really well at -x degrees of camber" then maybe I'm listening.

 

Yeah, these tires are very sticky, and that makes side wall roll, and more camber is needed to compensate and give an ever tire temp across the tread.

The exact number is definitely setup dependant, but the tire wants camber in every application. My plan is to take a look at the numbers is vsusp give it the roll I expect and make a guess where I want to start with settings. I do have a buddy with a lowered 308, he's at -3.25 both ends (need to confirm) with the similar Bridgestone re-71s.....but it's a lot compared to stock and required modifications to the a-arm brackets.

 

I was trying to work on #7 but the leak in #12 was so bit it made it about impossible to find other leak so I started with 12. This one the leak is very high in the port so it wasn't causing much oil problem. I put the air hose into the crank vest could hear/feel the air coming out. I ground it and you can see the issue, a whole lot of spray cleaner, then filled with the H-450 Alumbond and really worked it in trying to some bite in the crack. It says 4-5 hours to harden....and I don't want to disturb it.....I decided to add some heat thinking it will setup a lot faster and its probably a good thing to cure it closer to operation temp so less stress running. Now I'll wait a couple hours then move to another.

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Port repairs continued today. this morning...ok, around noon, I found and glued a hole in #7 and walked away to let it harden. While that was hardening I checked my notes from when I did the porting to confirm this area is really not a very critical to flow, just make it smooth so I cleaned up 12 and its done. Just now I found and glued a hole in 6.

While the 7 was hardening I took a look at the front bank TB linkages that were giving me trouble. When I originally designed everything I wasn't really thinking that I needed 2 different designs so the front bank was a last minute change and clearly suboptimal as some were hard stopping on the spring and a couple the screws were backing out while it was running.
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I found some much stiffer springs to hold the linkage against the adjusted and cut them to a size the works well. Then I repurposed the softer springs to help secure the adjusting screws....hope fully this does the trick.
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Here's the rear bank for comparison...you can see the springs are in different placed because they operate in the opposite direction.
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Hole found and fixed in #3....I think that's it. I'll do another look tonight to be sure.

Ebay steer unit guy canceled the order, new offer made to a different seller.

Since I'm waiting on the injectors I'm thinking I might make new a-arm mounts to correct the roll centers and maybe add the antidive in front. I look at it tonight.

 

I didn't actually do anything last night but tonight I did the final sand of the glued ports and a final leak test and didn't find any leaks....hopefully that means there aren't any more leaks.

Then I pulled lower a-arm mounts from 1 side. I've hear they are a pretty marginal design and I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be straight
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Anyway, mostly I just stared at it a bit. The stock mount are offset 20mm which seems quite a lot and it does make me wonder wft they were thinking? Its like they designed it and moved the chassis into production before the suspension guys finished or maybe more likely it didn't drive great and this was part of the fix. I'm leaning to making new wheel carriers but I want to give it some thought.

 

There is a plan kind of jelling in my head right now that involves a spacer on the bottom of the wheel carrier and a barrel bolt to reach through the spacer and grab the bolt on top of the balljoint to let me space the lower ball joint as low as I want to set it. Its the first idea I've had so far that I don't hate anyway.

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I've read that for motorsport type use roll center general want to be 15-30% of CG (about 2.5-5.1 for me) and on a rear drive car the rear should be closer to 15 and the front closer to 30 to get good grip on the drive tires....which is opposite of stock 308 setup that got worse when I lowered it and might explain why I was always hunting for rear grip, removed the rear sway bar, tried softer rear springs and such. Dropping the front balljoint lets me easily get up toward 5" in front even with stock a-arm forks

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Then in the rear a small change to the forks gets that looking pretty good

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Opps, posted the the screen shot of stock 308, here's lowered with small fork adjustment...it doesn't look as good until you look at the values on the y axis and its actually much more consistent with roll, it only move 0.3" over 5 degress of roll vs closer to 1.2" stock.
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I had a great idea that to create a pretty serious 66% anti-dive I could just invert the front A-arm mount.....but no

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The factory mounts are 20mm offset, no way that is fitting unless I cut a chuck of frame out. For sure 0 will fit and that will yield 34% anti-dive. I think 10mm drop will fit and that yields 50% so 34-50 somewhere is where I'll end up. I need to pick up some metal and longer bolts so I can get the camber I think I'm going to want. Then I will set the roll center height with the ball joint spacer that I hope works the on the car the way it works in my head.

 

The injectors are are there way home....out of spec. Injector Dynamics puts them into set with under 3% total error and these are now 5.4%. They are also too old to get replacements for the out of spec injectors so I need to buy a new set of live with it. For that reason they only charges me for the return shipping which was incredibly nice. I have cylinder trim tables so with the info on the graphs I can note what cylinder what injector goes into and even them out in the trim so not the end of the world and not worth a new set just yet. They are on their way home so I need to work fast on the suspension...my local hardware store only had 2 bolts each of the sizes I needed, need to find some more in the coming days.

Before

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After

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Just realized I bought the wrong size bolts yesterday so instead of 1/2 what I need I have none...mcmaster will bring the right ones Tuesday making getting the suspension back on a race against the injectors returning.



It wasn't a total lose though, I went a different way than normal and spotted this sitting looking lonely and unloved.....I'm trying to be strong and not go knock on their door.....

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Are you crazy? Don’t be strong! Give in to the dark side. Go knock on the door!

 

My teenage son who is the one really wanting a motorcycle says the ducati is too old...oh well.

New front A-arm mounts for 42% antidive, check. Stock is +20mm, the new are -5mm, that sets the lower A-arm at 6.4deg. Because the spindle is toward the read of the A-arm, the change only lowered the axle line 5mm.

I started be making a little jig, I didn't have wide enough stock, so I pulled out the mig welder and made it wide enough then cut a radius on the corner
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The metal for the bracket gets tracked on
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then heated and bent
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then cut it off
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Then to the mill for holes , shape it, and tack a bolt
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and it fits
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I do have a no ugly parts rule so I cleaned up the stock one
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Sitting at the bench looking at the car sitting with a jack holding up the left front it struck me how flat the car was sitting...jack the right just inside the rocket panel, both fronts are up off the ground. Nice.
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I have that identical bike, super fun, but I don't think that's a door anyone will answer

 

I drove back over to show my son, who is the one motorcycle shopping, people live in the house and it looks like are cleaning up the property. I THINK they pulled the bike out of the collapsing shed in the pic. Sadly though my son is saying the bike is too old to be of interest

 

I'm pretty sure that while trouble shooting my power steering issue I fried the new controller off the replacement unit while hoping I could swap a new controller in and not need to pull the whole assembly Image Unavailable, Please Login

Looks like fix the PS is a winter project and I may do something different to try to make it more robust. I found the CAN signals needed to make the prius units work correctly and they have a remotely mount controller so that is an option or just a more robust relocation setup for the fiesta unit I have (once I get another replacement)....either way, winter project.

My focus for now is just being ready for when the injectors return later this week. Once its running I need to get the air box on...I'm remembering there was an issue with the fuel line in the way and I just removed to test fit the airbox and never corrected the issue. But no air box, no hood, no inner fenders seems like a great way to get gravel in the engine so that is high on the list once the intake goes back on.

 

The new A-arm bolts came so I welded them into the brackets and...or there was a reason ferrari used a very thin head...to the mill with them
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With that fixed back to the car...the a-arm bushing area is larger than the bracket and now hits the frame
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so I moved the frame and it installed nicely
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the a-arm has a nice angle to it now
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and there is an extra 15mm of thread which will add about 2.5deg range to the caster adjustment and let me get to at least 3.5 and I can't imagine wanting more than that.
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This all took much longer than planned so I only got the 1 side done but now I know what to do so the other side should go pretty quick.

The last few days I've been talking cars with the injector guy and he mentioned getting the traction control working and really liking having so i was feeling left out since my ECU is not reading the speedo sending unit like I hoped. I hooked the scope to the wires at the ECU, jacked up the rear, put it in 5th and cranking it over.....hmmmmmm....not at all what I expected nor anything I've ever seen, a 4-9V square wave signal coming from a 2 wire sensor. I saw the 2 wires and assumed it was a reluctor but it obviously is not. I might be able to read it on a digital input.....if not I'll need a new plan.
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A V12 308 (not mine) on a short drive
https://photos.app.goo.gl/hwNswrLy1CPeznJ88

Quite a different sound from a V8 car

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I finished side 2 and it went pretty easy and the injectors arrived so I'll get going on the intake tomorrow.

Today at work I was chatting with a guy trying to get his project together and running and he was asking for info about the haltech he's installing and the plug and play pigtail he'd bought and that how to repurpose some wring and such. As part of that I went through the 5V sensor supply and the sensor grounds and that sensor ground is NOT chassis ground and mixing them will cause problems and that got into a talk about good grounding and why there are so many small grounds everywhere cars once ECUs were added and how before that everything used chassis ground so most old sensors are just 1 wire because they ground to the engine but you never see that today because it pulls coil or alternator or whatever noise onto the signal lines and they were mostly analog so they wanted as much signal as they could get reliably and 8V became a standard so ECUs that have been around a awhile like motec and haltech have both 5V and 8V sensor power outputs.....wait old sensors don't have ground wires......yup, the 308QV speedo is a has a hall sensor with an 8V supply and grounds through the casing so only 2 wires. For whatever reason it only pulls down to about 1V not 0V but I think that will be ok on a digital input to the ECU. I'll try it tomorrow.

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While getting ready to test Lana stopped out to...ummm... discuss a couple things with me so I was a little distracted and didn't remember that I had moved the jack from holding the rear tires off the ground to position the A-arm at ride height when I tightened the a-arm bushings.....so I engaged the started with the car in gear and dropped the front off the stands. Luckily one front wheel was still on and the only damage was to the jack stands....I guess its good they were cheap and just bent....
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Oh man, glad that wasnt worse than it could have been

 

It was a take a minute and collect my thoughts moment for sure.

But it is an opportunity for get some nicer jack stands. The now broken ones were pretty cheap and the other set I have is cheaper and honestly kind of scary.

I think I'm going to order 2 sets of these. They have removeable pas and actual feet so its safe on pavement
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Wow I wasn't aware of that thread. These projects are labors of love where journey more important than destination. Best of luck to both builds! Maybe can do a back to back video of them when both finished!

 

mk e - after reading horror stories of jack stands with ratchets failing (like the ones you are considering), I went to these esco jack stands with pins and a nice rubber pad on top to protect the car:

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