360 Challenge/Stradale Manual build thread

This little lot is required to refurbish the selector....
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It took a fair bit of time to press out all the old bushings and ball joints.
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And this is why I'm doing it - some bearings seized, some sloppy. All those little points add up to a less than perfect manual shift. This little rebuild is well worth it to refresh a manual car.

Note that when you press the little ball joints out they are staked (hard to see) in three places on each joint. I just pressed them out and the stakes failed easily under the weight of the press. I then cleaned them off with the Dremel and will restake that side once the new bearings are in.
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Managed to fit a couple this evening before I ran out of time.
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Morning Sir - no technical reason but my car is a factory manual and the Stradale box was delivered to me with just this hole! So I needed to do something with it
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Finished pressing in all the bearings and then selector levers cleaned up, finished and reassembled for trial. there is no slop at all now in the mechanism.
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Yikes just looked at how it came out of the car a couple of months back...

What a mess!
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Turning my attention to the engines today I worked to remove the inlet manifold and left and right dme looms off the 28k Modena engine.
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There are four p clips inside the manifold securing the looms to the metalwork.
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Really the only interesting thing was that the right hand dme loom was actually connected to the left hand throttle, and vice versa.

I would love to know if this is intentional or a mistake?

Anyone know?
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Perfect - thanks Aldous !

 

With the intake in bits I noticed some oil vapour residue in the chamber here. This is caused I presume by oil vapour not being purged of the liquid oil after being blown past the rings. In race cars it's a common practice to use an off board catch tank to solve this issue and prevent the oil sludge from being inducted back into the motor. The intake gaskets also have evidence of damage from the contaminated mixture.

I had a look at the challenge car - same setup I notice - though there does appear to be a revised disareator on later cars? Also took a look at the NGT car to see how they worked the breather setups on that but the pics were pretty poor.

Ideas?
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I'm with you on it. So we need a catch tank setup - what about crankcase pressure how's that gonna work?

 

Looked at it - probably best to retain the suction from the manifolds and just insert the tank in line from the disaerator to the inlet. Although that still allows the first condensed Gunky oil to feed back into the main oil supply.

I might have a very brief look at the disareator to see if it could be redesigned to incorporate a tank.

But in the mean time this one looks sensible and appropriate for the engine bay: (don't want a "hks greddy twin turbo anodised blue" one with a "killer power" sticker heheheh
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Hmmm yes - I'm just reticent to pipe anything back into the inlet to be honest steve if it can be avoided. I've always designed my race cars on open loop like this so seeing the Ferrari all messed up like this kind of convinces me?

 

My understanding of "positive crankcase venting" is that we are using the inlet suction to ensure the vapour and blow by products are evacuated smartly from the crankcase.

That's why we need to hook to the inlet and that's why in the turbo applications there is a valve stopping the inlet pressurising the crankcase under boost!

 

I.e we are not aiming to return he sludge to the inlet and neither were Ferrari. They were aiming for the disareator to remove all that and use the suction only as a function.

Unfortunately the disareator doesn't seem to work exactly perfectly - although it's a decent effort if you look up the back of it - plenty of baffling and complexity to persuade the oil to de mix from the vapour.

1) one option would be to fit a single catch tank between the cam covers and the disareator.

2) another option is a single tank from the disareator to the plenum.

3) third option is both 1 and 2

4) And a fourth option is to connect the cam covers to a catch tank, then directly to the inlets, thus abandoning the disareator function and relying solely on the tank.

I'm thinking carefully...