Electromans Type 4 conversion

[Electroman]

OK so i have been meaning to put up a build thread about my engine for a month now, especially since i see a current lack of build threads going on and thats no fun. As of right now I have already made some progress on my engine so I'll have to catch everyone up.

First off I'm building a 1911 to go into my 67' beetle that I just finished painting about 8 months ago. When finished it will be a fuel injected, ITB, staged injection, setup that will hopefully net me around 100 to 110 HP.
This build actually started over a year ago when I got a core motor (EC code 74' 914) and started collecting parts. Between then and now I lost my job and ended up getting a huge pay cut, got engaged and am currently helping my fiancée plan our wedding thats this July, and we are preparing to move to Florida. Needless to say currently money is tight, but I need to get my car back up and running before the move so I'm going to have to cut a few corners hear and there.

Anyway enough with the boring stuff lets get to the motor.
1.8L EC code case (STD, STD)
factory 66mm stroke crank (STD, STD) balanced
stock rods, rebuilt end to end and balanced end to end
96mm KB pistons
96mm EMW cylinders
1.8L S heads 41mm 34mm valves
manton chromoly pushrods
stock 1.8/2.0 rockers
solid rocker spacers

Those are the parts I had amassed before all the job stuff, which obviously put a big damper on my fun. But I have tried to keep working on it, doing whatever I could for the time being. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the tear-down or the early build, so bare with me.

After tearing down the core motor I cleaned the case and then pulled all of the oil galley plugs and cleaned the passages. Then proceeded to drill and tap all of the plug locations so I could install nice stainless steel NPT plugs. I then measured the whole case, every bore, the deck ect. All good. At this point I didn't have any money for more parts so I went back to painting my car since I already had the materials.

Fast forward to about two months ago. To this point I had managed to amass some more parts, always looking for the best deal.
German Kubelshmidt (sp?) main bearings
German Kubelshmidt rod bearings
Kubelshmidt cam bearings two sets (these ended up being Brazilian made)
I got a hold of a Eagle 2202 cam and lifters brand new for a steal. Not the best brand but I couldn't pass it up for the price, hopefully it wont go flat on me.
parts for the heads (get back to this later)
aluminum cam gear
gasket kit
some EFI stuff (again back to this later)

At this point I started doing th mock up, checking bearing clearance cam timing ect. and I have pictures of that

Checking crank run-out, measures way less than 0.001" can barely see the needle move on the dial indicator.

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Cam in case, checking end-play and bearing Clearance (not pictured)

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mockup crank installed.jpg

mockup case halves together.jpg

At that point I checked the cam timing, turns out its 2 degrees retarded. I ran the engine combo through desktop dyno (ya i know its not accurate) and retarding the cam kills HP. Soooo I need to get it advanced, I'm thinking i want to advance it 2 degrees. So my plan is to enlarge the bolt holes a small amount so i can advance the cam in relation to its gear 2 degrees. Is this a bad idea?

Well I moved on, leaving that till i split the case halves again later. So i proceeded to check the deck height on each cylinder, and thats where i ran into trouble. Every cylinder had a different deck height, that largest difference being 0.005". So I went about it mathematically. I measured each combination of parts I could make. Case spigot #1, cylinder #1, rod #1, piston #1. Measured that, then swapped to piston #2 ect. then I compared all the measurements finding which parts are longer and by how much. Then swapping parts around i got the deck heights within 0.001" but they are all around 0.071". So I took the cylinders to Costa mesa R & D to have John shorten them for me.

That was two weeks ago today. Long story short the job previous to mine he broke his tool he needed to cut my cylinders and had to order another, crap happens. Anyway he said he should have the tool any-day now.

So I moved onto the heads. Unfortunately this is one of the places I'm going to have to cut some corners, as I really don't have the bucks to get them rebuilt professionally. But I'm going to get them into the best shape I can myself, hopefully it wont come back to bite me in the butt. First thing I did after cleaning them up and decarboning the combustion chambers was disassemble them completely. Then I threw the exhaust valves in the trash measured the valve guides and the intake valve stem and it was still on the high side of factory specs. Checked the exhaust guides and they were all well within spec too. So I got a new set of exhaust valves. Next I turned my attention to the rocker studs and the exhaust studs. All of them came out. Unfortunately one of the rocker studs was stripped and poorly repaired, another was partially stripped, and one exhaust studs had been poorly repaired as well. So I quickly whipped up a jig and mounted them on the drill press and drilled out the two stripped rocker studs, and all of the exhaust studs. Then tapped them and repaired the threads with some solid steel threaded inserts not those crappy helicoil things, all installed with red locktite. installed new 8mm rocker studs from EMW with blue locktite and ordered some 8mm grade 12.9 bolts to cut into studs for the exhaust.

Again ran into another problem. The bolts I ordered were only partially threaded and of-course the unthreaded part is to large in diameter to run a die over. So either I need to either get some new fully threaded bolts to cut into studs or just some shorter bolts and just use them as bolts. Decisions Decisions. I decided to wait on the exhaust studs for the moment and move on to the valves.

I lapped all 8 valves into their seats and was very happy to see that they lapped beautifully and should seal great. Moving on the the valve springs I got a set of SCAT HD singles with chromoly keepers and retainers. Clearance the keepers so they fit the valves tight and shimmed the springs 0.045" setting them at an installed height of 1.460". 0.090" shorter than scats listed installed height, hopefully that will keep my valves well controlled through 6000RPM.

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So thats where I'm at as of right now. I'll get a post up shortly about the fuel injection details.

EDIT: trying to get all of the pictures back after the photo bucket junk

[Electroman]

OK so onto the fuel injection stuff. I mentioned previously a little bit about what I was planning and ill go into further detail here.

First off I'm planning on using megasquirt 1 with some mods and running the MSextra code. Some of the hardware mods include: setting up the ignition input for a hall sensor, adding a tach output, constant barometric pressure, and a waisted spark direct fire coil setup. I still need to finish the install of the second pressure sensor and the coil drivers but here it is so far.

megasquirt.JPG

megasquirt1.JPG

For ignition my plan is to do a 36-1 trigger wheel with a hall sensor, coil drivers in the megasquirt, and going coil near plug with 4 stock beetle coils. Right now I'm going to use some cheaper autozone coils I have laying around but may later upgrade them to blue coils or something entirely different.

Now the part im sure most of you are interested in the ITB's and the "staged injection". First off the ITB's I'm using are off of a 2003 Honda CBR600RR. I got them off ebay, with both sets of injectors fuel rails ect $30 to my door. This is what they looked like when I got them.

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Then I stripped them down, separated them, and cleaned them up. My plan is to use parts of a set of stock injection manifolds and mount the throttle bodies to them. They actually are fairly close in size.

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I'm planning on mounting the pink primary injectors down in the stock location right next to the intake valves, and the blue secondary injectors in the throttle bodies right below the throttle plates. The throttle bodies will be mounted as far away from the heads as I can get them and still have them fit in the engine bay. I still need to figure out the fuel rails, especially the ones close to the heads. I plan on using the stock motorcycle ones on the throttle bodies but I haven't made up my mind on how I plan to attach JIC fittings to the ends of them. Maybe just an 1/8" NPT tap in the end or braze or weld idk.

throttle body.JPG

throttle body 1.JPG

Now about that "staged injection". First off its not quiet staged injection I have planned, and as of the reason, again cost. I have two sets of injectors, neither of which is comfortably large enough on its own (164cc) and electronics are kinda my thing so why not.

True staged injection as I understand it is when you have your primary fuel injectors supplying all of the fuel to you engine until some set point is crossed, such as boost level, RPM, ect. At that point a second set of fuel injectors kick in adding more fuel. This is usually done when you need large dynamic swings in fuel, like lots of boost. Now what I'm planning is to have my primary set of injectors supplying all of the fuel to the engine in the low RPM range, then around 2000ish RPM's have the primary injectors start supplying less fuel and the secondary injectors start supplying more fuel. This transition would happen over say 2000 RPM's. So by about 4000 RPM's the total fuel supply would be supplied by the secondary injectors alone. But I'm also going to transition with engine load as well.

I'm not exactly sure where I'm going to start transitioning or how fast yet, still need to do some more reading and eventually play with the tune in the car. The main reason I'm doing it is from all of my research engine RPM and engine load depict where the ideal placement of a fuel injector is. Low rpm and light load the injector should be as close to the valve as possible. Just like basically all OEM manufactures. Now as the rpms increase or the load on the engine increases there is less time for the fuel to atomize and mix with the incoming air, so the injector needs to be moved further and further away. Obviously since my engine will only be turning up to 6000RPM's I wont see as big of a difference as you would with one that turns say 10,000 or more. But again I have the parts and it wont cost me more than a few fuel line fittings and some wire to try it out so what the hell, right.

To do this transition I'm planning on using the dual table code, using one table for one injector driver and the second for the other. Having the primary and secondary injectors on separate drivers. So again my reasoning is all about efficiency, hopefully this injection setup with my 12 hole denso injectors will get this engine cranking out the HP and sipping the fuel. Here is a very rough fuel table with no slow transition, which I'm not sure I need yet.

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I'm still thinking about the exhaust and planning out the cali cooling ect. Anyway thats all for now.

EDIT: adding pictures back after losing photobucket

[joosep]

Why so? I think there will be no smooth AFR

[Electroman]

I'm not the first person to come up with this, I have seen this exact type of setup used on race-cars before. When I say race cars I'm not referring to F1 cars (they have been restricted to 1 injector per cylinder for awhile), But not autocross cars and rally cars and I believe i saw it on a dirt track car too. As for why, mostly because I can, but also for efficiency.

When an engine is running at idle or low rpm (by low I mean anything under 2000) the velocity of the air through the intakes is repetitively low. Which means there is a long pause between intake events on each cylinder. So when ever you inject fuel it basically sits around on the hot intake valve evaporating. This helps get more of the fuel into a vapor so it can be burned efficiently. Which is why OEM manufactures place the injector as close to the intake valve as possible. If you mounted it too far away the injected fuel wouldn't stay in suspension in the incoming air and would tend to stick to the walls on the manifold. One fuel is stuck on the walls of the manifold it is very difficult for it to come back off into the incoming air. so it would disrupt your AFR and hurt your drive-ability because of it. Now thats all at low rpm.

At mid and high rpm things change. The higher the engines rpm the less time the injector has to get the fuel into the engine. If you were to place the injector low like in OEM setups, you would end up spraying at the back of a closed valve the majority of the time. This obviously can screw with how well the air and fuel are mixed together. But if you move the injector further up in the intake tract the fuel has a longer time to mix with the air. When you spray fuel into the incoming air from such a high point) especially anywhere around the butterfly valve in the throttle body where there is allot of turbulence) the fuel get mixed together with the air and some starts to phase change to a vapor. This phase change requires heat energy which the fuel gets from the new air, cooling it in the process and making it more dense. So this longer mixing time and cooler more dense air helps make more power in the mid and upper rpm ranges.

So too kind of sum that up. When the engine is running in the low rpm ranges it really wants the fuel injected right next to the valve, to keep as much of the fuel in suspension as possible. But as the RPM increase and the amount of time to inject the fuel decreases. The injector wants to be at the other end of the intake tract, giving the fuel more time to phase changes and mix with the incoming air. The whole reasoning behind all of this is to try and get the most homogeneous fuel air mixture as possible, so you can get a fast clean burn wasting as little fuel in the process.

Now about the AFR not being smooth, I guess that rough fuel table I put up wasn't clear at all. No problem. That fuel table is kind of an initial collection of my thoughts on how that real table will look. As of right now its kinda just showing where i plan of transitioning between injectors. But as it sits it might not run too bad. See the AFR shouldn't go all wonky at all. The ECU interpolates between ever number on that table. For instance let's say the engine was idling at 800 RPM and 70kpa. If you look at my fuel table you will see a column for 700 rpm and a column for 900 rpm. To get the fuel info for 800 rpm the computer basically averages the 7 and 800rpm columns getting in this case 23.5. the Megasquirt ECU does that between every number on this table in every direction. On this table in the transition areas between primary and secondary injectors I have 600 RPMs and 5kpas difference. That may not seem like much but the ECU I'm using has an RPM accuracy of 1RPM and a fuel accuracy of 0.1msec, so there should be a fairly smooth transition between the primary and secondary injectors even on this table. Now later on, when I program the ecu or when I really start tuning this engine I may find that thats not smooth enough and I will make the transition over a longer period of time.

Hope all my ramblings helped make it a bit more clear. Don't be afraid to ask questions, I'm more than wiling to sit down and try to explain why I'm so crazy for trying this.

[Electroman]

Update:

The past few days I have been toying around with my Megasquirt. I finished the constant baro mod and flashed it with the high resolution version of ms1/extra. Then I read through the manual several times and started messing with the settings in TunerStudio. One thing I'm toying around with right now is the actual firmware for the Megasquirt itself. I have a background in electronics and computer programming so I decided to take a look at what was under the hood so to speak. One of the things that bugs me is that the whole thing is obviously set up for a water cooled car, and I plan to remedy that problem. The main area I'm referring to is the whole warm-up and enrichment areas. All of the temperatures they use are low, I feel that you should have control over the enrichments over the entire operating temperatures of the engine. So I plan to rewrite a small part of the code and spread the temperatures out from -40F to oh about 450F max, I'm thinking about having the settings end around 380F ish. Anyway thats basically a side project.


Also today I picked up my cylinders from the machine shop. I was able to spend two hours in the garage and got the deck heights measured, the cylinders lapped into the heads, and started gaping the rings. Anyway now my deck heights measure 0.041", 0.040", 0.0395", and 0.0395" being a perfectionist I would prefer for them all to be exactly 0.040" but I will settle with what I have now, as hard as it may be to do so.

Just to clarify with KB 96mm pistons and hastings rings the top ring gap should be 0.025" second ring 0.017" and the oil rings somewhere around 0.025"? Does that sound right?

Anyway hear is a picture of the cylinder and a view of what the piston sees.

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EDIT: adding photos back after loosing photobucket

[Electroman]

So I managed to put in a few more hours today.

Verified my ring gap specs form some old posts Jake made a few years back. Well today I got all the rings gapped and installed on the pistons. Then I got the pistons installed into the cylinders, the cylinders installed on the engine, and finally the heads bolted on. After that I got the solid rocker spacers sanded down so I had 0.005" clearance on each rocker set. Hopefully I'll get a few hours in tomorrow, and start the valve train geometry. Here are two more pictures.

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EDIT: adding pictures back after loosing photobucket

[GARRICK.CLARK]

looks good to me Electroman.
I've just completed a 1911, am gunna turn the key tomorrow and see what happens.
The hour's of prep work on these motor's I recon must be 3 or 4 times that of a type 1.cylinder head/manifold work just goes on and on. gotta be worth it tho.

[Electroman]

Ya lots and lots of prep work.

My problem is I have to keep telling myself that its not going to be perfect, that I need to get it as close as possible then let it go. Otherwise I'll be building this thing for another year.

Anyway good luck with your motor, hope everything works out like you plan.

[Electroman]

I didn't get out to the garage today but I spent a few hours tonight going through the Megasquirt firmware trying to see if I could increase the temperature ranges.

The short answer is its not going to happen anytime soon. The long answer is with their current firmware you run into hardware limitations for the size of a number that can be used. It's an 8 bit processor so you can only have a number up to 255. The processor is natively coded to use degrees Fahrenheit so basically no higher than 255 degrees. Well had a thought to convert the firmware to be native in degrees Celsius which would allow you to move the temperature range much further up without loosing too much resolution.

That part is easy. The hard part is the computer interface, its also coded to Fahrenheit and I cant get the source code for tuner studio and although I could get the source code for Megatune, the required changes would take me a week or so. Basically the ends aren't worth the means. Oh well it was worth a shot.

[Piledriver]

MS2 & MS3 have no issue with CHT, in fact they have a feature allowing "extended" clt temp-

The CLT if for warmup, I'd stick it on an intake manifold bolt or on the port wall under the ITBs.
Seems to be where it matters most for warmup, and 255F should not rail out at that location.

You need to monitor CLT with a TC under a plug anyway.

[Electroman]

Ya piledriver I know about those features.

Right now I'm just trying to see how far I can take the MS1 chip. After I get the car running again in the future I will probably upgrade to at least a MS2.

As far a monitoring the cylinder head temperatures I'm going to be getting one of these http://www.aircraftspruce.com/catalog/i ... 105698.php that should get the job done.

[Electroman]

Small update:

I managed to measure all the pushrod lengths to set up the valve train geometry. got 4 of them cut tonight.

[Electroman]

We have pushrods

sdfh.jpg

Started tear down so I can throughly clean everything and then do final assembly.

EDIT: adding photos back after losing photobucket

[Electroman]

Its officially a shortblock.

Managed to get a few hours in last night and made some good progress, since there isnt too much to say about this here are a few pictures.

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EDIT: adding pictures back after loosing photobucket

[Electroman]

Just came in from the garage managed to get a good amount of time in today. Got the engine entirely assembled now. Only I would spend the day before my wedding building an engine.

finished longblock.JPG

Next thing to do is the cali conversion cooling. But I'm going be gone for a week or so on my honeymoon this coming week so no work for awhile. But when I get back I'm gonna hit the ground running so to speak.

EDIT: adding pictures back after loosing photobucket