I've taken delivery of some of that shipment now... the rest is in awaiting steam cleaning.

But Ben's crankshaft was among the bits that I picked up. What a lovely piece of gear this is, an LA Billet crank that was originally made with 3.25" stroke and 2" journals, then copped a nasty when an oil pump failed.

They sent it back to the makers, got the pins ground to the original 3.305" stroke with the 1.88" Honda big end size that Ben had decided to use (and had bought Carrillos for...) and properly restored, heat treated etc. Mains are 0.010" undersize. Then they abandoned the project... Ben picked up on it and bought the crank.

He thinks it's pretty good, I gather:

Ray that crankshaft is a work of art.

Thanks for sharing, Ray. Keep it coming. There is too much time between your posts. Our TV shows show that such projects can be accomplished in a week. You are obviously not swearing at one another enough and nothing appears to be thrown around the workshop in anger. Please speed up this reality show. There are some Americans around here, you know?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Ray Bell
[B]
He thinks it's pretty good, I gather:

I had a girlfriend whose Dad was a Queens Council, the "best" commercial QC, and in his dining room he had the crank from one of his cars, a Silver Dawn RR - it was loverly. Oh well that piece of your son's is going where it belongs, but we'll all know what's inside that old caste iron block.

Yes, MP, I'm sure there are some nice bits of engineering out there which can be equally at home inside an engine or on display...

Just like some are best suited to becoming posts for letterboxes.

Ben's been caught up with the HQ Holden thing for about three months now...

He used to race them and I think he felt he had some unfinished business. Apart from that, he felt that there were none of the guys out there who use his engines were quick enough to show how good the engines are.

He did a deal with the owner of one of his old cars, revitalising his engine in return for the use of the car for three meetings. That was Morgan Park in March, Oran Park in April and the HQ Nationals at Queensland Raceway in May. That was last Sunday.

At Oran Park he started to get into his stride and then the gear selector rod fell offso he qualified only 20th. It was a progressive grid, so after filling 11th place in the first race, he lined up eleventh for the second. Then he got up to sixth in that, so started there in the third. He was challenging for second place in that one when the rod fell off again, so dropped to 20th and could only make it back up to 14th in the final event.

A lot of effort went into preparing for the Nationals. More dyno time, a bit of a going over for the rest of the car... all this in between putting his customer engines on the dyno. And struggling to get the right fuel, which took him three weeks... and then he only got it between dyno sessions!

Qualifying saw him fourth, then he ran in second place most of the weekend as Gary Bonwick ran away and hid. Bonwick, they tell me, has been unchallenged in this class for about two years.

So for the final, Ben lined up alongside him and was running behind him when a safety car came out. With the restart it was on, with them running side by side and Ben taking the lead on a few occasions before he went for (yet another...) outside pass and ran out of road with three laps to go.

He came back on in sixth, fought his way back to fourth and was happy to get the 'hard trier' award for the day.

Most of all, he proved his engines could run with the best.

Now, despite half the HQ field telling him he should get another one of those and keep on racing them, and including some sponsorship offers, he's back to the Dodge.

Yesterday he took the aluminium flywheel and the billet crank to the machinist. As the crank has a Chevy pattern on it and the flywheel was bought first and has the Dodge bolt pattern, the bits are being modified to suit. I think he's changing the crank so the flywheel will still fit a Dodge crank if needs be.

That look so good it can be used as decoration, a speaker stand maybe.

Indeedy... it's a very nice piece!

The flywheel is pictured several pages back...

That is indeed a very nice crank. Quality piece.

Recently I had the opportunity to inspect and test a number of crankshafts from China, from multiple vendors. 383 SB Chevrolet (3.75" stroke) cast-iron cranks, specifically. These cranks have drawn some interest because they can be bought for less than $200, in some cases as cheap as $110 net.

And I found that most of them were fairly nice-looking for cheap cast cranks, with excellent surface finish... journals were one to three microinches. One or two had evidently been through ribbon finishers. Guess they concentrated on that stuff because that's what people can see, so that is what will sell. Straightness and indexing were decent too, to be fair. But in rod journal concentricity and taper they were all over the place. Awful.

So the under-$200 crank is no bargain if it needs to go to the machine shop before you can even use it, or it takes several sets of bearings to get the clearances half-assed "close enough" to get by with (whatever that is). Just to see where we stood I pulled a brand-new GM replacement 350 cast-iron crank straight out of the box. (Made in Mexico.) All journals air-checked dead nuts, well within .0001" every which way, no problem. So you know what they say... you get what you pay for, and caveat emptor.

A crank weighs ?35 kg, so that's about 35 bucks of cast iron. How much is a GM crank to buy, net?

I remember reading in a Ferrari book, that the billet of steel for a Ferrari Crank back in about 1966 I think cost of $US200. I think - for the time - it must have been a nice piece of metal!

around $300.

Ray Bell, is there a sketch or basic plan for us to get an idea of what this car is going to look/be like? If that's the crank then you would naturally have people asking these sort of questions.

The car will look very much like a standard car...

The rules don't allow for any flaring of the guards, removal of bumpers or anything like that. Not even bonnet scoops. 6" wheel width is the maximum, and he's going to be running period alloy wheels called 'Torque Thrust D' from memory.

He has been mulling over whether or not to change the colour of the car when he paints it. If you look back through the thread there are pictures of the car in it's 'as received' condition.

One thing Ben wants to do is bulletproof the engine, even to the extent that he'll be using an artificially low regular rev limit. That's why he's gone to the billet crank and Carrillos, expecting a small performance gain and a large reliability gain.

I wanted to get pictures yesterday, but he'd packed the crank away and was too rushed to get it out... but another stage has been completed...

At some great cost he's had the crank flange reworked to take the Dodge flywheel. This meant six fresh bolt holes and some machining of the spigot detail on the flange. Apparently the guy who did the machining reckoned it was pretty hard iron, too.

Ben had sent a question away to Hot Rod Magazine asking for options on this, hoping to find something that would do the job without machining. On the day he picked it up (some six months or so after sending off the question!) the answer appeared in the magazine!

It suggested, I gather, using a part that someone makes that combines the Mopar ring gear with the Chev bolt pattern and a mount for a tiny multiplate clutch. He reckons he would have gone that way, too...

It might be wise to follow the Chrysler products at this address;

http://forums.aaca.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=cfrm&c=10

There are several people who seem to know a lot about parts in the U.S.A.

M.L. Anderson

Thanks, Marion... you never know when you'll need more contacts, that's for sure...

In the meantime the scraping of sound deadener and removal of original paint proceeds apace. The lead filler has been melted out and welds reinforced, the boot (trunk) floor has been replaced and a lot of the areas of floor etc with loose surface rust have been sanded back.

My son is still apparently holding on to the engine parts that he offered to onship for us over a year ago, I certainly hope they get mobile soon. Or is there anyone in Indiana who could chase him up for us?

Here is one for Ray.

http://www.a2zracer.com/page9.html

Interesting stuff... we tend to forget all those things...

Though I wonder why they had a 'short stroke' 273? The 273 had the same stroke as a 318, I wouldn't have thought they could play around with that. On the other hand, they might have been allowed to get their capacity any way they liked, and destroking a 318 wouldn't be silly. Except they'd have to use 273 heads, there were no LA heads for a 318 at that stage and Poly heads, though better, surely wouldn't have been allowed.

Anyone know the Trans-Am engine mod rules?

Might be able to post some more progress pics in the next few days.

I wouldn't read anything into it. Displacement, bore, and stroke were fixed by homologation in the Trans-Am so there was no monkeying with them. I think he is just saying he thought the factory engine was short-stroke in general, which is fairly mistaken, relatively speaking, but there you are.

I certainly hope you're coming to have a look at progress on the car when you come here this year, McGuire...

Sorry to report I will be not be making the annual trip to Australia anymore. I have taken on a new gig which confines my sticking my nose in other peoples' business mainly to the USA, primarily the Detroit area. So I have less travel overall now, which is good, but I will not be making regular visits to my favorite spots anymore, which is the unfortunate part. Surfers Paradise was certainly one of those. I love everything about Queensland and Australia.

Which is not to say I will not be back...I will just be doing it on my time, and it is hard to say when I will have any of my own.

I would say to any American who is planning a vacation to say, Hawaii: have a look at Australia. The beaches and the weather every bit as nice, and there are a LOT more things to do and places to visit... especially if you are a car enthusiast.

Okay then... just let me know when you're going to Indy some time then...

I might give you a mission to carry out. Involves parts for the Dodge.

I go to Indy all the time, it's practically my second home town. Especially now that my daughter lives there. (She's a zoologist specializing in primates, works at the zoo.) What do you need? I may even know the shop, it's possible.

Not a shop...

My son has a bunch of the parts we've bought, and I mean a bunch! Stuff we couldn't get shipped here by the sellers and so on. Some of it he's had for over a year, he keeps promising to send it but never seems to find the time.

He's actually at Bloomington, but works in Indy.

I think I mentioned that bodywork is proceeding... Ben's father is giving him a bit of a hand too:

Ray, someone has a lot of work ahead of them. I do not envy them....

I have been drawing the Poly spherical combustion chamber and really don’t have enough accurate information and dimensions to do much it much justice. The intake valve seems to be leaned over to the engine C/L by 20 degrees and the exhaust is parallel to the cylinder C/L. without reliable dimensions it shows that it should breathe very well but not as well as a true Spherical Segment but still better than everyone believed back in the 1960’s. I couldn’t find that either valve was on a compound angle altho in relation to the engine C/L’s it is compounded one to another.

And now if someone could just make a little easier to tell one engine from another!!!

Checking on manifolds it is going to be a hard row to hoe it one wants a Weiand Manifold as they aren’t even listed on the Internet Catalog except for the newer engine.

I wish Ray and his associates a lot of luck.


In somewhat the same subject;
The new HEMI is a lot of trouble to design and manufacture.

http://www.allpar.com/mopar/images/new-hemi/5.7-head.jpg

http://www.allpar.com/mopar/new-mopar-hemi.html

As all should notice it isn’t a HEMI with all the different radii Squish and Etc. At least it does have dual sparkplugs as did the old Wright J-5.

M.L. Anderson

Where did they say it was troublesome to manufacture?

Todd

Quote from Todd; Where did they say it was troublesome to manufacture?

I didn’t state that anyone but myself said it . Anyone who has worked for 40 years in manufacturing can see the compound curvatures and blends plus extra sparkplugs plus the fact that the old “Hemi was a single curve probably made with a single plunge cut. Compare the combustion chamber plus all the rocker arm angles etc. etc. and one can easily see that the HEMI cost a lot more money than an old “B” engine.

Can Chrysler afford it is the real question!
M.L. Anderson

How much do you suppose it costs to manufacture relative to comparable-displacement 4 cam engines from Nissan and Toyota?

It is entirely likely that Chrysler won't be able to afford anything for long, but I don't think it will be due to selling too many Hemis.

The extra spark plug will cost some dough, but with CNC those shapes are not much of a problem anymore. Take a look at the chambers on the latest LSx, SBC and BBC heads now widely available in the aftermarket. That whole deal is done on a Makino horizontal machining center in approximately nothing flat. Watched it being done just the other day.

As a point of interest... as a cost-reduction measure to save the 426 hemi, in the late '60s/early '70s Chrysler studied switching over to a ball-stud valvetrain and built some prototypes... but since there was no use for the engine in any form by that point, the whole thing was dropped.

I'll endeavour to confirm that lack of a compound angle for you, Marion... as I sit here I'm almost certain they are not compound angles...

It's nice to know you're taking an interest in this. I believe this engine has been sadly neglected over the decades.



It is easy, with just a little knowledge...

The Poly has rocker cover bolts through the top of the cover, the LA (273-360) has them around the outside. The big block has the distributor at the front, small block at the rear.



Weiand have stopped production some time ago and nobody else wants to get involved. Except perhaps someone who might fabricate from tube. Ben is planning to do this, actually, while I have plans (that seem to be constantly delayed) to make up patterns to cast one with a lot of similarities to the RPM Air Gap Performer style.

I plan to make this as a saleable item in time, with the plenum designed to accept various carburettor combinations.

The owner of one of these prototype engines recently posted in the Vintage section of the Moparchat forum...

Several quotes below..... I stated; And now if someone could just make a little easier to tell one engine from another!!!

Ray Bell states; It is easy, with just a little knowledge...

Alto the engines are easier to tell apart by their upper structure differences the actual difference in cubic inches etc. makes it difficult to tell them apart in the various shop manuals and information literature that I and many others have. Chrysler Dodge and DeSoto didn’t make it any easier by their proliferation of engines in general at that time.

It appears that the Poly was dropped in 1967 but this is nothing but a guess!
Now if anyone can straighten this out I can get back to the odd engine that McGuire has put on the list!

M.L. Anderson

There are a few of them floating around out there, which is unusual for a Mopar engine of that sort.

If you want odd engines I have plenty more.

Hans, the 318 Poly was never used in a De Soto (except in South Africa, perhaps, which had a rebadged Dodge Dart in 1962 called a De Soto)...

I'm happy to try and explain anything you want to know, but it is important to realise that the Poly of which we are speaking here was not derived from any Hemis... as were some Polys in Dodges in the late fifties. They are architecturally the same as the LA engine in the bottom end, same crank, same rods, timing chain and water pump and distributor. Water passages to the head differ and there is more clearance for the inlet pushrod in the valley side of the water jacket.

Regarding the valves, they have to be a simple angle because the rocker shaft would not allow the rockers to follow the valves properly if they were at a compound angle.

The last Polys in US production were made in 1966. Canada continued to produce them for another year.

I found the following several days ago about the actual shape of the Poly chamber very interesting;

The spark plug is located at the focus of the parabola. Mathematically, any vector that starts from the focus and strikes the curve of the will reflect away from the parabola in a straight line. Essentially, the shape of the Poly forces all of the power from combustion down the cylinder, rather than having the top of the heads absorb some of the energy. This increases power and cools the engine.

Of course with a leaned over intake and a straight up and down exhaust and an angled sparkplug he doesn't state just what part of the parabola they used!

Oh well ! http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1149266

M.L. Anderson

Don't you feel, as I do, that this is a bit of hocus-pocus?

I do believe they give better torque than the LA, but how much is due to the chamber shape and how much to the excellent inlet shape I wouldn't dare guess. At least not without a lot of experimenting.

I agree, somewhere between marketing hocus pocus and a first approximation to a good idea. IF the combustion forces were perfectly centred on the plug, and the wavefront were spherical, and it was a linear system, then it would work. They aren't, it isn't and it isn't. But roughly speaking, it's not a bad place to start. I'm not even convinced that increasing the peakiness of the pressure delivery to the piston is necessarily a good idea.

The test would be to look at the piston acceleration for one of these heads as opposed to an alternative design. Or the TVs.

Of course it is very hard to evaluate - does the extra surface area required cause more harm than this does good? etc.

Well I have finally got a 1966 shop manual which shows and states many of the things about the Poly 318 engine. The other engines at that time was a LA 273 cu. in. engine and the big block 361 etc.. Fortunately it shows a lot of pictures and a good picture of the rocker arm assembly and the offset rocker arms of the 315 cu. in. engine. It was worth the money!!! It is on a disk but unfortunately is in Acrobat PDF . The LA engine is very obviously the one with the inline valves. But has no pictures of the dual Four Barrel manifold.! @$#%^&*()_+}”:?< Not only that but curses!!!

M.L. Anderson

I love PDF, has a good search capability and you can print it out if you want to hurt the forests!

Any information or drawings you might want, Marion, just go to this site and ask:

http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/318poly/

I have many photographs of the heads etc too, and cutaways of the heads should still be available in this thread. Ben cut one head into about eight sections so he could get a good look at it.

If they're not, I'll repost them...

Pdfs are fine but for any photos or drawings included, the original size and resolution are lost forever. That's my pet peeve with decks.

EDIT: well that and attempting to download them from a dialup connection. Now there is time out of your life -- the computer locks up and you do nothing until the download is accomplished.

Have finally found the Polydual4bbl manifold! This was made as a kit from the best informationm I can find. Also includes a lot other manifolds also just as unavailable at this time.

http://www.moparts.com/Tech/Archive/smallblock/10.html

I guess this is the package????

For high performance enthusiasts, Plymouth released a dealer-installed High Performance Package in the spring of 1956. Retailing for $746.90, the kit included dual four-barrels, special air cleaners, an aluminum(?) intake manifold, and high performance camshaft. This kit was available for both the 277ci. Belvedere V-8 and the Fury 303ci. V-8. The kit raised the 277’s hp to 230 while upping the Fury’s 303 to 270hp.


M.L. Anderson

Actually once pdfs could contain lots of extra data, designed for printing the hi res image for the imagesetter making the colour separations, all from a low res much smaller file. I'd have thought pdfs would have even got better.

But as you've experienced, pdfs can be far too large, and maybe that's because of the person who set the resolutions too high? Ideally low res images should have been in the document, not hi res ones. And yes it would be horrible downloading such a thing directly, rather than a download format where its background and automatically recovers lost data due to transmission interruptions. I'd forgotten how downloading huge files in real time still goes on and what a pain it used to be - errhh can be!

Marion, this one:



Is surely the Weiand single 4bbl unit? Aluminium, not a very nice manifold, was made also to take two 4-bbls but otherwise unchanged. As far as I know.

The factory unit from that site:



Has quite small carburettor mounts. I don't know what size they take, but they're not big at all. I feel sure this is a cast iron one, by the way.

Ray stated;
Has quite small carburettor mounts. I don't know what size they take, but they're not big at all. I feel sure this is a cast iron one, by the way.


The Paragraph states it was supposed to be aluminum but this may be incorrect as at that time not very many manifolds made by manufacturer’s were aluminum. Also notice the two bolt heads holding a strap down which looks as if it is a exhaust heat riser of some sort.
The engine @ 318 cubic inches isn’t big enough to take really big Carburetors such as the 1250 cfm Holley #HLY-0-80532-1 , which at that time weren’t likely in production anyway. The smallest one in the Summit catalog is 390 cfm x 2 = 780 cfm. I don’t know just what the smallest 4 barrel was at that time. A NASCAR 358 V-8 is held to a single 750 cfm.

This is after a lot of thought and search is possibly the manifold for the series of engine 240, and 290 HP in 1956, 1957 and 1958 and other years that I haven’t any information about.

M.L. Anderson

Edit below.
About fifteen minutes after posting the above over at AACA this was posted;

Rusty OToole;

They made a 2 - 4 barrel setup for the Fury 318 up to 1958. After that the big block 350, 361, and 383 took over the performance duties and the 318 became the workhorse. The 318 was available with a single 2 barrel with a single 4 barrel optional up to 62, after that they were 2 barrel only.

Your manifold probably came off a 57 or 58 Fury with the optional 290HP 318.


Now to find out about the Dodge 326 of 1959 3.9531" x 3.3125" and that manifold!!!

Yes, Marion, I've seen one of those manifolds and I wouldn't be surprised if they took a pair of 350s.

Although Ben has a pair of Thermoquads he could use, he's getting other carbies to try... here are the Carters he just got in from the US:



In the meantime he's heavily involved in the bodywork, though the body is becoming less heavy the more he gets involved... here is the lead he's melted out of the C-pillars and some parts around the back:



It's a slow process, working on his own each morning before work. He's using spray putty in cans to get the body back into it, "It's more expensive but a lot less trouble and time than setting up the compressor and spraygun for a little bit at a time."



He's quite happy with the job he's done on those extreme rear corners, though it's been so time consuming he's wondering if he shouldn't have left the lead in there.

There's been a bit more weld thrown into key areas, like this rear parcel shelf, which carries the rear roll bar braces. Note that under our rules for this class, roll cages aren't allowed to overtly stiffen the chassis.



Wet weather this week and an opportunity to have another race this weekend at Morgan Park (in the rain, which Benno likes) will mean a bit of stagnation. But I won't see it all again for another two or three weeks, so undoubtedly there'll be more progress by then.

Has anyone verified the Polys sent to England for the Bristol 409 & 410 and the exact engine it used and did they use the Dual Quads or the Single Quads or what?

M.L. Anderson