DYNO RESULTS OF MY CUSTOM HEADER!

I spent this evening using the power of the interwebs to remotely dyno tune the car that has my custom header. This was the first time I had done this. It was exciting and annoying at the same time. I couldn't see everything in exactly real time, but, it was a huge step up from just getting a datalog file sent via email. I could see where the engine was in the timing and fuel maps in semi-real-time. This was a huge help to get my brain wrapped around what needed to be changed. At the end of the evening, we ended up extracting over 10WHP on an already potent package that had been tuned via feedback and datalog. Given my familiarity with this engine, the final timing curve was only off from my guess by at most 2* at WOT.

Here is what I can say about the engine:
It is a DOHC D-series. It has my custom header on it. (See THIS LINK for more info, and also search around for more pics of the thing and design theory.) I tuned it. The engine has more power to gain, especially if it is revved higher. The engine is extremely easy to tune with no stupid peaks, no issues. The AFRs are extremely consistent and it pulls very cleanly through the RPM.

Rather than focus on the numbers, look at how darned flat the torque curve is and how close to linear the power curve is:

YES it is a crappy copy. No, I can't an won't post more of the chart. 

The scaling of the torque curve is also wrong, due to an issue with the dyno coming out of sync with the RPM. The dyno computer thought the car was revving to 9200RPM when the team was doing pulls from 2500-7500ish RPM.

Also, this was done on a Dyno Dynamics dynamometer. I mention that for the people who know about them. Those that don't and obsess about numbers, you can make fun of the WHP, but I will take this as a huge validation of the general design of my own headers. I will take feedback from this team and improve on what I can do and make things better than before. 

I have been smiling with this success the whole evening, eager to share the results with people who have known about this project, and now I share with you!

Fooled you! (And me!)

I thought I was done, but, I always give things a once over before packing up for shipping, and I totally spaced on the inside of the runners:

That would have been embarrassing to send to a customer . . . So, I cleaned up the runners with a grinding stone and cartridge roll:

Here are all the pieces:

My customer is going to weld the megaphone on once the header is fitted in the car. Lots of stuff has been moved around in that car, so I thought it best to ship things separately than to force him to cut it apart to reposition things to fit. I also had to trim down the exhaust extension to fit in the box:

Packed up and ready to ship in the box the materials came in! It should arrive on Monday at the latest and get installed on Tuesday after being coated and wrapped. I am looking forward to hearing how it performs and sounds on the car. 

Other than that, I have a bunch of non-work related updates that I will have to leave for another time, if I ever get around to them. The next few days are going to be weird and crazy. More work is lining up, which is good, but I have to finish the projects I've already got. =) This is a good place to be!

I finished my first complete header today!

First things first . . . A shop isn't a shop without good tunes. For the past few months, I've been listening to muzak (I generally listen to mostly bad music) while working via my lap top or my cell phone, neither of which are particularly pleasing to the ears or clearly audible over my TIG welder's fan that is constantly on. (The on thing that really irks me about that welder. heh) I made sure I got up early and loaded up my speakers and amp:

I've had this stuff for years! The speakers are Alesis near-field monitors. The boxes are HEAVY and ported. I drive them with an Alesis 150W amp (most of the time, sometimes the 500W version I got for subwoofer duty . . . ) and feed them through a normal 3.5mm to RCA adapter cable. At times, I've been accused of having the subwoofer turned up too loud . . . when I don't even have one. The speakers are very efficient to pretty low frequencies, and I really do tend to prefer fabric tweeters since I have a tendency to be overly sensitive to the treble area. It was such a joy to listen to polka (yes, really, at least part of the time) and other music while working!

So yesterday, I left off with this:

It was tacked up and ready for full welding. After fiddling around a bit trying to figure out the best way to position the header for welding, I got an idea. The stock exhaust nuts, while very robust, are rather large and get in the way of the TIG torch. Why not figure out a way to reduce the profile of the bolts that were holding the header to the jig? So, I did! Below is a pic of the M6 threaded rod, washers and nuts (all stainless!):

The stock exhaust stud is an M8 size, and in the following pic you can see the clearance difference rather easily:

This made a good difference in clearance and ease of welding around the tubes. 

Here you can see the header mounted on the c-channel jig:

This makes for a much easier time of welding everything since you can move the jig and header around to make it easier to weld the difficult spots! Even so, I was getting stuck in a few places as I still have the long back cap in place:

A bit more shuffling around easily took care of that last little bit, and that was no where near the hardest part that I had to weld. 

I think this is after everything was welded, as I didn't get many "in process shots" since I was busy working over under around and through the primaries to get everything welded:

In the afternoon, new goodies arrived! I ordered some Norton sanding belts and Mirka stick on discs. The Norton belt is likely coming off soon because of this:

It is terribly ironic that the cheap belt that came with the thing tracks perfectly strait while the high quality (Norton makes many of my favorite abrasive products!) belt just rams straight into the side, creating a lot of unnecessary friction and slowing the whole thing down.

The next items to show off are the router speed controller, which works, at least with no load on the motor and a digital optical tachometer. I could test the tach out today as I didn't realize that the thing took 9V batteries, and I have none of those. 

The tach works optically. It requires a piece of reflective tape mounted onto the rotating thing you want to measure the RPMs of, and then you point the tach at the thing and it simply counts the tape. I mounted the tape directly onto the the chuck:

Once the header was welded up and I took the collector off and put it back on (what a pain . . . ) to verify everything was fitting decently enough, I needed to find a way to mount the springs. I came up with a brilliant idea to use this:

The twin of the free bed frame bracket I used to mount this:

To make 4 of these:

Which got sanded down to match, looking like this:

I cleaned up the flat sides, which I should have done when the material was in a large, flat piece as that would have taken much less time, and had two pairs of retaining spring tabs! I didn't even have to drill any holes!

I got the header mounted back onto the c-channel jig ( take apart, put back together, ad naseum!) and figured why not make the new low-profile studs permanent bolts:

I simply carefully melted the threaded rod to the nut and now I've got a perfectly sized nut that will make dropping in and securing things to he jig much easier! 

Here are the 4 finished tabs:

I trimmed the ends of the springs back a bit to make mounting slightly easier without taking the whole thing off:

While the header was on the head, I had marked off where I wanted the tabs to be, so I got them ready for welding:

Trying to tack with those magnetic triangles was weird. The magnetic field was definitely distorting the arc! It was so very weird. But, I managed to get a tack on there and then take the magnetic holder away and then weld the tabs on solidly:

Every once in a while, something weird happens that is still pretty cool. I wanted to keep the tabs 2.5" apart, but check out what the second set of tabs measured to when I just placed them by eye!

Dead on! OH YEAH! LOL!

Here is the final shot of the evening:

DONE! (Almost)

I forgot to clean up the inside of the ports from the head. That is going to be the first thing I do in the morning, then, finish packing it up and get it to the FedEx facility! YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Another ironic thing: most of my pretty welds on the primaries are on the backside of the tubes. LOL! 

I learned so much today doing this! I can't wait to move forward and tackle more challenges, and I already have those ready and waiting for me! =) 

Weld . . . wait. Weld . . . wait. Even while tacking.

If you recall, I left off last night with a hole in the joint between a primary merge with a filler rod and an electrode sticking out of it. Well, that was the first task of the day and after some grinding and welding with a fresh tungsten, I ended up with this:

After that, I started fitting the 90* bends:

The #4 is closes to the camera and also on the bottom of the merge. #3 is next to it. These are installed with the normal leg lengths of the bends. The two "top" primaries are shortened by the diameter of the plus a 1/4" in order to fit them. I do this because the #1 and #2 primaries are "reaching" from their respective cylinders. Does this lead to the all hollowed "equal length primaries" you hear so much about? No. I don't really care for equal length primaries, as I want to widen torque curves into plateaus, not have silly peaks that aren't much good for anything but dedicated one note racing. 

I use tape on the tube to make sure I cut and finish the tube straight:

 I love this technique, especially since my bandsaw doesn't cut particularly straight without constant attention. heh

More mockup and checking fit:

 It is WAY better to have to make a few cuts to trim something down than to cut too much. Slow and steady saves time in the end. 

I couldn't take a whole lot of pictures of in process methods with the rest of things because I needed 3 hands (had a helper hold things in place at times) to hold everything, measure and test fit. 

Mocking up the rest of the primary for #4:

Rolling stools with adjustable seats can be handy for mockup, too: 

Here is #4 tacked up and in place:

Note: The collector is NOT supported by ANYTHING other than runner #4. That is how strong tacks SHOULD be. 

Here is a side view of the collector (for you, Dan): 

If you enlarge the pic, you can see that the bottom of the collector is about on the same level as the backside of the oil pan (the lowest part). There is enough space between the pan and collector, but I wouldn't want to have it get any closer to allow room for some movement when the header is heated up and also for the header wrap that is going on the header to cut down on radiant heat. 

This is an example of too long better than being too short: 

After some trimming, making sure of the angle and squishing the tube in my vise to more closely fit the oval shape of the port, I had 2/4 of the runners tacked into place:

There is a huge gap between the last pic and this next pic, but it took a while. Actually, that is an understatement. LOL! It's SOOOO good to see this thing finally take shape!

Collector and primaries:

Front shot. The angle is a bit exaggerated due to the funky angle I held the camera. 

Here is the end of the collector:

I am actually NOT going to weld on the megaphone and exhaust extension onto the header, since the car this is going is nothing I am familiar with and has major components moved around. 

Tomorrow is going to be more welding. The reason why I titled this post what I did is because even with tack welds, maybe even ESPECIALLY with tack welds, you CANNOT rush things. As I was tacking the last runner (#1), I could hear all sorts of pops an pings. Go too fast, and nothing will go together correctly. 

I have to weld all the runners and make 8 tabs for the springs that will hold the sections together. I have concerns about one of the collector slip fit sleeves. It is a bit loose, but I know a few ways to make sure it seals, though after the header warms up, I anticipate the header will seal extremely well. 

Busy, crazy day tomorrow. Time to get some good rest. 

Another busy day

I grabbed some pics from Dave showing how much bigger the new motor is and just a much nicer pic of the drill press as it currently sits:

Today started out with a journey all over New Jersey. That is not usually my favorite thing to do, especially since I ended up in Trenton, but, all in all, things went well. I first drove down to the McMaster-Carr warehouse in Robinsville. I love that place. I picked up a few things:

3/4" aluminum rod to repair Mike's brake drum, SS springs for header retaining and much better sized SS washers for Dave's bike. I forgot the other washers, so I didn't get to return them. After I stopped in to check on the status of the above stuff, I was told that since the orders were placed late at night it would be a while before the orders came up to to the pickup area. That was fine with me since I needed to exchange my argon bottle (FINALLY!). The nearest place I could exchange it was about half an hour away in Trenton, so, I went there and found a really pleasant manager of the store who was very helpful. We discussed the possibility of purchasing a small acetylene bottle and whether or not I could exchange the old oxygen cylinder I was given a while back. Overall a very pleasant experience, and if I can time my pickups correctly, I will be going back there. 

Once I got back to my "shop" I set about prepping the mandrel bends for welding. This mostly involved lots of wire brushing. So much so that I got tired of holding the drill and having the tubes slip around so . . . I got creative:

That saved a heck of a lot of time and was way safer than holding the pieces in one hand and the drill in the other. Two hands controlling a piece you are working on is nearly always safer! Safety doesn't always have to mean slow. I saved at least 45 minutes putting together that quick setup! 

That took care of the outside of the tubing, but you can't forget the inside! Here is the tubing ready for some flap wheeling with the hanging moto-tool equipped with a mini-flap wheel:

That thing is awesome! A dremel ain't got nothin' on that! It made quick work of cleaning up the insides of the tubing. Since pretty much everything was prepped, it was time to start welding stuff together!

Here is the jig I used to attempt to keep things more consistent:

Darnit. I forgot to rotate a few pictures before exporting them. Oh well. I'll apologize for the taco neck, but, that's about it. 

Top view:

Close up:

The angle kept the legs on the same plane, or at least the same length. The block in the middle of the legs clamped to the angle is a 1/2" spacer to keep the Legs from pulling in too far (something that happened on a previous collector that makes things annoying off from square) and the clamped angle on top keeps the pieces flat and pretty well locked together. I like this jig, for now, but am going to make something more permanent in the future. 

My welds are finally starting to show tendencies of what I like to see. In this series of photos, you can see a progressively nicer bead developing, and I hope this trend continues!

What one must NOT forget is no matter how nice the weld is on the outside, the inside is what counts for exhaust flow! Here is the inside of one of my merges just after welding:

Typical stuff for welding mild steel. Note how well the "crotch" of the joint matches up and how smooth the flow path is. 

Same merge, just cleaned up a bit:

Much better! It only took a few minutes to do the work with this:

You can see how much use I have gotten out of that stone by comparing it to a new one: 

I got the megaphone and exhaust extension all welded together and was working on matching the collector outlet to the megaphone in this pic: 

While things were cooling off, I took the flange I am using and slapped it on the belt sander. Sanded on the left, as delivered on the right:

Since I will be indexing the rest of the header of cylinder number 4, I got that runner prepped and tacked in place:

I didn't get pics of all the welds I did on the collector because I was too busy getting work done! I have pics of the previous ones I've done that you can look for. It is mostly the same process, which is slightly boring. You weld a bit, then wait for things to cool down. Weld some more then wait . . . I did try to get as much done as possible instead of just sitting around and waiting.

Here's a good example of what I did while waiting for things to cool down:

That is Mike's drum. Here is a closeup of the damage I am going to repair:

A brake cable housing is supposed to slip into that broken hole. I am going to cut and grind the old material down and and replace it with this:

After I weld that piece in it's place, I'll finish it up nicely and ensure that it fits the brake cable.

Overall, I traveled a LOT and did a crapton of work. Towards the end of the evening, I started to get tired and made a few annoying errors like getting the tungsten completely stock in the weld: 

 I am going to grind that out and finish the collector tomorrow morning. I'll get the primaries mocked up by the early afternoon, and hopefully get to welding most of them up. I have to go home for my sister's birthday dinner in the evening, which puts a huge cramp on my working time tomorrow, but I will keep pushing forward to get this and the rest of the projects on my plate done.

 Tomorrow, most of my Amazon order should arrive, too, including the router speed control and new belts and discs. I have to say that the belt and disc that came with the sander actually are decent, but I am wearing them out through shear usage! I hope to have much more to report tomorrow! =)