Valve Spring Shimming

The Butcher always enjoyed a good tool. The Butcher always hated a bad tool. The worst rating a tool could receive was that of the "turd sucker".

I'm half way through the engine build, crossed the mountain peak, and now gaining speed. I have been savoring the fun. I consider engine building to be highly enjoyable. It's like building a computer with clearances. Here are some updates on where I have been, where I am, and where I am headed with the pile of metal parts. Please remember that I am not a mechanic, nor do I play one on TV. Please take everything I say with a bag of salt. Some of it is good advice, and some of it is Butcher style voodoo. I will try to highlight which is which.

I got my block back from the machine shop. Jody the machinist did a super job and what was extra nice is that he constantly let me grill him with endless noob questions regarding all facets of engine construction. I even had him giving tutorials on the proper use of micrometers, calipers, and dial bore gauges. I noticed several members of his shop would sneak over and listen as he taught the Butcher some basic shop fundamentals.

Here are a few pics I have probably shown before. One interesting thing on stoker blocks is that there usually is a chunk the shape of a quarter removed on each cylinder and even on the area where the oil pan installs. This is because the longer stroke would cause the rod to whack this area if it was not relieved. Here is my engine number. Someone once kindly decoded it and I believe it is a 1974, probably from a Ford Granada. The block was ready to go...clean and full of freeze plugs even. It looks like new.

Everything was fine except there were two set screws and I did not know what they lead to. Each day I would see them and think "where on earth do those lead to?". There might be secret treasure behind them. I have to remove them and see. I was hoping they lead to oil because a few people told me to pull oil pressure from the back of the block or something, and I thought this might be what they were talking about. The first day, I had those screws stripped in less than 28 seconds. Now a normal builder might of said "what the heck, let's move on". Not the Butcher. I was going to beat those screws if it meant using TNT in the block. I called Jody and got some advice. Drill out, head up, let sit, then use a bolt puller thing-a-ma-job. I forget the official name, but I have a cheap set of them, ready to go. I figured if everything failed, I could drag the block down to Jody or Jorge and admit defeat. Well it took three days.

A young Butcher would of had the four letter words a flying. This is the older, slower Butcher. I would not be rattled by frozen set screws. I was bringing out the heavy artillery. I first tried the low chance of success "vice grips". This was a long shot and this did nothing but make the set screws do a big belly laugh and the threads crumpled instantly. I then brought out some thread breaker sauce and the stripped bolt removal tool. Soon I had my 4 foot jack handle on one arm and the wooden broom pool tied to the other. My friend physics was hard at work.

The do not call him the Butcher for nothing. This tap wrench was quickly toast. I think I broke 2-3 tools on this little sideline challenge. You will be happy to know that my tap wrench will never brake again. I quickly order king pin style replacements from Enco that were built Butcher tough. I will have to admit that I like Enco now, almost as much as Mcmaster. Enco is nothing but tools and I like that they have a wide range from el cheapo, to full moxi.

I decided to have a sauna, drink an ale, and reflect. Jody had given me the answer. The next day would be the big push. Out came the serious stuff. I doused those screws in mouse's milk, then I set the damn block on fire with the propane torch. Then I waited as I confidently chewed a frosted cherry pop tart. With the new tap wrench and a good bit of belly busting, out came the set screws. I am the king. In the holes was nothing but rust. This leads to the cooling system. Interesting =)

You may recall that I mentioned in the engine building book by Don Terrill, Terrill talks about something he likes to call riblets. He states that in minutes he can make a manifold or head flow better with this simple technique. He used 50 grit sandpaper and sands in the direction of the air flow. Hold on one second

<Voodoo Alert>
Please note that we are entering the land of engine builder voodoo. These ideas may or may not hold water. They are interesting, yet I have no concrete proof of their effective use on a performance engine.
</Voodoo Alert>

I thought about Terrill's riblets for a while, and to me, this sounded an awful lot like Extrude Hone, which is proven to be very effective even at the highest levels of racing. The only trouble with extrude hone is "cash". Heads and manifold are over $1000 easy. A bunch of sandpaper and some ale is less than $50. I decided to give the Terrill riblet technique a try. I first used my Vic Jr manifold as a guinea pig to make sure I was not going to damage anything beyond repair. It felt great. "This is really working" I thought. I got really excited when I thought I had found the cat's pajamas. I thought that a 40 grit mcmaster sanding foam brick would work magic. It just did not fit. Cutting it into smaller pieces did not help. I tried regular sandpaper and it was hard slogging. I even tried a cut apart belt sander belt and this made for uneven file marks. In the end, the best system I found was 3M sticky sandpaper. The type you use for body work on a cobra. The drawbacks to this paper are that it is $40 a roll, and the strongest grit I could find was 80. I developed many "wrap around the finger" techniques. The glue on the back is key because you get coated in aluminum dust and regular paper would be impossible to grip. This is a semi exaggeration, but you want to go from a roughness like on the right to a smoothness like on the left port in this pic. There were still some rough corners that I could not get totally smooth, but they were better than when I started. The lads were over last night and I made them put and scrape their fingers in the old rough vic jr, and then in the new "ribletted" Super Vic, and there were Oooo's and Ahhhs all around. One test I did was to take a sharp object and drag it across the port and listen. Then repeat the port in the direction of low...the noise was noticeably quieter. As Richard has said to me on many occasions, it is all about Laminar flow, and I believe this simple technique may allow for a lower bounding layer, and therefore airflow will increase. Extrude hone claims a 15%-20% over already ported heads. My guess is that the sandpaper will be worth 5%-7%.

Once I had done the manifold, I could not resist doing the heads. CNC work always has tradeoffs. You can mill a chunk of aluminum as smooth as a babies butt, but it will be in the machine 17 years, and so most milling leaves small lines in terms of time savings and efficiency on round shapes. Here is a great picture of my ported heads intake port, upside down. Those are tiny lines probably can be improved upon to reduce the bounding layer. For four hours, two days straight, I sanded. My fingers hurt. I wish I had 50 grit. I think things turned out well. Not perfect, but a lot better. Almost baby butt fur. The goal is not a mirror finish. The goal is millions of little lines, helping the air travel the proper direction on its journey. I think Westech has a flow bench. I am very interested to see if this has helped. I am going to give them a ring Monday and get prices. I have my flow data prior to this. I don't have stock super vic data, but I imagine they have it on file. If I find out more, I will pass it along.

<Science Alert>
Please note that we are entering the land of science. Old school hot-rodder beware. The truth is out there.
</Science Alert>

If I had a dollar for every distributor gear post from the last 3 years. Engineer Niles aka 'Grover', set the law straight a few months back. I wanted to echo his comments and add to them. If clearances are correct, any gear will work with any cam. Really it comes down to a question of wear rates and cash. It is $15 - $45 for a distributor gear, and it is $200 - $300 (plus labor) to swap out a cam. Grover writes "The selection of gear material from an engineering viewpoint is driven by what do you want to wear".

Its that simple. It just makes more sense to have the distributor gear equal or softer to the cam gear. I believe most factory engines have iron cams and this is why MSD ships iron gears. Brass gears are becoming popular since they are sure to wear before the cam shaft. To sum it all up...because of wear rates and the cost of a cam replacement vs a distributor gear replacement

Steel Cam......use steel, iron, or bronze distributor gear
Iron Cam.........use iron, or bronze distributor gear
Bronze Cam...where on earth did you get that cam

I ordered some fun Canton parts. These are going to be standard in future JBLs I believe. Some of you already use the excellent Canton oil sandwich plate that screws onto the block. I am not going to also run the Canton racing inline oil filters. I believe this will help me from reversing the lines =) and the filter is easily accessible. The top was really snug. I did not have the exact correct socket but this 36mm did the trick. I bought Canton adapters since I run 10AN lines. A nice benefit of this setup is that the canister can be mounted in many places, freeing up space in the engine bay. I'm also going to go with an Canton inline gas filter.

I think I am up to 3 valve spring removal tools. I decided to leave the cave last week and go to NAPA for a good spring tool. All they had was this. This could not compress the spring in my ball-point pen. This is a turd sucker. I also have one of the ones you screw onto the stud and pry down. Its not to bad, but it side loads the valve, forcing it down. This means that the heads have to be on the car, and the cylinder has to be air pressurized, for the tool to work. Finally I found the pro-level tool I had been seeking. This bad boy made quick work out of the springs, once I got the hang of it and dialed the spacing in.

As owner of a 351w sb ford, you might go hunting for a FelPro intake gasket and select the ever popular 1250 with ports of 1.20'' x 2.00''. Over time, your wrenching gets a little more sophisticated and you up the anti, going with the 1262 with ports 1.28 x 2.10''. Finally you are seen making guttural he man noises since you know you have reached the pinnacle of FelPro. Yes, I am talking about the rare and little known, 1262R with super size it 1.40"x2.25" ports! AR AR AR AR!!!! I am a little skinny on the width but will be glad not to be trimming every hole in the gasket.

Nothing to do with cobras except, I figured "if the butcher can blow up a car, he can damn well blow up an air conditioner". 3 port switch, flux capacitor (don't stick your tongue on this), motor (pricey), fan blades, that were fine until you took the gear puller to them and mangled them beyond repair, Pow R Pak (sort of like a capacitors capacitor). Went to the net, had everything ordered in an hour. Should have that souped up air conditioner back on track in a day or two.

I think I am going to go old school on you. Rods and pistons ready to go. Smokey, Jody the engine machinist, and the Butcher, all feel the same way about spirolox....they are a pain in the ass to install, and they are a pain in the ass to remove. I will have to admit that I have gotten pretty fast with them, but I kept thinking "there must be another way." I picked up my worn out "POWER SECRETS" and found the section on piston pins and retaining clips. Smokey said that Spirolox work fine, they just hack the crap out of the piston on removal and install. Instead, he preferred a DUAL Tru Arc setup. I checked online and found Tru Arc and spirolox at Flatlander and they were both 42/1000ths. I ordered up a set. Here is the common spirolox retaining ring to hold in a floating pin. And here is the old school Smokey dual Tru Arc. Right now I am leaning on the dual. Smokey never had a problem with them and ran some heavy HP.

I decided to have my engine balanced. Richard Hudgins tells me it is more a function of RPM rather than HP. As RPM rises, there is a much greater need to have things in balance. I was surprised to find that the most expensive part of my block work, was the balancing. I think it was a little over $200. Here is what the balancing shop gave me

Engine Type...external balance sb ford
Pistons.......472 grams
Pins..........120 grams
Locks.........4 grams
Rings.........56 grams
Total Rod.....478 grams
Rotary........508 grams
Reciprocating.200 grams
Total.........1868 grams

What I thought was neat is how and where they removed material. Here is a regular rod, and here is a rod with a little weight taken off...notice it is round. And a tiny bit of material was removed from the base. A regular piston, and one with some material removed.

After ribletting the heads, I had to wash them and put them back together. I had my cam spec card, a spring gauge, a caliper, and shims. Comp and Crane and other cam makers all sell shim packs. I bought a set of each size 15, 30 and 60 thousandths. Now I am not sure of the exact procedure, so check with a pro mechanic before following the Butcher's lead. Here is how I set my news springs on the heads.

1. Install valve and keeper and measure
The first this I did is get the distance with the valves closed. In this example it would be 1.920". I know from my cam spec card, that my springs are to be set to 1.812" and have 145lbs of pressure.

2. do a little subtraction
If you trust your spring supplier and don't have a spring gauge, you would just do some subtraction and get 1.920 - 1.812 = .108 ...in that case you could then use three shims, a 60, 30 and a 15 for a total of 105 and you would be damn close. I did not use this exact method. In retrospect, I think it would of worked fine since I feel my springs were pretty accurately made. I decided to go one step further and do it the proper way. The trouble as I found out was that it is very difficult with cheap tools, to get accurate measurements. I measured some springs 3 times and each time the numbers were slightly different.

With the 1.920 from above, you now grab one spring and one retainer. You take these and install them into your spring gauge and compress until you reach the magic 145lbs (for my case) and then measure. It should be around 1.812 and it was. Let's say the measurement was 1.790. You do the same math and this time get 1.920 - 1.790 = 130/thousandth. In this case I would probably take a 60 60 and a 15 shim for a total of 135. I tried to error on the conservative side, so I might be 10 - 15 tight on some of my shims which is probably 5-7 lbs and that is within 5% of the 145lb target.

Once everything was shimmed, I added back on the studs and the guide plates. I did a little thread chasing as well. More on this in a moment. Two small annoyances of trickflow heads are that the valves are offset. This makes standard guide plates not function, and you cannot add aftermarket shaft mounted rocker arms, and secondly, pistons require a non standard flycut I believe.

I decided to go the whole nine yards and install new valve stem seals. These are plastic or rubber caps that seal the valve. I am not clear on their purpose...spacing, air control, or oil control? I can say that they are devilishly hard to remove and just as hard to install. First I had some trouble trying to decide whether or not to lube the valves and then what to lube them with. In most books, this is rarely talked about. When I took my heads apart, the valves looked like they had white lith on them. I tried one test valve with ARP assembly lube....yikes. It was like glue. Way to thick. Here is a fun test you might try in your garage, just for fun. Find two flat scrap pieces of metal, maybe 4"x4". I had two giant washers that worked well. Then find 4-5 lubrication products in the corners of your garage. I grabbed assembly lube, 10w30, redline CV joint red paste, and crane can super lube cam oil break-in additive. I then coated the washer and rubbed it in a circle. You get a feel for how each lube works and sort of what it would be good for. You also get to make a good mess, but it is an educational mess. I decided the Crane superlube was like a nice thick oil and decided to lube up with it. The surgeon pre coated the valve guides. This white thing is a stem seal, but you can't just shove them on. The plastic socks are install tubes to help the seal pass over the valve ridges. A socket is going to act as my stem install tool. My first successful install...don't spare the lube. On #2, I damaged one of the socks. I decided that I had to first push the valve on withmy thumbs and then use the socket. This would hopefully stop the socket from hurting the plastic guide. It worked! Springs were places in the ready position AND these are the exact springs and retainers that were measured with the pressure gauge and calipers the day before. I used the spring tool once again. My first attempt at the retainer clips almost cost me an eye. That clip shot and hit the roof of the garage. On went the goggles. In one of the engine books, they suggested a little assembly lube on the clips to hold them in place. This was just enough surface tension to hold them still and the tip paid off great.

<Semi Voodoo Alert>
Please note that what I am about to show you may disturb and offend some people. These are block modifications. Why? Because I am Building Ford Short Track Power! =) If I was reading Obtaining A Mirror Like Finish On My Aluminum Manifold, then I would not be partaking in these dark arts. Most race engine books agree on restrictors. There are experts that say it is wrong. I just know that when I starved my engines for oil, the bearings went, and the top of the engine was not hurt. This was an almost zero oil condition.

Should I use “Oil Restrictors” in my engine?
No, Crane Cams does not recommend the use of oil restrictors. The oil is the life blood of the engine, not only lubricating but cooling the engine components as well. For example, a valve spring builds in temperature as it compresses and relaxes. This increase of temperature affects the characteristics of the spring’s material, and if excessive, will shorten the life of the spring. Oil is the only means the spring has for cooling.
</Semi Voodoo Alert>

Now it gets scary young Johnny. The word "oil restrictor" strikes fear into the hearts of men. I'm am referring to Ford Racing part numbers
M-9448-A302 (old blocks and 302)
M-6799-R351 (sportsman new blocks)

What is the goal of a restrictor kit? The goal is to give the main and rod bearings more oil by taking some from the cam and top of the engine. It requires the installation of 4 set screws with small holes in the center in main bearings 2-5, and then installing a tricky one, followed by a tricky installation of one in a major artery. I can hear the fingernail biting. Here is an Edelbrock351c making 500HP on the dyno with an explanation of such a kit. Oh the horror. Ack! Make him stop. Hee hee haaaa. I think it all started when I got hit in the head from a mysterious rubber mallet. Oh ya! I forget to say you get to tap the valves with the mallet to make sure they are set. They make a neat popping sound. OK, enough scary oil stories for today. I can hear the "don't do it" emails already =)

Next comes block full cleaning and washing to get all the metal particles out that I made. One thing that is always good to have around the block is the industrial sized WD40 since rust wants to attack fast. Next some exterior block painting. Then some oil screen lifter area kits. Here is the big block chevy kit which will work just fine. Then we will cc the head chambers to get an accurate reflection of what compression ratio I'll have by choosing the correct gasket. I forgot to say that there was a little thread chasing action. The threads are good to go.

<Voodoo Alert>
Ceramic coating on engine parts has been shown to be effective. There are dangers. Coatings can flake off and pistons can cause rings to melt. Smokey says no young engine builder should fool with this stuff. Dyno run example.
</Voodoo Alert>

That's the goal. A pump gas, 600, the hard way. No turbo, no NOS, no blower. I can here a few nei sayers now "no way Jose Butcher". To that I say, pick up your September Car Craft and turn to page 61. That is a ford sb 408, 10.5:1, doing a 626HP @ 6900....and they didn't have the secrets of the riblet :) hee hee haa.