Things are moving along

Well the heat has been turned up by the looks of things. I went out to the workshop last night to find both Pat and John busy cutting up steel and tacking together a new chassis already. Because the 73a car is sitting waiting to be masked up for painting, which is one of those boring jobs, they had both decided they might as well do something more productive and let Bryce mask up his car.

It will be interesting to see the progress over the next week or so. I know that over the next few days they have other non stockcar related work to do, but even at the current pace it should only take a couple of weeks to have the chassis finished.

Because they were working so hard I felt compelled to do some more playing around with some spare Toyota heads. The one wreaked head I have was run through the power hacksaw a couple of times giving me a look into the port design.

While I completely admit I don't know much about port design etc so I am sure there will be people telling me I am doing it all wrong. But at least any extra power we get from my engine I will know that it was because of what I have learnt, or perhaps that is just some rubbish because I can't afford to buy or pay someone else to do the work?

But anyway if anyone is interested, the above cross section had the hacksaw run directly down the spark plug tube. You can see that there is a number of water jackets running very close to the ports. This makes grinding to make the ports larger a bit more stressful. You can see the inlet side has quite a smooth run into the cylinder compared to the short and sharp exit for the exhaust. So on the exhaust I am cutting out the valve stem completely, and also taking away the bottom edge of the port. This is increasing the volume inside the port and with making sure that everything is nice and smooth the gases should be able to flow out efficiently. The outlet holes have been matched to the extractors.
On the inlet side I will reach down the port and just cut a small amount from the base, this decreases the angle into the cylinder. But that's all for the inlet, no smoothing or polishing.

Hopefully I can get this done before the first practice at Waikaraka but with it taking about 5 hours per port and then a final volume check and clean up time it will be close. Especially when we still have to fit brand new camshafts, shim them up, then swap heads over. Hmmm perhaps I should be sick now and leave work early?

Scheming......MadPhil