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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2013 12:50 pm
by Greg Bryan
Dave - regarding the packing material in the inner spaces, I'm not sure what the original material is - maybe a tar based sealer, but a good body supply shop should be able to recommend a modern equivalent that maybe wouldn't shrink and provide an ideal environment for corrosion creation!

Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2013 9:42 pm
by Dave Erickson
WRGREENE wrote:Dave, sounds like you have a plan... are you located here in the bay area? i am in the middle of rebuilding my 60 T5... took it down to metal, epoxy prim., now paint. love to see your operation. wayne -aptos
Wayne, I'm about 2 mi. from Laguna Seca race track. I've got lots of projects, so there is generally something going on. Visitors always welcome. I'd like to see your 60 T5.

Dave

Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Fri Dec 20, 2013 1:55 am
by Bob Forman
Wayne, just for kicks what color was your T5 originally?

Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 11:45 pm
by Dave Erickson
Now that spring is here and its getting closer to summer, I've started to think about what to do first on the body. I've got the engine out and parts are going out to get balanced next week.

Probably next on my list is overhauling the transmission. However, once the transmission is out, the car goes up on jacks, so I need to build a rolling chassis. If I start removing body components, like windows, the car needs to go into a garage, so I need to build a garage. It would be nice if the garage had a lift. Man this gets complicated fast, doesn't it?

I spoke to a body man today, who may do the bare metal restoration. He suggested that I have the exterior media blasted now, and bring the car to him so that he can complete the body work, then epoxy primer the exterior. It is not the sequence I had been thinking of originally, but it makes sense to get the exterior body work done now, along with the engine, transmission, underside of the car, engine compartment, etc. None of which requires the car to be in a garage. So probably that is what I will do, then work on getting the building permit in parallel and have the garage ready when the interior work/windows/doors are being worked on.

Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 12:11 am
by Dave Erickson
It has been a long time since I posted anything in this thread, but work has been going on and progress has been slow but steady. I'll try and update what has been done since I last posted, hope I get it in the right sequence. The easy part is the body and interior: I haven't made any progress, all work has been on the engine.

The bottom end rebalancing needed to wait until I machined & lightened the flywheel. The Spec Book has a nice diagram of a lightened S-90 flywheel which I used as the model. Here are some photos of that:
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 12:24 am
by Dave Erickson
The flywheel also had a groove on the oil seal surface that needed fixing. I didn't like the idea of using a speedi-sleeve, so I made my own out of 4140 chrome molly steel, which required machining the oil seal surface undersize, cooling the flywheel in the freezer, hardening the 4140 ring, tempering it and installing it on the flywheel with a shrink fit, then turning it down to original size. Here are some photos of that:
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What the photos don't show is the number of iterations it took to get it right... The final solution involved making a holder for the ring, which was heated along with the ring and held its heat while the ring was being installed. You can see the holder in the photos. Here is the final product after turning down the sleeve:
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 12:37 am
by Dave Erickson
The flywheel wasn't quite done, it needed to have the clutch surface machined, and I didn't want to do that on the lathe. I have a Deckel CNC mill, from 1984, but the problem was I have not used it much, so this was one of the first projects I completed on it. It required learning to program in G-code, or rather, Deckel's version of G-Code called Dialog. Here are some photos of that.
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The photo below shows all the tools I tried trying to find a cutter that would do a good job and which would handle the overhang between the top and clutch surfaces. I'm still looking for the perfect tool, but the one I used worked ok.
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 12:49 am
by Dave Erickson
After the flywheel was done, I spent some time trying to find the crank/pulley/flywheel combination that had the least runout between the crank journals, the front and rear seal surfaces and the pulley v-belt. There were several thousandths of variation between the different combinations I tried. I set it up on the lathe and checked it as shown below.
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The photo below shows a VW pulley nut that I modified with a center drill, so that I could mount the crank on the lathe.
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 1:18 am
by Dave Erickson
Finally, the bottom end was ready. I'm using the 10-10 SC crank and rods that came in my engine, a Gene Berg pulley, along with the lightened flywheel shown in previous posts, and they were sent to Gene Berg's for balancing and to rebuild the rods. Elgin cams supplied a 7008 cam and a set of lifters. The case checked out o.k., so at long last the bottom end went together.

The next thing to address was heads. 40 years ago I used to rebuild heads in a shop in Oakland, and I still had a Hall EJ valve seat grinder (well known to flat head afficianados), but it was in need of an overhaul. It was also kind of a pita to use the grinder, since you had to change stones so much to do a 3-angle grind on two sizes of seats. So I searched ebay for more of the same, found three more EJ grinders, and located Hall Toledo, the company that made it, which was much harder than you might think. They sold me new eccentric spindles and a 10mm pilot and some alox stones, and I rebuilt the machines. Since 356 heads have exhaust valves that are angled at 30 degrees, I needed a tilting stand to hold the heads so that the valve pilot would be vertical when the exhaust seats were being ground, so I made a head stand. Here are some photos of all of that:
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The Hall Toledo EJ grinder has two spindles, an inner spindle which rotates at a slow speed with an eccentric center that fits on the pilot, and an outer spindle which rotates at high speed and carries the stone. As a result, the stone only contacts one spot on the seat at any time, and it does a full rotation about every 3-4 seconds. You get beautiful results if the stones are kept dressed and the pilots and eccentric spindle are not worn.
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 1:51 am
by Dave Erickson
Over the years I had picked up an assortment of 356 heads, several of which needed welding. One of the heads for my SC engine also needed welding, it had a bad case of ring rash. It was a running engine that I put 20k miles on before this whole project started, so finding the ring rash was a bit of a surprise. The mechanic who put it together did a lot of other things that make me wonder how the engine lasted even 1k miles. Anyway, I had several heads with creacked valve guide bosses, one had a crack at the spark plug, several had ring rash, one had a broken fin, one needed to have an exhaust stud hole welded for remachining, etc. A good friend of mine recommended that I take the heads to Dennis Etcheverrey, at Norman Racing Group in Berkeley. Dennis used to do the heads for Lukes and Shoreman. So I was headed north one Friday for a visit to Sonoma, and dropped the heads off in Berkeley. What an incredible shop, with an engine dyno, racing Alfas everywhere, parts to the rafters. I picked up the heads a couple of weeks later, here are some photos:
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 2:11 am
by Dave Erickson
Now that I had a bunch of welded heads, the first item of business was to get the head machined for the SC engine. That is it above, in the second photo. That required a way to hold it on the mill table, first, then a program to restore the combustion chamber. I decided to make a torque plate that would bolt to the head using the head bolt holes, and which would use the dowel pin holes that the factory made in each head for location. Here are some photos that show the torque plate and boring it in place:
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Then I wrote a CNC program to do the 30 degree combustion chambers:
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And another to bore the welded valve guide bosses:
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 2:44 am
by Dave Erickson
Now that the heads were almost done, before assembling the valves, the pistons and cylinders were installed without base gaskets, and the piston/head squish was measured. Of course nothing is quite that simple. The #1 & 2 A&A cylinders would not seat in the bores, the fins hit the case acorn nuts. So the cylinders came back off, the offending fins were ground down and then the cylinders were reinstalled, this time with no problem. The photo shows one of the 4 acorn nuts that caused problems.
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The squish was too large (.030" without base gasket), so next step was to revise the 30 degree program into a full service head program. Now the program cuts the 30 degree, flycuts the top and cuts a groove for the cylinder to sit in. It took a bit of trial and error, since there are two tool changes needed, but the final result was perfect. The program is written so that it cuts the 30 degree, flycuts the top to match, and cuts the groove for the cylinder, and when the head is installed using a .010 base gasket below the cylinder, the squish is .030- .032", both in the 30 degree region and in the small flat at the bottom. I did both heads (removing .010" since the chamber volumes were around 65cc), and both came out the same :)
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.030" Squish:
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 3:13 am
by Dave Erickson
The only thing I left out was installing the valve guides into the heads. I still have a 1960's EMPI valve guide puller that came with parts to pull 36HP VW, 40HP VW and 356 guides. It made short work of the pulling, then the heads were heated in the Barbeque to 400 deg. and new guides were installed using some anti-seize and a 6 pound hammer. The EMPI kit included taps, studs to fit the tapped holes, the puller and the mandrels to drive the guides in. Here are some photos:
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The round disks are to set the valve guide height, one for intake the other exhaust.
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Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2015 11:32 pm
by Greg Bryan
Terrific pictures of some very fancy machining. You have a little more going than the average owner when it come to tools ...

Re: 64 SC Beater

Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2015 1:25 am
by Dave Erickson
Greg, thanks for the nice comment. I look at tools as extensions of my hands and brain. I'm never happy until I find an acceptable solution to any problem. When you consider the value of our cars, my investment in tools is very small.

-Dave