[TPR] Poly Dist Gear???

Mon Jun 20 12:40:17 PDT 2011

See comments on Poly gear from Russ.

Mad Dawg Antenucci 
Team Pantera Racing 
The 1st & still the only vintage race team in open road racing 
www.teampanteraracing.com

________________________________
From: russell fulp <musclebyrussell at hotmail.com>
To: teampantera at yahoo.com
Sent: Mon, June 20, 2011 11:46:29 AM
Subject: RE: Poly Dist Gear???

Hi Dennis:
Everything I have done with a poly gear is encouraging. They work well with most 
cam cores. The only drawback is to tell your buddy to make sure it is for a 
Cleveland as most out there are of the Windsor variety.

Russ 
B.L. Machine & Russ Fulp Racing Engines
1100 E. Orangefair Lane
Unit E
Anaheim, CA 92801
714-870-8570

________________________________
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:08:24 -0700
From: teampantera at yahoo.com
Subject: Poly Dist Gear???
To: adin at frontier.net; tpr at teampanteraracing.com
CC: musclebyrussell at hotmail.com

Russ,
If you read Mike loooong ;-)> report below you'll see his steel gear ate his cam 
....I know that will come as no surprise to you and yea I remember what you said 
about NOT running a steel gear but my question is what if anything have you 
heard about the poly gear?

Thanks

Mad Dawg Antenucci 
Team Pantera Racing 
The 1st & still the only vintage race team in open road racing 
www.teampanteraracing.com

________________________________
From: David in Durango <adin at frontier.net>
To: TPR List <tpr at teampanteraracing.com>
Sent: Mon, June 20, 2011 7:46:23 AM
Subject: [TPR] ? - for the dawg

From: MikeLDrew at aol.com
Subject:  [DeTomaso] Pantera fall down go boom :<(
To: detomaso at realbig.com
Message-ID:  <844d.67fcf0e2.3b2fdbb8 at aol.com>
Content-Type:  text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Hi guys,

Those of you who were at  the POCA Fun Rally last weekend perhaps noted that 
every single Pantera that  drove to the event, safely drove home at the end 
of the weekend, save  one.

Unfortunately, that one was mine. :<(

I've been loving my  new 408 stroker Cleveland, which has utterly 
transformed the  car.   I had a wonderful drive up and over the Sierras, 
tempering my 

enthusiam a bit in deference to the handful of Panteras that were running 
with me (also a reflection of a recent run-in with Johnny Law that I managed  to 

escape from for about $300, but my next ticket will result in points on  my 
license).

At the track event, the first thing I did was to bleed  my brakes, as my 
pedal was soft and squishy.   I got a bit of  trapped air out, which improved 
things, but they are far from where they  should be.   I think this is a result 
of some uncharacteristically  horrible engineering that took place when my 
friend who restored the car  years ago, fabricated new brake lines.   For 
reasons unknown, he  deliberately placed a big loop in each line, which is 
seemingly guaranteed  to trap air and result in a spongy pedal--exactly what I 
have 

had all these  years.   I think I am going to trash all the hard lines and 
start  over.

But anyway.   Once the brakes felt up to the task  (although far from 
perfect), I started driving on the track Thursday  afternoon, and the car was 
much, 

MUCH faster than two years ago.    I'm still very handicapped by my 
super-crusty tires (my intent was to burn  them off at this event and then 
replace 

them when I got home) which kept  cornering velocities laughably low, but also 
provided lots of opportunity  for sideways antics at relatively low speeds.

Two years ago, I would  enter the front straight in 3rd gear, upshift to 4th 
at about 5500 rpm, and  just be nudging 110 mph when I felt it was prudent 
to lift for the first of  the three S-curves leading to the hairpin at the 
end.   This year,  with all the extra power, I was topping 130 mph.

Whee!

The thing  is, I would reach the 6000 rpm rev limiter well before the 
turn-in  point.   My choices were to either upshft to 5th gear for just a  
moment, 

then back down to 4th, or to just coast for a bit.   Since  nobody was paying 
me for this and there were no trophies on the line, I  elected to do the 
latter.   My car has an MSD system with the  'soft touch' rev limiter; the bumpf 

that comes with the MSD box indicates  that there is no harm in just riding 
the limiter, as it randomly cuts spark  from various cylinders to keep the RPM 
at a predetermined maximum  point.   So often times, I'd keep my foot to the 
mat and just ride  the limiter for 100-200 feet or more, then lift off and 
turn in.

At  the end of the first day, the car was running just a little bit  weird.   
I was having trouble with the idle speed, and in fact the  next morning I 
had to turn the idle up quite a bit.

I then went out  for a second day of more fun and games on the track, and 
the motor seemed  'off' ever so slightly.   I was driving with a raised 
eyebrow, and  then I came down the front straight and noted that it was well 
down on 

power; with my foot to the mat it was 20 mph off at the turn-in  point.   I 
determined that I would pull in at the end of the lap  for a look-see.

Didn't happen. :<(

When I got to the steep  uphill, the engine started stuttering, and I had my 
foot on the floor trying  to keep it going to at least the top so I could 
pull off.   But  just before the top, it went POP and quit, leaving me stranded 
on the side  of the track, and causing a yellow flag in that area for the 
rest of the  session.

I figured the distributor shear pin had sheared.    There were no other 
indications, I had fuel, no clanking noises from the  engine, so it was pretty 
apparently an ignition issue.

They threw the  checkered flag and I coasted down the hill to a safe spot 
and abandoned the  car until lunchtime.   Rich Boschert was kind enough to tow 
it in  to the paddock on his flatbed trailer, and then any number of 
volunteers  stepped in to help sort it out.

Steve Liebenow offered up some shear  pins, and I figured I'd be rolling a 
short time later.   But then  the distributor cam out.   Bad news.   
Distributor gear  totally mangled. :<(

Then we started thinking about getting a  replacement gear from Summit, just 
down the road.   But Chuck  Melton took a look-see down into the engine, and 
what he saw was far from  good--the drive gear on the end of the camshaft 
was destroyed as well. 

Trailer time. :<(

Fortunately for me, Rich has to drive within  a mile of my house on his way 
home.   He was kind enough to  trailer my Pantera back to the hotel, and then 
back home Sunday afternoon,  and allow me to follow behind at the wheel of 
his lovely green Pantera, so  all things considered, this went about as well 
as could be expected under  the circumstances.   Sunday morning we had an 
uneventful drive  home, and since we had two other truck/trailers and another 
Pantera in  convoy with us, it was easy to unload the car and push it into the 
garage,  where it now sits, sad and forlorn.

Here's some photos of the gear on the  distributor.   All of the teeth were 
filed razor-sharp, creating  much slop in the timing (the cause for my idle 
problems no  doubt).   But then, a number of teeth simply sheared off 
completely, which caused the car to stop dead.

http://www.poca.com/index.php/gallery/?g2_itemId=32311

When  you click on each photo, it opens up in a normal-sized view, but you 
can  select the max size, which shows really excellent detail; you can clearly 
see where the teeth were literally sheared off.

I've since been in  touch with Dan Jones, John Christian and others, 
attempting to determine the  cause of the problem.   I was using a steel 
hydraulic 

roller cam  core, and a Crane steel gear advertised to work well with such 
things.   However, I did have a couple of things going against  me:

1)   Excessive oil pressure.   I purposely  re-used the oil pump from my 
previous engine because it delivered 50 psi  there (verified with a mechanical 
gauge) and I did not want high volume or  high pressure, both of which are bad 
for Clevelands.   However, my  new engine (perhaps due to tighter 
tolorences) sees the oil pressure gauge  pegged.   Probably 80 psi at operating 
RPM.   

The  literature that comes with the cam gear says that it will live with a 
steel  cam, EXCEPT if excessive pressure or volume oil pump is used.   They  say 

that rapid wear will then result--which I got.   So, since oil  pumps are 
cheap, I'm going to start over from scratch with a new Melling  M-84A.   (The 
Summit website is incorrect and doesn't list this  for the 351C, only showing 
it as applicable for the 351M and  400M.   But in fact this is a 351C pump, 
as shown on Melling's  website.)

2)   Driving on the rev limiter.   Although  MSD says this about their 
system:

There are two ways to limit your  rpms. The rough way simply cuts off 
ignition spark, which can cause  backfiring, extreme engine roughness, and 
possible 

engine damage. The gentle  way is with these MSD Soft Touch rev controllers. 
They use sophisticated  computer circuitry to drop spark one cylinder at a 
time, until your engine  is at or below its maximum rpm. Those cylinders are 
then fired on the next  cycle, to prevent them from loading up with fuel. The 
result is smooth rev  limiting action without all the rough stuff.

The truth appears to be that  even this 'gentle' process is rather hard on 
the system, perhaps aggravated  by the fact that I'm running a gear drive 
instead of a timing  chain.   It didn't occur to me that running on the limiter 
for a  few seconds at a time would stress the system, but in hindsight (and 
after  consultations with Dan, who hadn't heard of such a thing but 
subsequently  did research and found other stories of people suffering similar 
damage to 

mine after running on the rev limiter, regardless of whether they were 
using a timing chain, gears or whatever) I'm sure that my driving habits on  the 

track created this problem.   I'm going to address this by  fitting a higher 
RPM pill in the MSD (the motor is built to go to 6500 all  day long but I was 
being 'conservative' and had a 6000 rpm chip in the MSD)  and by avoiding 
touching the rev limit, if at all possible, and certainly  avoid deliberately 
doing so and just keeping it on the limit.

I think  the gears were perfect when I drove over the hill to Reno, and I 
just busted  them all to hell at the track.

Tomorrow I'm ordering a new cam, same as  the old one (did I mention how 
wonderfully this engine ran?).    Dan also turned me on to a new distributor 
gear.   Tri-Tec  Motorsports now makes a carbon-reinforced polymer distributor 
gear for the  351C/460.

http://www.tritecmotorsports.com/Carbon_Ultra-Poly
-Ford_Distributor_Gears.htm

I  am going to phone them and see what they have to say.   I don't want  to 
run a bronze gear, because of all the maintenance hassles, but a steel  gear 
might not be as good a bet as one of these glorified plastic  ones.   At this 
point I think I've got nothing to lose by  trying.

The motor will come out of the car early next month (no time  before then), 
by which point I should have my new components in  hand.   With the help of 
friends more knowledgable than I am  (which is most of them, when it comes to 
engines anyway!), I hope to have it  repaired and ready to go in a day, then 
installed another day  later.

I will have to pull the oil pan and clean all the metal shavings  out (and 
also from the front of the engine), and the oil pump pickup is  likely filled 
with debris.   It goes without saying that the oil  filter will be changed as 
well.   While we'll take a look at the  bearings while we're in the 
neighborhood, I'm fairly confident that the rest  of the motor was unaffected by 
this 

little glitch.

We'll  see!?

Once it's up and running, I'll pull the distributor every few  thousand 
miles to inspect for any signs of untoward wear or  failure.   I'm hoping this 
is 

a one-time situation to be quickly  and relatively painlessly resolved.

Fingers  crossed!

Mike

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