[TPR] Fw: Poly Dist Gear???
John Bentley
gndplne at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 21 09:23:03 PDT 2011
In one of my previous engines I had a Hall HP6 solid roller cam and used a bronze gear. It did wear a bit and I replaced in once in the 4 years I ran that engine. I think its all about the quality of the cam gear. The aftermarket cams just don't have the same quality of gear teeth cut as the factory ones. Its a difficult gear to cut properly. I think if the gear is cut properly in the cam core and the mesh is correct, a bronze gear will last a long time. If the gear tooth surface doesn't look really smooth, it will slowly file down the distributor gear tooth surface.
In my experience, its not so simple as just replacing the distributor gear. This gear should be mounted on the distributor shaft by someone with the proper tools and experience and the distance measured. You should coat the gear with a wear indicator and then run the engine for a while and remove the distributor to make sure the gears mesh at the proper height and the wear patterns are normal. Make sure you check the gear height on the distributor shaft. Should be 4.000 inches. If it isn't, you have to set the proper height and drill a new roll pin hole that is 90 degrees off and higher on the shaft.
JB
--- On Tue, 6/21/11, Mad Dog Antenucci <teampantera at yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Mad Dog Antenucci <teampantera at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [TPR] Fw: Poly Dist Gear???
To: "Kirby Schrader" <kirby.schrader at gmail.com>, "Charles Engles" <cengles at cox.net>
Cc: tpr at teampanteraracing.com, "David in Durango" <adin at frontier.net>
Date: Tuesday, June 21, 2011, 8:32 AM
You make a lot of sense Kirby ....I would add something Doc mentioned and that is 'attention to detail'. My original stroker rebuilt was 4 years ago and then 2 years ago when we added Mike Trusty's efi, Russ did a general engine over haul....at that time I asked about the steel gear replacement and Russ recommended we NOT add it to a Cleveland since he didn't have the experience running a steel gear on a Cleveland.
And for all those coulda-shoulda-woulda reasons I have continued to use a bronze gear in my Pantera with the Cleveland stroker. Which also has the hyd roller and after allot of road miles and WOT open road races it still looks fine and mine will stay in the Cleveland as well.....psi is 70 hot.
You didn't mention if the
GT40 is running a Windsor...I assume it is.
Mad Dawg Antenucci
Team Pantera Racing The 1st & still the only vintage race team in open road racing
www.teampanteraracing.com
From: Kirby Schrader <kirby.schrader at gmail.com>
To: Charles Engles <cengles at cox.net>
Cc: Mad Dog
Antenucci <teampantera at yahoo.com>; tpr at teampanteraracing.com; David in Durango <adin at frontier.net>
Sent: Tue, June 21, 2011 6:44:22 AM
Subject: Re: [TPR] Fw: Poly Dist Gear???
Well, I'm hearing all the assumptions, theories, personal experiences, etc. etc., but I'm leaning towards the material side of things.
i.e., although they say they are compatible, they might not be?
I would like to point out that I ran 90psi oil pressure hot in my 351C for 15 years without a problem. Startup cold would peg the 100psi gauge for a good five minutes. Never had any distributor gear problems. Not a single one.
I did not have a roller cam though... It was a flat tappet solid lifter cam ... with triple valve springs. 7000rpm was my shift point of choice.
So I personally rule out the 'too much oil pressure' theory.
Fast forward to the most recent engine in the Pantera.
The steel gear on the hydraulic roller that was in the Pantera looks fine and it will stay in the motor.
The steel gear on the solid roller in the GT40 still looks fine, so it will stay.
I will keep checking them both until I'm confident.
Although I keep hearing about 'compatible' and 'it should work'... This stuff is happening too much and for too long now.
I'm going with a bronze gear in the new Cleveland going into the
Pantera and live with the maintenance issue until I'm confident.
The material they make the roller cams out of is obviously the main problem and getting a distributor gear to mate with it and live is the issue.
Of course, as we all know, the BEST solution is a dry sump motor. No need for a distributor gear!
I rarely hit the rev limiter. The one in the Pantera is so dramatic, it takes your breath away. i.e., the ECU shuts off the fuel.
Yes, I know... it's an ancient Haltech F9a, but it works and I don't care what y'all think.
I can tell you that it is anything but 'soft'. It's more like a launch through the windshield.
The GT40 uses an Electromotive 'soft' setup. It uses fuel and spark. Much for touchy feely.
OK, that's me done ranting for the morning. Man.... that soap box seemed to have grown!
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 17:25, Charles Engles <cengles at cox.net> wrote:
Dear Dennis and Russ,
I am such a dope. I hear that the non standard oil pump, i.e. high volume and/or high pressure pumps, puts extra stress on the gear interface. I guess that I am not able to appreciate that it would be *that* much greater. I do however yield to experience.
I can see that an external pump should solve that problem. I think that would actually be a dry sump system?
For the rest of us thinking about the choppy waters of roller cam conversions, it would seem to me that the answer is prevention with gear compatibility, gear fitment (both gear to gear and gear to block), attention to normal oiling passages ; attention to the special oiling hole at the end of the left lifter galley; bushed lifter bores, a good normal volume and pressure oil pump and attention to detail.
Warmest regards, Chuck Engles: Rookie Engine Builder
PS: just now the newest issue of Circle Track has an article “The New School Cleveland”. No discussion of roller cams, but an interesting Cleveland engine building article for circle track.
From: tpr-bounces at teampanteraracing.com [mailto:tpr-bounces at teampanteraracing.com] On Behalf Of Mad Dog Antenucci
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2011 3:28 PM
To: tpr at teampanteraracing.com
Subject: [TPR] Fw: Poly Dist Gear???
FYI....responses from Russ to the Pope
Mad Dawg Antenucci
Team Pantera Racing The 1st & still the only vintage race team in open road racing
www.teampanteraracing.com
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: russell fulp <musclebyrussell at hotmail.com>
To: adin at frontier.net
Cc: Dennis Antenucci <teampantera at yahoo.com>
Sent: Mon, June 20, 2011 1:05:12 PM
Subject: RE: Poly Dist Gear???Answers below in color.
Russ
B.L. Machine & Russ Fulp Racing Engines
1100 E. Orangefair Lane
Unit E
Anaheim, CA 92801
714-870-8570
From: adin at frontier.net
To: teampantera at yahoo.com; tpr at teampanteraracing.com
CC: musclebyrussell at hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Poly Dist Gear???
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:02:03 -0600It would seem the cam gear ate the dizzy gear (sharp teeth on the dizzy gear) but I wouldn't mind knowing the sequence of events. Well you are partially correct. With the added pressure from the oil pump it try's to hold the dist. shaft in place and the cam says no way and it turns, machining the gear on both pieces in the process. You see with any friction surface you have to have the hardest surface on the stationary end or the cam. the steel gear by itself is softer than the cam gear but with added back-pressure from the oil pump ,it becomes about the same and that is why it ate up both surfaces. If you had an external
oil pump you could run them together all day.
In addition it would be good to know:Was the dizzy gear specified incorrectly? Everything was probably O.K. to start with but the oil pressure was your culprit.
Supplied incorrectly?The little oil squirter trick: why didn't Ford to that?They did not plan on them turning any kind of RPM that it would necessitate added lubrication. Why do we have to (guess I know the answer to this one)?
do we know any history of these poly gears? too new? The Poly gear is softer and will mate with any cam core. Just make sure that you get a gear for a Cleveland or a big block as most of the gears out there are smaller O.D. and of the Windsor variety.
Curious.
----- Original Message ----- From: Mad Dog Antenucci
To: David in Durango ; TPR List
Cc: russell fulp
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2011 10:08 AMSubject: Poly Dist Gear???
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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