Ownership Verified: The red baron! My Donkervoort S8AT, hubby of topless swede and connoisseur of boost!

Then you'll have to do the full roadtrip :)

Too long away from home and a bit too much time off work (not that I have a set amount of vacation days). Plus flights already booked for just the short trip. :)
 
Another batch of shitty phone camera pics coming up. The dismantling phase of the engine is now almost complete. Started off by removing the cams and lifters from the cylinder head:

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Again, everything appears fine, apart from one of the camshaft bearing caps having worn somewhat:

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The wear is not insignificant, but the camshaft will be well supported enough despite the grooves, and it's not located directly over the oil feed, so it will work. I will ask the machine shop how much they would charge for machining and line-honing the cap to a perfect condition, but in it's current state it would still work fine (the camshafts are very well supported by their front ball bearings, so the cam caps don't need to be absolutely immaculate. All the other ones had very minimal wear.

The cam lifters themselves also have minimal wear. New ones are not that expensive, but as they can be dismantled and cleaned, I don't think buying new ones is justified.Standard camshafts will be retained as they are also in good condition (and more agressive cams would hurt drivability).


The bottom end was dismantled too, (and yes, that is the best picture I have :p):

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Crank gear was rusted on pretty badly, was a complete bitch to remove, but I managed it without damaging anything.

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The oil pump on the Cosworth engines is identical to the standard Ford ohc oil pump apart from the piston oil squirting jets attached to the pump cover and pickup tube. The purpose of the oil jets it not so much to lubricate the bore, but to cool the pistons. This will be dismantled and inspected later:

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The crankshaft in these engines is Cosworth specific, and shares only the bearing race dimensions and stroke with the standard ohc pinto crank. The flywheel is different as well, and the whole thing is significantly stronger. A used one of these in ok condition is over 500? so to keep costs as low as possible it was important that it would be in good condition.


Opening up the connecting rod bearing caps revealed this:

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All of the bearings are heavily scored and #4 is absolutely destroyed. However the bearing races in the crank seemed to be in good condition despite this, and all the journals are in STD size. At most it will need a 0,25mm regrind on some of the big end journals, but it might be usable with just a polish. All of the main bearings were STD size as well, and in pretty much flawless condition. This is all great news :)


As was visible in the first engine related post, the block was very worn. This didn't worry me too much as I knew I could source another one quite easily and without much cost. I was more worried about the pistons having been overly worn, this doesn't appear to be the case:

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The piston skirts are scored, but the evenness of the score marks and the fact that there isn't a localized spot with more wear leads me to believe that they have just picked up grit from previous honing, or possibly been assembled with too much clearance. They appear to be very much usable as long as a good block can be sourced :)

The conrods seem perfect as well, I will have the machine shop measure them up due to the destroyed bearings, but as there is no evidence of them having heat damage, I'm pretty sure they are all still withing tolerances. :)

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All that was left was the bare block which most likely would not be used in this engine:

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To finish off the day I cleaned up and went through the ancillaries, etc. that came with the engine. Things to note:

? Crankshaft position sensor is possibly broken
? Oil pressure sender is broken
? Turbo oil hoses missing
? Ignition coil missing
? Wiring loom is a bit of a mess
? All the fuel hoses and vacuum hoses will need replacing
? All the cam cover and intake plenum bolts are missing
? Turbo is completely shot (though this was already known)
? It came with a new distributor cap! :p


Next up I will remove the valves from the cylinder head and start the modifications. :cool:


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It's now confirmed that we have a reasonably good base for the engine, and there really can't be significant unpleasant surprises any more :)
 
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Took the valves out of the head to inspect the seats and valve guides and so I could give the cylinder head ports a bit of a touch up.

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The valves themselves are in good condition, just very dirty. The valve spring collets were held on *very* tightly, which indicates that the valves may never have been removed before. Inlet valve guides are in acceptable condition, exhaust guides need to be changed or fitted with liners to tighten them up. :)


Now, the cylinder heads I usually work on are old 8 valve cast iron lumps from the 60's and 70's. Most of those have such horrible port designs that if you want to get any sort of flow out of them you have to spend hours upon hours carefully grinding away massive amounts of material in specific places. This gets very time consuming as you need to keep measuring constantly to make sure all the ports are uniform. Such is not the case with more modern 16v heads. When the Cosworth head was designed, some thought was actually put into how well the air flows into the combustion chamber. As such, the main thing to focus on in a (relatively) mild porting job as the one this cylinder head will receive, are the defects caused by mass producing the heads. This means that the main area to concentrate on is near the valve seats, as the factory cutter they used to machine them has left ridges that hurt air flow:

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Areas of such coarse finish are unacceptable in a high performance engine, as they are located right where the airflow into the cylinders is most restricted ?near the valve seat. Preliminary material removal was done with a die grinder:

On the valve pocket area:

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And in the short turn of the port (left side unmodified):


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The aim with these places is the promote the turning of the airflow so that it flows as evenly as possible around the entire circumference of the valve. The original short turn on these cylinder heads is relatively sharp, so the air doesn't "want" to turn around and utilize the frontal area of the valve, instead it "skips" across the valve and flows near the back of the valve seat. Increasing the size of the valve pocket area effectively makes the outside turn of the port have a larger radius, which again allows the air to flow around the valve more effectively. The goal for this engine is not to increase the port size unduly, as we want to retain low down torque. Due to this the rest of the port will only see removal of casting flash and a slight raise of the port roof to match up with the increased size of the valve pocket.

Bit of smoothing of the coarse areas:

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..And the inlet side is looking a lot shinier than before. There is still quite a bit of work to do on that side before attacking the exhaust ports.

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Zylinderkopf ready for the machine shop :)

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Don't know if i mentioned this? But i've been in contact with Donkervoort regarding reinstallation of pedals. it looks like the hand control conversion was more invasive than i thought.

Here's my setup:
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Here's the original setup:
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The brakepedal is a straight swap, but the clutch goes behind it. One possibility is to attach a pedal to the pivoting point to the levt of the brake pedal. The accelerator seems impossible with the current clutch location. Any ideas?

And they quoted me this:
Throttle: ?222.12
Brake: ?188.41
Clutch: ?115.08.
That's outrageous for these pieces of metal:
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Does anyone maybe recognise where they're from? I don't think they're made in-house.
 
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I don't recognize them (although they look a lot like Caterham's pedals), I think they are made to measure for the Donk. I also don't think they'll fit your system as is, without removing the hand controls. At least needs some modifications. One thing is for sure, they are not worth that much :D If you want to have a starting point to modify, get Caterham's pedals for about 30gbp/piece and have someone modify those.
 
Out of curiosity (and because someone (Posmo) asked) i looked up the new-price for the S8AT. Turns out they started at ?47.500 in 1992, which is about ?69.500 in todays money. So it's only depreciated about 50% in 23 years which isn't bad at all.
 
Due to time constraints there has been a bit of a change of plan regarding the engine. Instead of building up an entire engine and getting it to Norway, only the cylinder head, ancillaries, ECU, wiring loom and other associated parts will be prepared for the Donk for now, and (most likely) shipped to Norway for installation before the road trip. This makes everything a lot simpler, quicker and cheaper, as some measurements we took 99% confirm that the Donkervoort already has a Cosworth bottom end.

Preparations are quite nicely along, and the parts should be finished during next week. :) Haven't been taking too many pictures unfortunately, but here is one of one of the best looking cam covers of the 1980's :cool: A bit of red paint and some brushing of the bare aluminium and it came up a treat:

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And the "rat's nest" I took 5 hours to prepare today:

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Overall the loom was quite a bit better than ones usually ripped out of cars. There were only a few cut & soldered wires, and only 5 or so mystery wires I had to remove. All of the connector pins were checked, the connectors labeled, and the old tape replaced where necessary. This is now a very simple thing to install, just plug in all the connectors and run:


?1 wire to the ignition
?1 wire to +12v battery
?1 Wire to the fuel pump
?1 grounding point
?Tachometer input
?2 wires to the ignition coil terminals (might add connectors for these though)

Some useless wires were also "hidden" into the loom by taping them up, This included some dash sensor wires (oil pressure light, water temperature sensor, etc. as Adrian presumably has separate gauges+wiring for those). I also taped up the original boost control valve wires, as you do :p


Big news coming up when the cylinder head comes back from ze shop :)
 
That cam cover looks AWESOME.
 
A nice cam cover, COS the engine is WORTH it.
 
:lol:
 
how do you brush the bare aluminium without touching the inlays at all?
 
Completed parts are piling up.. :)

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Picked up this puppy today! Custom GT2871R with a .50 A/R housing. Perfect for instant response and the powerlevel we're looking for :D

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2871? Right, have a safe flight.
Finnish turbo Donk has problems with gearbox, cant handle the torqu, and there isn't anything that takes power and also fits.

edit: but there is Lotus 7 with +400whp, so there is a way...
 
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2871? Right, have a safe flight.
Finnish turbo Donk has problems with gearbox, cant handle the torqu, and there isn't anything that takes power and also fits.

edit: but there is Lotus 7 with +400whp, so there is a way...
Always a way! :D Do you have any info on the specification of the finnish Donkervoort? Is he using a Type9? T5? Strengthetened Type 9? Which engine? How much boost? etc.

And a BorgWarner T5 and Tremec T56 both should fit. There's also a dogbox in Type 9 casing someone made that can handle up to about 350hp.
 
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