Thursday, June 28, 2012

Manifolds,magneto and sparkplug leads

 This is where the model is up to now, the carburettor,air cleaner and dummy hot box are to be made.The rocker covers and water out manifold are also to be fabricated.
 The inlet manifold is now installed.Note the diamond shaped clamps

The right hand side of the engine.The fabricated casting on the side of the timing case is for the governor spring . On this model the governor will not work. The fan cowling is yet to be made

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Inlet and Exhaust Manifolds.

Originially Caterpillar cast the manifolds, something I was not prepared to do at this scale. Instead I fabricated the exhaust in two halves (inner and outer) to form the 'tube'. This shows machining the internal passages, from each of the cylinder heads, for the inner half (head side). The other side is a mirror image.
Here the outer profile is being machined. The manifold is being cut from mild steel. The cutter is a 6mm four flute solid carbide roughing cutter running about 5000 RPM and a feed rate of 200 mm/min.
This is the reverse side showing the ports being machined.
Here are the two halves ready for welding. Once welded the manifold is hand filed to profile. 
A similar process was applied to the inlet manifolds. In this case they were made from brass. I chose this because it is easier to machine since the inlet manifold is also more complex. Here is one manifold silver soldered and the other pair before. Much machining and hand shaping is still required before these are finished.
 Including filing the exhaust manifold has taken about six hours. Fitting to the heads took about the same again! Here you can see the partially completed inlet and exhaust manifolds mounted.
Note the diamond-shaped clamp plates holding the manifolds to the heads.

Pump, Governor, Fan, Distributor

This view shows the rotor of the water pump with tufnol vanes. The pump was tested in the lathe at different RPM and pumped at all speeds even when turned at slow speed by hand.The tufnol proved to be unsuitable in that it was hydroscopic and jammed in the slots. These have been replaced with delrin which is not hydroscopic..
The components of the pump.
The pump with a coupling on the governor shaft. This will enable the pump to be removed without removing the timing case. The magneto is actually a distributor driven at crankshaft RPM. It has a twin lobed cam operating points and a two to one reduction gearing to drive the rotor. The rotor shaft has two ball races.
This is the  govenor gear with the pivots for the fly weights. I have decided that it is unlikely to make this function in this scale so will just use the governor shaft to control the engine RPM manually.
The fan hub was made by machining four curved grooves in the hub. The toolpath was initially drawn in AutoCAD and a dividing head used to repeat the groove at 90 degrees. The curved blade mounts were machined from a piece of steel tube (turned to the correct diameter and thickness) and cut length-ways to size.
These were silver-soldered in to the slots and the sheet metal blades riveted on.
The fabricated casting on top of the timing case is the housing for the governor spring.

The crankcase covers removed showing the crank and connecting rods.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Pistons and rings

 The pistons have been machined from cast iron. The inside of the piston has been pocketed with a 4mm end mill.Note the fixture top left which is used to hold pistons for finishing the outside and ring grooves
 This image shows the pistons with ring grooves machined and gudgeon pin holes bored.The rings have also been machined with a slit made by a 0.2 mm saw. The ring in the foreground has been heated to dull red with a 4mm nut in the gap. Only two ring grooves have been cut both for compression ,no oil rings at first. These will be added later if found necessary.
Three pistons ready to be installed . The gudgeon pins are oil hardened silver steel. Teflon buttons on both ends of the pins prevent the pins from scoring the bore