Chapter 10 The Art of the Deal

  The race heads were at Precision Engine in Georgia and my crankshaft was ready to be magnafluxed, index ground and clearanced for the Honda rod journals.  The block was ready to have the decks leveled and surfaced.  It was clear I needed a road trip. 

  Another Studebaker Bonneville race car changed owners and moved from the left to the right coast.  David had introduced himself on the Studebaker forum after the purchase and a few of us convinced him it would be more fun to run Studebaker power in it.  He started a buying spree to begin collecting the bones of good cache of potential race parts.  Some of those parts were from legendary Ted Harbit, who hails from central Indiana.  I offered to run up to Ted's and ferry the parts to Georgia.

  Around that same time, my friend Jeff was considering having a few friends over for a weekend of Georgia style Studebaker fun.  A few phone calls later and it became a full fledged event.  Jeff was celebrating what we could only assume was his 100th birthday, because he wouldn't tell us the real number.  I was celebrating the one year survival of my accident.  The owner of the Racing Studebakers web site, Sonny,  Jeff, David, Matthew, Mike and Linda, who are the major partners in a well-known Studebaker shop, all descended on Eastern Georgia.  I came in a couple of days earlier to drop my crankshaft off at Precision Engine and discuss the project.

   On a personal note, backing up a couple of days, we had noticed my left shoulder was swelling and one of the insertion points looked infected.  Knowing I was headed on a week long road trip, I checked with the docs.  Yes, MSRA had infected the surgery sites.  A prescription for antibiotics and a promise to return the day I got home got me out the door and on my way.  But things didn't get better.  The shoulder just got larger and stiffer with accompanying increase in pain levels.  Not wishing to end up in a distant hospital, I sucked it up, ate pain and antibiotics and carried on.  Upon my return home, the doctor checked me into the hospital and went back in to the shoulder.  After scraping the reattachment points for the bicep and flushing 16 liters of rinse to clean everything out came a few more days' stay and IV's.  When they released me, it was with the commitment to complete a 6 week course of daily IV infusions and weekly blood tests.  Very limiting, but better than the alternative.  Back to the important stuff, the car.

  During the celebratory weekend David told us about his plans for the car and the time crunch to finish the first engine built to check out the chassis and safety systems for the April ECTA event.  One of the big time investments was the development of some good cylinders heads.  It didn't take long for me to explain to David about the plans I had for my heads.  Since they would take much less time than starting from scratch, I offered to loan them out.  David quite generously offered to pay the machine shop bill for the titanium valve conversion and the deal was done.  My heads will run in at least the April ECTA event known as the Ohio Mile.  If he needs them longer, I agreed for the loan to last through the race season.  A day or two later I was comfortable enough to offer the loan of my entire engine to David's cause.  We didn't close the details out, but there is a reasonably good chance that Rabid Snail Racing prototype engine number RS-R001 will run this year.  Very exciting and much more immediate gratification than waiting the 2 to 3 years it will take to build the rest of the car.

Chapter 8 It's a Grind

  Working on the block has been a parallel project with changes to the crankshaft.  The crankshaft started life as a forged steel Studebaker 259 unit.  It was stroked 5/8" to take the stroke from 3.625" to 4.250".  I had a lot of concerns about getting it to work for a Bonneville application centered around the close quarters and proximity of the camshaft.  More details on the camshaft are coming, but suffice it to say that the lobes on the camshaft were very close to the bearing journals.  The cam used by Granatelli was very small in comparison, as they had reduced the base circle to 3/4".  The roller cam I wanted to run and designed expressly for Bonneville use with a valve lift of 0.620".  I assumed the cam was reduced because of clearance issues with the stroker crank.

  Since the crankshaft was key to getting the displacement needed, I determined I needed to work on the crank, and if it wouldn't clear the giant roller cam, I'd design another with a reduced base circle.

  In balancing the crankshaft, extra weight was added to the end counterweights.  Otherwise, the crank was just like a standard 289 crank, just made longer in the rod journal placement.  The counterweights were the same shape, and rod throws carried the normal contour out to the rod pins.

  Oil control is a big thing for me, and I wanted to make this crankshaft enhance the oiling, not make it worse.  A phenomenon known as windage occurs when oil from the bearings and cylinders is hit by the crankshaft, dissapated into smaller droplets, and pulled around the rod throws and counterweights by the rotation of the crankshaft.  Smokey Yunick did some experiments with windows in the oil pan to actually see windage in a running engine.  He reported seeing virtually all the oil in the pan making a larger and larger cloud with the appearance of a taffy pulling machine.  This creates a parasitic drain from the impacts.  Also, as more oil is entrained, less is available for engine lubrication and cooling.  Yes, cooling.  More on that later.  Eventually, with high enough RPM's virtually all the oil is tied up in the windage cloud and, in extreme cases, causes the oil pump intake to be uncovered and system oil pressure and flow drops to zero.  Bad combination.

  So, what can be done?  Various engine builders have done experiments in reshaping the counterweights and rod throws with good effect.  Arguably, the best method shapes the leading edge of the counterweights as a bullnose or rounded profile.  This reduces the impact of the crank slamming into oil draining down to the pan and encourages the oil to run across the surface to an edge where it can be channeled safely back to the oil pump.  The trailing edge is reshaped in a boattail with a sharp edge, which sheds the oil in large drops to the main web or block wall, out of the way of the next oncoming rotation.

 The next step is a crankshaft scraper, a thin blade of Teflon that wipes the oil from the crank as it passes 90 degrees on the upward portion of rotation.  This, in conjunction with a well-designed oil pan, should go a long way to improving oil control.

  It takes a lot of grinding, shaping, and smoothing using several tools to reach in and get to the nooks and crannies.  The pictures show the roughing out of the shapes needed.  There is a lot of surfacing left to do.

  An added bonus is that the crankshaft is lightened during the knife-edging, greatly reducing bearing wear and crankshaft twist.  The smoothing of forging marks increases reliability as well.  There is another process yet to be done once the entire knife-edging procedure is done and the crankshaft is polished to a scratch-free condition. The oil ports that run through the crank need to be beveled, removing the sharp edges and tapering them out to increase the time the bearings are in a place in rotation where oiling can take place.

In all, it's a lot of work.  Some folks pay someone else the $1000 it costs to farm this work out.  And we haven't verified other changes needed for the clearance of this crankshaft.