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Early Ford V-8 Club of America Sacramento Regional Group #4

Regional Group

Fred's Page

Hello one and all,

Last month I said we would follow the oil path as it goes past our modification area, and gets to work doing it’s job of keeping a film of oil between the various moving metal parts of our beloved old flathead V-8. Remember that well-worn saying that “you can’t compress a liquid?”

Just as well that we can’t, because if that law didn’t exist, we would never have gotten past a horse and a sled. Early low rpm engines didn’t have pressurized oil. They relied on dippers off the crankshaft that would dip into the pan of oil in the pan, and then sling it all over inside the engine. It kept the moving parts and cylinder walls saturated with oil. Poor, but it worked if the engine wasn’t stressed too much. The old Briggs & Stratton on your push lawn mower still uses this system. Some engines with overhead valves had pumps that would direct a stream of oil on the rocker assembly up where the oil mist from the sump couldn’t reach. In the 1920’s Chevrolet had a system where by when you wanted to go for a ride in “old Betsy”, you had to undo a couple of wing nuts and lift the valve cover off and pour oil all over a mat assembly that set over the rocker arms. It would slowly leak through and lube them. That must have been a “pain in the kiester”; I’ll bet a poor memory was costly for those drivers

O.K., here we go. Picture yourself as a drop of oil. There are ten bejillion other oil drop buddies pushing you from behind & shoving you into your oil drop buddy in front. Why is this happening you might ask yourself? In the very bottom of our engine is a container we call the pan. In the pan is four quarts of oil in varying degrees of contamination. Ours of course is fresh & clear amber color, because we always change it on schedule. Don’t we? Hanging down into the pool of oil is a tin housing with a screen in it, and a metal tube going up to a cast iron housing that holds two intermeshing gears. One gear is just an idler gear mounted in the housing, and is a slave to the other gear driven by a vertical shaft that is driven by a gear on the back end of the cam shaft.

A V-8’er hops into his old Ford, hits the starter button, the engine rolls over turning the cam shaft, the vertical shaft starts turning, causing the intermeshing gears to turn in a sealed chamber. A vacuum is formed in the tube going down into the oil, nature abhors a vacuum and the oil is sucked up the tube and into the gears. On the exit side of the gears the oil wells up into the chamber that the vertical shaft is housed in. At this point a hole drilled between the rear main bearing boss and that chamber starts filling with oil. (Remember how in the previous article we couldn’t filter the rear main without a modification? This is why.) O.K., now our chamber is full. Up we go with our oil drop buddies to the area where we made our filter modification on the left rear of the block. Now we change directions. From the left rear we head for the center of the block at the back directly under the fuel pump location. Through the passageway we so carefully drilled down into on our modification.

Now here is where Ford made a very good modification on the 8BA engine. (‘49-’53 Ford & Mercury). Prior to ’49 oil came in behind the housing that holds a tube for guiding the fuel pump push rod. This tube is pressed down through this oil passage and has a very small hole in it to lube the push rod in this tube guide. Some of the oil works it’s way up between the bushing & push rod, while some goes down and provides lube to the centric surface on the cam that works the fuel pump push rod. The oil has to go around that tube guide and it was a natural sludge trap. Planned obsolescence? Would Henry do that? With the new block they brought the passageway in front of the tube and eliminated the trap. Must stop for now. Next month we will continue our trip. Trick question: Do we have oil pressure yet?

Keep it right side up.

 Fred