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

Hello one and all,

 I would be interested to know how many of you that read last month’s article, had to prove to yourself with a calculator, if a four cycle engine really did fire 50 times a second at 6000 rpm. I had to when I first heard it. For another trip into the world of micro-second technology, consider that at the idle rpm of say 800 rpm you pull the wire connector off your V-8’s spark plug, & hold it close enough to jump the gap to the plug terminal. You can see the individual spark pulse, but just barely. Now do the same thing, but run it at 3000 rpm. You will only see a solid stream of electricity jumping the gap, yet we know that if we make even minute changes in the timing, it will make critical changes in how the engine performs. You have to ask yourself, how can that cylinder get filled with fuel & air-compress the charge-fire the charge-expel the burnt charge that quickly? If it weren’t for the fact that it can, we would still be riding around on a horse & life would be much different.

Ok, now back to our oil filtration. Last month we saw how the stock filtration only cleaned a small portion of the output from the pump & the oil that did get cleaned was dumped back into the pan, while the unfiltered oil went through the engine. Something wrong with that picture wouldn’t you say? The easiest answer to correct this sad situation is the method described in the accompanying drawing. In theory this should also give your oil pressure a boost as the stream, going through the old filter to the pan is now gone. I have done this to two blocks & both times the aligning & drilling was the challenge. It is best to have a friend with a calibrated eye watching to see that you keep your pilot hole bit going the way you have determined. The object is to dead center the horizontal the passageway into the engine. If you don’t get it pretty close, when you drop the 9/16 ‘s bit down you could so far off center that the wall of the passageway gets ruptured. Oops! Just be careful. This work should only be done on a complete rebuild of the engine, so that any chips of metal will be cleaned out before assembly.

An aside note: If you are taking your engine to a modern machine shop where the hired hands can rebuild a Chevy small block in the dark, but don’t know “jack” about flat heads be sure & let them know the crank shaft isn’t in the center of the block. It is .265” (over a quarter inch) to the right hand side of the block. If the machinist sets his machine up centering on the main bearing bores & he decks your block, (resurfacing the area that the head gasket sits on) you can be in for a rude awakening later on.

There is a reason Henry chose to do this off set. It is called the “De Sax Principle”. It accomplishes the same thing that modern engines with larger pistons do by off setting the piston pin to one side. When the force of the expanding fuel-air charge pushes down on the head of the piston the rod is at an angle. That causes the piston to want to rock in the bore & scuff the skirt. By off setting either the crank or the pin, it tends to dampen that tendency, or so I’m told. Well Lynda’s ready to write this up on the computer, so I will say keep it right side up.

P.S. Next month let’s look at what happens to that oil after it heads for the engine through that passageway we drilled down into.

P.S.#1 A ”rule of thumb” that I have heard is that you should have 10 lbs. of oil pressure for every 1000 rpm.