Lake Speed's Ford C3 NASCAR Engine: Drag Racing Legend Greg Anderson Machines The Block!

no one gets to come in here and do a video this is absolutely incredible at the bottom of the board and get out that pinched into the area at the bottom these are little big baby valves compared to what they build this is the pappy's dingle ball this is definitely not a legal ball definitely not to get you up to speed if you don't know what's going on here basically we pulled this engine out of lake speed seniors race shop when we did that race shop tour video it's been sitting for 15 years after he stopped using it so have his cars well we're gonna get it refreshed with modern components and show you how all that works hopefully make some more power than what it should have back in the day put it back in lake's car and he's gonna hop in it and go rip a road course with it again he's 74 years old so that's what this process is about if you haven't seen that first video yet you should go watch to catch up to speed to this one we're back at pro motor engines and they got lake's engine torn down obviously you saw that last video but they went over everything and found some more detailed stuff about it that we didn't show you before i think we pretty much conclusively say we there's some evidence that at least a couple of cylinders would you say migration was the word there's there's water migrating in there we haven't uh we don't really understand why how about the valve springs sitting compressed for 18 years is that a source of power loss yeah it could be so what are we doing here so i have a dts spring rater we're going to rate your c3 valve springs so these are the ones on lake's engine that sat with the rockers tight for 15 years correct yep that could be a reason why it lost so much power in yeah 15 20 years way too long the majority of my lifetime [Music] that's neat so we know what it what it used to be yeah so what i'll do is i'll put the data in based on the manufacturer specs and then we'll we'll just verify after it actually rates the spring okay what the number is so i do have to have some information to begin with you know to tell it but once i do you can verify [Music] so what it does is it'll it'll rate the spring twice to get a coil by number and then it'll rate it once i can change that to whatever i want but how it's set up it'll rate it twice to get a coil by number and rate it once to get a actual pressures you know your open pressure you see pressure so that's how we do 99 of our springs the same way do you do this to springs even when you take them out of the box just to verify brand new we rate all our springs yeah yeah yeah the pressure was within you know that part of it was good yeah they're they they were within five pounds of the catalog rating we had the catalog rating yeah we had the sheet right we pulled up in the catalog and we checked the spring ratings it's within five pounds of the catalog rating right now i mean you've got which is it wasn't the springs killing it 255 pounds um seat pressure 690 open and that's you know that's a pretty stock spring it's something i think we'll be able to improve a lot on without the spring technology having that big monster on there for you know yeah we'll have improvements there so the next thing we're going to do is take the block over to greg anderson now the guys are rather helping us out they've got a brand new cnc machine uh cnc home so we're going to cnc hone it so a few days later we're at kb racing right now about to get this block honed in a really fancy rottler machine that i don't know that much about but flake will have to explain it better well this is this is the cadillac of honing systems this is not a ball home with a drill this is not even an old sun and machine like a cv616 this is a modern cnc this is especially a computer-controlled pump so it's vertical so there's no rocking motion and this is also a six-stone like i call it a stone but it's the sixth diamond abrasive pony head so the thing about two abrasives is pushing out so it kind of always wants to make these things oval shaped because it's pushing in this direction well this has six so it's pushing out equally in all directions so when you're done honing it's going to be straighter and rounder top to bottom the only way you can really measure that is what's called a pack gauge with a device that goes in and checks multiple points of contact up and down those are like a million dollars so unfortunately we work with the guys at roller that total steel would actually help us manufacture rings we have to flap the rings in to make sure they're round we hone sleeves all the time so we run the rings through them to make sure they're round so we're honing every day so we've actually worked with them and found that okay if you hung with a two stone head you'll get a certain amount of outer roundness from top to bottom you can't check out the dial board gauge it'll show straight but it's not really straight like a slinky you can bend it all around it's still round check it aware but it ain't straight so with this it gets it straighter and rounder so to try to maximize the power because we got a lot to make up on this engine we need these boards as straight as round as possible because if we saw anything we felt like the area we were losing power the most was in ring seal so that's why we came to these guys because they are the pros at ring seal i mean greg how about i mean you're talking about three horsepower per cubic inch on what you guys make pro stock engine is the most efficient naturally aspirated engine on the planet so if you got to get every bit of power out of your motor you got to come to the guys who are the pros so which by the way if you don't know that no one gets to come in here and do a video this is absolutely incredible this is a feat beyond reality so we can't thank you greg enough for taking your time to one do this number two let us actually see you do this we didn't think you'd be the machine operator either well a couple months ago i wasn't but get a new toy like this i'm kind of kind of interested in new toys and this is the new toy for us and it's definitely helped our program we're extremely happy with the machine extremely happy with the way it works and the product that it puts out and as as like said the bottom line is you can't get a cylinder straight enough i mean the straighter you can get it the more round you can get it the more power you can make simple as that obviously in our game we're looking for every single car we can find so this is uh this is the way we've elected to go it's definitely paid benefits already so we're excited about it and that's why i got involved i kind of like new toys don't see any other ford engines in here i don't see any of this the first ford engine that's been through the doors here and did you say this is the smallest bore size you put in here on a motorcycle or what this one is one really cool thing about this home is inside the computer is actually sensing while it's honing so it's adjusting the load that's putting on the stones as it's going up and down when it's when he's actually holding it you better see it when it finds a tight spot somewhere in the cylinder it'll it'll stay in that area and get rid of that tight spot the home will basically stop the full travel and stop in that area make little short short strokes yeah it'll get that tight spot out yeah you can watch it on the on the little map there it's actually showing you know how much load is applying where it's moving and you can see it real time which is kind of cool so the idea is we would like to be able to get this thing to clean up and be straightened around by 4065 that would be ideal because then with the stroke we have we're at 358 cubic inches we've only been taking out maybe a couple of thousands of bore size so any gain in power won't be because he made more displacement it's just because we got it straighter rounder and hopefully we'll take that blow by from which it was at least seven maybe higher on the dyno and bring it down much much lower hopefully get that vacuum up a little bit too because that's where some power can come from back in the 90s could a boar ever be as specific as what this thing could do no matter no chance there was no way i don't care who was honing it uh absolutely not in fact there was a story that doug said that you know when they doug gates and they first got their first rattler robert was still coming around and roberts was still used to using the old sun and thing and he worked for about a day or two on this one block trying to get this finish right and he couldn't ever get exactly he wanted and doug was like why don't you just come over to the cup shop and use our rattler two hours later it's done and he's like i will never use that old thing again i got it done and dusted in a couple hours versus a couple of days you just can't you just couldn't get there so was that a common occurrence for it to take a few days to open the block perfect well if you were trying to get a very specific surface finish and you know back in the days you ran different type of rings those were all you know ductile molly type rings and those molly rings are sprayed on so it's an iron ring and you spray a coating of molly on it well when you spray that coating on it's kind of porous so it holds oil like a sponge so you can make the cylinders really really smooth because the ring would hold the oil and the oil is the gasket between the ring and the cylinder well with the modern rings are steel there's no molle coating on them anymore which is actually a good thing because they live longer and there's a lower coefficient of friction but it doesn't hold any oil so now we have to hone the block in a way to create that oil retention so that's what we're going to be doing is using a series of progressively smoother stones but as opposed to going like maybe a three-step process we're going to try to do it in two and there were some methods that had even four steps and we're definitely won't be going forward we're just going to take a rough grid abrasive go to size and that will give us the valleys then we're going to come with a smoother grid abrasive over the top of that and make the top of it flatter and smoother but still have those valleys to hold the oil that would be your black opinion yes sir that's a plateau finish they call it and what we're going to try to do is more we now call the extreme plateau not just a little bit flat on top we want it like way flat on top with a bunch of valley underneath we want to hold a lot of oil what he's doing right now is putting on a torque plate so the idea is this torque plate using the same studs from the heads you're going to simulate the cylinder head right because when you put the cylinder head on and you torque it down it's going to distort the block so again back to making this cylinder straight and round you don't just want to straighten around here you want it straighten around when the engine is together so the idea is that you got all the main caps everything on torque just like it would so from the bottom of the cylinder that same stress is put onto it and then we're simulating the same stretch you have the same head gasket the same studs the same lube everything so that this will simulate as close to possible what the engine will see when it's assembled that way we're honing it the way the engine will actually be running that's the best way to try to get it straight around for the best possible ring seal so we're going to get our baseline surface finish reading now yes sir so we'll see where we were when we tore it down we know what it was but it was also kind of a little bit oily than two so this will give us an idea of where we are to begin with again this is honed for the old-school type of rings so we're going from the old school ductile molle 043043 you know three millimeter type ring package i remember right it was actually a no 43 1.5 millimeter three millimeter ring package what was in there but ductile molly so it was honed smooth for that type of deal we're going to go to a 0.7 millimeter 0.7 millimeter 2 millimeter ring package all steel so we've got to change that surface finish to make it correct for the new rings so we can get good ring seal we can actually see what the surface looks like on there yep so this is tracing that little diamond stylus is tracing the surface and that's giving you a picture of what that surface looks like and this is in micro inches so that's millionth of an inch obviously there's a big goofy right there so that's probably one of those rust spots that was causing all that blow by that's not a good spot yeah so that rpk is crazy high so that's what the problem is is that those numbers are not good because of that so we're going to go to a different spot again where did that horsepower go oh we just found one of them right there that is we caused big problems in terms of blow-by which we saw on the dinette so that just was verifying what we had previously seen how big of a sweep is it taking like of a length down the wall it's taking uh two hundredths of an inch okay so not very much no just yeah i can't like that yeah it's taking a little bit how thick is a piece of hair uh 40 microns so it's 39 000 of an inch so it's taking a sweep that's like a few pieces of hair it's pretty small so the scale of this is that's plus 200 micro inches that's minus 200 micro inches 100 micro inches is a tenth of a thousandths tenth of a thousandths that's how small this is so we're trying to work in an area that's a hundred maybe a hundred and fifty micro inches so we're talking about a tenth or a tenth and a half of the thousands is what we're working on here you can't even see that oh no you can't see it you can't feel your fingernail the old ways of honing and trying to measure stuff you can't get okay rk so what does rk mean that's kind of your core roughness so that's 23 your rpk is four so that's really low that's the peak height so that's actually how high those peaks are that shows us pretty worn down and then the rbk is 32. we're going to try to get that number up over 50. we want that number to go way up so the is the rvk the valley depth that is the valley that's the holds oil right so for ring seal you got to have oil retention that's not a whole lot of water retention okay but you can go back over here and you can see on that graph there's not a lot of deep valleys when we're done with this we should see some really long deeper ones down here now the scale right now is plus or minus 200 micro inches we should be able to flip that scale to plus minus 400 micro inches we got so many deep valleys so it may look a little bit different because the scale might change okay if we do our job right the scale will change so if you still haven't understood it yet the valleys on this graph are where the oil would lay in the cylinder wall yes and that's there for lubrication and for sealing okay that's the goal so it doesn't make sense yet which is uh this is a 170 200 grit diamond all right so most people would home in the old days with a 325 grit abrasive so this is twice the abrasiveness twice the grit of what people would normally do so it should create those really good deep valleys so we're going to go with 170 200 to begin to get that base finish to get those valleys and we're going to come back with a 600 diamond or cbn over it so it's smooth on top valleys underneath that's what we're going to do today so this isn't pappy's dingle ball this is definitely not a dingleball definitely not all right is this making sense like leave a comment if you're if you're following this with the peaks and the valleys and all that stuff we want to keep it keep up the speed here we know what on a block like this we know what the four spacing is between so we punch those numbers in and for 380 i believe it's before four spacing so for 380 which moves over for 380 it moves over four 380 moves over so that's very simple to do same thing with the other bank we have to go through it and set the locations on the other bank the same way so but anyway we're on bank one or the odd bank as we call it so we're going to start on cylinder one so we'll we'll take our cone head and we'll go down into the blower we'll get our stones fairly close to the cellar wall and then we'll let the stones themselves or the diamonds themselves find where zero is contact so we'll find themed stones the diameter it'll automatically bring the stones out to the cylinder wall and stop the size of the film so the top there so now we zero the stones at that diameter right there and that's our starting point so then we tell it well how much do we want to take out of it to start with so we set a value in here and and we don't know yet on this particular block how much it's going to take how crooked it is how much it's going to take to get around and we're not looking to hone out several thousands we're looking to take it as much as it needs to go to be perfectly straight and that's basically the size we're going to stop at then we're going to order our pistons for that size but since we do not know it's been many many years since this block's been run we don't know how each cylinder is going to be how crooked each cylinder is going to be and how much it's going to take we have to find out what it's going to take to clean up every cylinder to be the same size and perfectly round so that's what we're going to do here so we're just going to start at a real small value here let's just start at a a half a thousand just to see what happens at a half a thousand and see if it will clean up so now the machine basically knows where where the wall is what size it is when we punch that value in it's going to go that same size on every hole it goes to so basically when it's done it'll have every hole the exact same size so if that's not enough to clean the bore completely and make it perfectly round then we'll increase that size and we'll go through them again so the correct order of operations is to get your blocks set up first and then order your pistons to match the blocks that's the correct way if you have a lot of confidence in where your block is going to come in or where it's going to be able to come straight yeah it's saying our pro stock stuff we've run the engine for three or four races we're going to own the block we know that that block's gonna clean up in less than a thousand so i'll go ahead and order ahead of time my pistons for the next rebuild a thousand figure because i know i'll be able to get that block clean within the thousands but this has been many years since this block's been run and every block has you know different qualities to every block some blocks move more than others some have thicker cylinder walls some have thinner cylinder walls and they move more and you'll have blocks that basically when you hold them if you use too much cone pressure on them the cylinder wall will breathe and that'll give you a false reading on a straight cylinder wall it won't actually be straight because it's got too much load and it's pushing that cylinder wall in and out and it's still reflective so we have to learn how robust to block this is and how much load can we use but we're going to start at a little load also just to make sure we're not forcing that cylinder wall to move when we're holding it we don't want it to move we want it to be perfectly straight without too much load on it we're going to cylinder one we've got our feeds and speeds set we think where we'd like to start with them our crosshatch i don't really know what you used for a cross hatch back in the day but we use somewhere around a 30 degree angle yeah it's going to be in the ballpark so we'll start with that see how that looks we're going to start with only a 20 load on it because we just don't want that cylinder wall to breathe too…