Bonneville Dreamer

[KLZE Porsche]

At the top of my bucket list is -to run on the Bonneville Flats. And so it has long been a dream of mine that I would love to fulfill before I "Kick the Bucket"

The dream:

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NOTE: Since the Blue car (previously known as RR Probe) has been moved to a restoration project rather than a race car -the Purple People Eater has become the primary Bonneville Platform.

[KLZE Porsche]

First off -some may have seen my crazy KJaBusa idea in another thread I have posted. I plan to experiment with several crazy engine combinations until I get the engine that will meet my goals. One of the engine combinations will be a .040 over piston and with some ultra-lightweight Ti rods. Here is a comparison of them to KL rods both on the same weight scale:

http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Images/KL_Rod_Weight.jpg

http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Image...Rod_Weight.jpg

I had the bushings bored on the Ti rods to enable a .787 full floating pin. I then have the option to use either stock KL type pins or Childs & Alberts that are much lighter:

http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Images/Wrist_Pins.jpg

The most incredible discovery I have involves heads, valves, valve gear and a touch of Hayabusa. I got so obsessed with the Hayabusa motor that I began to look much deeper into it. It is by far an engineering marvel when you think about the displacement to horsepower ratio as well as the RPM limit. It is simply a mad screaming beast packed into a very small package.

I decided to buy a Busa head to tear it down and find out what makes it tick. Upon doing this -I discovered that the valve angles were almost identical to KL. The head diameter is slightly larger than KL on the intake, identical for the exhaust and the stem diameter is 5mm rather than our 6mm. The smaller stems allow more flow and that is a plain and simple fact! Then I looked at valve length and the Hayabusa valves are extremely close in length. So I envisioned that I could put Hayabusa valves into a KL head. It is not beyond reason if the valve guides are changed to 5mm ones.

So then I looked at valve springs, retainers, locks, and SLAs on Hayabusa's. Amazingly the valvesprings are almost the same height and diameter except for being doubles. They have a stepped shim that goes underneath them and the retainer is different to also accommodate the inner springs. The retainers have a pocket for the valve shims since they are shim-under-bucket. Busa SLA's are a little too small for our bores unfortunately but I did find the cure. But the differences in weights between Hayabusa stuff and KL stuff is amazing.

I almost forgot to mention that the Busa Inner springs will work with the KL springs as outers which look like they would work with the Busa retainers. This would create some really cheap and really high spring rate doubles at a very reasonable price. The only thing I am not sure of -is if the Busa retainers could stand that much of a spring rate increase. If not -they do make Ti and Stainless aftermarket retainers. At first I had thought the Busa retainers were Ti (due to the ultimately low weight) but I believe they are a very hard aluminum. I don't really know how to determine if they are aluminum or Ti and I was unable to find it anywhere on Busa forums.

Buying Busa heads is far cheaper than buying expensive big name goodies. So I bought myself about 8 Busa heads for experimentation purposes. So now for a few photos:



The valve seen in the photo is a stainless aftermarket piece that is for the boosted engines I will be playing with. Now for a few weight comparison photos.

Retainer weight comparison:
http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Image...comparison.jpg

2008 Busa's came with Ti valves and so here is a comparison between a Busa Ti exhaust valve and a KL steel valve:

http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Image...comparison.jpg

KL vs Busa springs and retainers:

Ape makes aftermarket springs for Busa that will handle up to almost a half inch of lift.

Since the 5mm valves and the slightly smaller SLA buckets would not work with the KL heads -I had to go back to the Engineering drawing board and come up with some solutions. For the valve guides -I decided to design my own guides and make them myself. I wanted to mix KL with Busa so that I get a guide that is a direct drop-in but will take Busa seals, busa valves and the stepped shim at the bottom. I went out and bought myself a lathe so that I could make the pieces. I decided to go with Silicone Bronze and so I bought me some sticks of SB and went to work. This is the design I came up with:


The one to the left is my creation and the middle piece is Busa while the far right is KL. It has the inside diameter of the Busa, the upper seal mount bit of a Busa, the outside diameter and length of a KL. I am currently trying to find a more efficient way of changing the valve guide ID. I have only made the one guide prototype as of yet because it took me over 3 hours to turn to perfect tolerance on the lathe. So -even if I get quicker at making them -I would have around 140 hours into turning valve guides (not including time for mistakes). So I am debating giving the design to a CNC machine shop along with the materials to have them turn them for me. The accuracy would be better with less babysitting on the machine and would save me 140 hours or so that could be spent on something else.



I have also been debating -turning some adapter collets to press into the KL heads so that I can use straight-up Hayabusa guides. There are plenty of aftermarket Hayabusa valve guides available. So that might be the better way of doing it. Adapter collets would take far less time to machine because they would have only two critical tolerances (ID and OD) and they would be straight vs all the angle cuts I had to make on the one I made.

Here is one of the valves with guides:



Guide-less head -awaiting new guides:
http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Image...-less_Head.jpg

I will be trying out this combination on a normally aspirated test hog engine. The only way to find my limits is to exceed them and so I plan to tell the dyno operator to hit 10k for the first few runs to get a few good numbers -and then I want to push it until it explodes. The only fairly expensive item that I could stand to loose would be the dry sump pump. I am debating -not putting new gears into it until after the test run. The gears I have in it may be good enough to withstand the trial.

[artsvetkov]

Looking awesome, Its definitely not a cookie cutter DIY project.

[KLZE Porsche]

Umm sir I think your in the process of making the box.... how many RPM's do u plan to be able to rev up to if (knock on wood) these new hayabusa kl hybrid heads your building?

The heads I am working on -I dubbed a while back as Monster III. I had already run two previous verisons of my "Monster" heads and this will be revision 3. I have never gone as far with a set of heads as I am going with this set. They are waaaay outside the box.

I was originally shooting for a 10k engine but after lots and lots of research on what makes Hayabusa motors and F1 motors able to spin so many RPM and make such incredible power -I think I can do 12k with a KL motor. Twelve is about the limit on a typical valve spring type engine. The F1 guys had to go to hydraulic valves to push it much beyond that. They just could not make the valves open and close fast enough. So I think for me the "Wall" will be 12k because I am NOT going to get into hydraulic valve systems.

Below is the solution for the Shim-Under-Bucket (SUB) size difference:


To the left is the stock KL HLA, the middle is a newer 4 cylinder 626 SLA (without shim) and the last is a modified 626 SLA (also without shim) where I have used the lathe to cut the top retaining ring for the shims off. When done -it is nearly identical to the Busa SUB except with a slightly larger diameter for the KL bore and a longer stem underneath -which makes up for the difference in the installed valve height.

Cut the shim lip off of a 4-cylinder 626 SLA and you have a 30mm Busa hybrid SUB:


This is 4 Busa SUBs compared to the modified 626 SUBs:
http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Image...KL_Buckets.jpg

[nevin94 PGT]

Sounding excellent so far! Definitely a "measure twice, cut once" kinda deal. haha

Sorry if I missed something, but what chassis is the motor/tranny combination going into? Is it a probe?

And good luck!

[KLZE Porsche]

Just a fun pic:

[siknin]

wow... some very very difficult work going on there

[mac1]

Oh how we have evolved! Great progress as always.

[nevin94 PGT]

What speeds will the engine be going at your target speed of 250? Just curious.

[KLZE Porsche]

Any guesses on this one?



Answer:
http://www.xtremethings.com/BD_Images/LCA-n-parts.jpg

I dropped off one of my blocks on Friday for boring .040 over for the ultra-lite Cromo rods. Although -I forgot that I had stretched the 5.400 length to 5.426 and I told them to take .020 off the deck on each side. So hopefully if I catch them early Monday morning before they start on it -I can tell them to cancel the .020 decking. If they have already decked it then I will just use the block in another build that I will be doing with Milli "S" rods.

So I started shaving the sides of the ultra-light rods to fit in the +.040 over bores without having to insert from the bottom. I would not be able to do so anyway because the rods are a press-fit and I plan to use the Childs & Alberts lightweight tool-steel pins. So they have to fit through the bores without scratching them. This means shaving the sides and polishing them to ensure they do not have any sharp edge that might scratch.

Before they are done -I will be re-balancing them back to within less than a half gram of weight difference. They were already so close in weight that the difference could not be measured even by using 1/4 gram fishing weights to determine an accurate difference. But re-balancing to their perfect balance before -should be a piece of cake since all of the shaving is done in the same place.

Here is a photo of the pistons that the block is being bored for compared to standard OEM on the right:


Rods:


This will be one of the first boosted test hogs. It will be to test the rods that have been bushed to .787 press-fit with some of these odd -but very nicely cast OEM replacement pistons. As you can see in the photo -the bolts are extremely beefy and this is the reason why these rods are very wide at the big end. But only a minor shaving plus a .040 over bore cures that problem well. This rod has been shaved but still needs balanced as soon as all of the rods are shaved.

[4stpgt]

just so you guys know i meet a guy in roanoke va selling his turbo probe that had a 6 speed in it!!It was awesome he said a mechanic in roanoke va did the custom work so it is possible,not sure what trannny he used but it was awesome!!

[JKpgt96]

Very cool Mike. I might have some things to share with you depending on what I can find the next couple of weeks.

[Md323]

I had someone tell me that there is a similar race run somewhere on the east coast where people set speed records but I cannot remember the name of the place. If I knew of it -I could use that for a few test runs before going to Utah in August. Perhpaps someone reading this will know the name of the place and post it up?

do you mean this?

http://www.milemarker-1.com/

[lilpavel]

I had someone tell me that there is a similar race run somewhere on the east coast where people set speed records but I cannot remember the name of the place. If I knew of it -I could use that for a few test runs before going to Utah in August. Perhpaps someone reading this will know the name of the place and post it up?

I told you and its ECTA in Maxton, SC
http://www.ecta-lsr.com/

[polarexpress17]

just so you guys know i meet a guy in roanoke va selling his turbo probe that had a 6 speed in it!!It was awesome he said a mechanic in roanoke va did the custom work so it is possible,not sure what trannny he used but it was awesome!!

i'd like to see that