FrankenFerrari - V12 Ferrari 308

In reply to java230 :

yes, right.  I'm changing the t'stat because I have the wrong temp for this engine, Ferrari put 160F (70C) in everything but that is really a different problem.  I posted this log before and it shows the t-stat open and let in cool fluid and the engine temp drops as it should so the t'stat is working fine, just the wrong temp.   The right side of the graph shows the fan turn on but the temp just keep rising to about 100C so the radiator/fan combination is clearly unable to cool enough.  With the V8 and water based coolant this setup worked fine.  the fan was set to turn on at 80C then back off at 75C and you could watch the temp oscillate between those points....it ain't doing that now though.  hopefully a should fixes it.

Holy damn I love seeing all these traces.

Syscrush said:

Holy damn I love seeing all these traces.

Pretty much all the aftermarket ECUs are also dataloggers which does come in handy.  The one I have can log something like 1000 channels at 10hz but drops to like 500 at 1khz.  My biggest complaint is they all log at 1 rate, I can't say log coolant temp 1 1hz and and crank position at 1000hz so files get big fast when I want to see crank position accurately.

Cleaned the sump off and changed the oil filters.  While filling the fillers I realized I bought 20/50 breakin oil....did know they made it but it should give me more stable pressure so a good mistake I think.

Changed the thermostat today....frikin sealant.  I pumped the sealant directly into the block not the coolant tank so I'm hoping all this E36 M3 is here and not in my radiator

and that was  followed by an hour "do I have the right one?" investigation...I decided both are right.  The new $51 Mishimoto is shorter and allows more recirculation flow when the t'stat is closed but does close the recirc when its open, its closer to the ferrari design iirc.

nothing to do with my car but I was wondering what oil newer ferraris were running, 458 is 5w40, 458 special is 10w60.   While looking I spotted this in the 458specail owner's manual...the optional wheels that are compatible with chains. Who i wonder would fit tire chains to their ferrari?  I guess its got to be a law somewhere that they specify who to fit chains?  Morning chuckle 

In reply to mke :

Apparently it is a "thing" in Monaco to drive your exotic car up to ski resorts, complete with luggage and ski racks.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

In reply to mke :

Apparently it is a "thing" in Monaco to drive your exotic car up to ski resorts, complete with luggage and ski racks.

Can confirm- this is a thing. Spent a few days at Isola a few years back, and they had a special valet line for exotics.  Saw a 458 with studded snows and a paint/interior matched red/camel roof box roll in one morning.  

It was quite spectactular looking on snow...

Well there you go then....I guess the people who can actually afford a ferrari can afford a $15k set of winter wheels and tires.  I know there are luggage sets matched to the cars, a set of bags that exactly fills the trunk, they are $5k+ used for the 308 set last I saw.  I used to be on someone's mailing list and got event notices.  I remember a 3 day 2 night drive through the smokey mountains.  I started reading and asked Lana if she was interested before I got to the bottom....it was $6k!  per person! to go on a drive with your own frikin car! There were chase vehicles, luggage moved place to place for you, white glove roadside lunches..... different world I guess.

In my world I started cleaning up gasket surfaces this morning getting ready to start reassembly tomorrow or Wed and hopefully be ready for a new years day drive...around the block so I don't need to worry about chase vehicle or tow trucks :)

mke said:

Well there you go then....I guess the people who can actually afford a ferrari can afford a $15k set of winter wheels and tires.  I know there are luggage sets matched to the cars, a set of bags that exactly fills the trunk, they are $5k+ used for the 308 set last I saw.  I used to be on someone's mailing list and got event notices.  I remember a 3 day 2 night drive through the smokey mountains.  I started reading and asked Lana if she was interested before I got to the bottom....it was $6k!  per person! to go on a drive with your own frikin car! There were chase vehicles, luggage moved place to place for you, white glove roadside lunches..... different world I guess.

In my world I started cleaning up gasket surfaces this morning getting ready to start reassembly tomorrow or Wed and hopefully be ready for a new years day drive...around the block so I don't need to worry about chase vehicle or tow trucks :)

 

 

The extremely rich live very different lives than you and me, though they are not without problems.

My wife (a veterinarian) once got a call from a client in flight on their private jet.  Their very expensive German Shepard Dog (who would only respond to commands given in German) was having diarrhea all over the inside of the jet.  
 

Not a problem I ever expect to have.

Its mostly back together.  Cam covers on a couple days ago, end covers went on yesterday, intakes on and fuel system pressure tested tonight.  The new coil plugs are coming from China is seems and are now due 1/19 so I won't wait and will cobble the coils somewhere so I can get it running and see if the heads are sealed, Saturday at the latest

I did a few little things.  The rewelded fuel rail had a little weeping, not really leaking...a pin hole in the weld I guess that I fixed.  

I had disconnected 8 of the throttle return springs to take load off the actuator to try and get under 5 amps so the internal driver in the ECU would work...that was a fail and I added a 25A external driver so I went ahead and reconnected the springs hoping it helps get the idle a bit lower.  The springs were already pretty soft, I custom made them way back to be much lower force than the stock springs on the the ducati TBs came with figuring I had 12 not 2

On the same note I went back to the slightly tighter 14.5mm OD o-rings on the bottom of the injectors to be sure there is no vacuum leak.

Last I beveled the sides of the manifold son now in theory at least the cam covers can be removed without removing the intakes.

Looking good...can't wait to see this come to life!

I'd be looking at pressure testing the cooling system before wrapping too much up, is that a possibility?

Leave the engine oil drain plug out and watch for coolant.

I have a terrible feeling that you're going to have problems with the gaskets because they've had coolant on their faces.

With engines that need head gasket retorquing as part of the normal procedure, it's pretty standard to run straight water untill that re-torque to prevent glycol contamination of sealing faces which can later cause corrosion pitting (as the glycol breaks down into acetic acid) and gasket failure. 

I have a vague recollection from reading the MSDS that Evan's waterless is largely ethylene glycol.

bentwrench said:

I'd be looking at pressure testing the cooling system before wrapping too much up, is that a possibility?

Gammaboy said:

I have a terrible feeling that you're going to have problems with the gaskets because they've had coolant on their faces.

Yeah....I think this is more a Hail Mary than the the K-seal was...10% change?  If I'm lucky? I guess I just kind of want to know I've exhausted all hope before getting on with pulling it to replace the gaskets as that is about a 40 hour + several hundred $ job.....but yeah, that is almost certainly where this is headed.

The factory leak test procedure is engine dry with air.  Seal all the outlets, 30psi in and wait 24hr... I need to look but it's something like that.  So I need to get a gauge, air valve, and make plugs for all the outlets to do it.

I guess I'm curious why go through all that trouble to test the cooling system per the almost 40 year old manual.  Isn't best practice these days to pull vacuum on the assembled system?  Unless you have leaks elsewhere, that would be "all outlets sealed"...

Yikes! I thought for sure you had tested prior to installing!

40 hours labor and a handfull of yuppy food coupons, dictates that this is done prior to installation.

Especially given the somewhat experimental nature of your project.

Hopefully you can test it in the car?

I have a double dose of head gasket mojo saved up, I'm sending it your way.

I "so" want to see this a success!

It's good that you are not near me, if you were close enough my clients might have some trouble keeping me on their projects.  

In reply to sobe_death :

As it sits now fully assembled a vacuum test would makes sense to confirm a leak but with the engine on the bench prior to install a vacuum test is limited to 15psi with pressure in the in the opposite direction of reality so a 30psi pressure test does make sense pre-install I think and is still the factory method  I THINK? 

Right now though, with the engine fully installed in the car I'm not sure a vacuum or pressure test add any value over just firing it up and its either good to go or needs to come out?  I could have saved the bother of installing the cam covers and intakes but they are on now so I'm thinking just cross my fingers and fire it up at this point I guess

After 84 pages of insane machine work, you're down to head gasket sealing so you're still moving in the right direction.

Here's the good news for the day.
-It fired right back up
-God I just love hearing this thing run
-With the new o-rings and all the TB springs installed it was no problem to get the engine idling down to 700 at least before I sync'd the TBs and not sure all the cylinders stayed running down there,  I re-set to about 1150 for now.
-the TBs are much easier to sync now, getting them matched to 5% total error took less than 5 minutes.  I could have gotten them better with a little more time but didn't see the need for now.
- got to driver it out of the garage rather than push it and I continue to be thrilled every time it moves under its own power
-power steering sure is nice turning the car around in the driveway
-oil pressure was way more stable with the 20-50 break-in oil rather than the 30wt I used last time
-tach is working...it seems a little sticky but its working

Bad news for the day
-yeah, the head gaskets are no more sealed than they were before so it needs to come apart.
-no idea where I'm going to move the coils  

Bummer .Hopefully the problem will be  easy to identify and fix , once apart  .

dave215 said:

Bummer .Hopefully the problem will be  easy to identify and fix , once apart  .

In the grand scheme this seems like a teething issue....hopefully.

I'm leaning toward the solution of painting the head gaskets with sealant even though I know in my heart its wrong because I'm thinking this is a problem of my own making....the 86mm bore size. I know people are putting together 89mm bore engines with my bore spacing but I think they are also using the newer style MLS head gaskets that are coated everywhere with viton or similar. I didn't pay up for custom tooling to make those so I'm using the older type composite that is a gasket with flame-rings and in my case the flame rings basically touch each other.

so the only thing keeping coolant out of the cylinders in the between the cylinders area is the flame-ring, which is not a gasket really but more heat/pressure/flame protection for the gasket....and then I used the evans coolant which seems to be extra good at leaking so in my mind this is where sealant becomes the only real path foreword because I effectively don't have any gasket between the cylinder...at least that is what I'm thinking.

agree that it is probably a teething issue .You might want to look at the specs for loctite copper gasket adhesive  as an alternative to aviation cement .The other question is did it leak from the start or was it induced by a few heat cycles .If it was induced by a heat cycle no amount of bench pressure testing would have found it .

mke said:

-yeah, the head gaskets are no more sealed than they were before so it needs to come apart.
-no idea where I'm going to move the coils  

Well, as a wise woman once said "that project has to last the rest of your life anyhow" - hopefully the high from all of the stuff in your good news list carries you through the effort of re&re the heads and sorting out a solution for the gaskets.

Good luck finding a new home for those coils. Would you gain anything in terms of space by going to a waste-spark system? My guess is that even if you did, it wouldn't be worth the other tradeoffs to someone who went to ITBs and added 12 separate MAP sensors to his CAN bus.

Syscrush said:

Good luck finding a new home for those coils. Would you gain anything in terms of space by going to a waste-spark system? My guess is that even if you did, it wouldn't be worth the other tradeoffs to someone who went to ITBs and added 12 separate MAP sensors to his CAN bus.

So I have 12 coils but the ECU only has 10 outputs (at least for now, the HW is built with 12 but I'm waiting on new firmware but a running engine really the only thing that would get me on the FW priority list so waste spark but separated wiring joined at the ECU connector and easy to change) ...which is most is fine I guess....it pulls a lot of amps.

As I was pulling things apart today, bathing in coolant and such I decided I"m going to remove the 12 O2 bungs I installed near the flanges as they are probably too close to the engine to be usable anyway and then wrap the header to control the heat better....then see if the coils are ok as-is.  I wanted to wrap the headers anyway but it was lower on the to-do list, now seems a good time and if the coils are still getting too hot I can move them.

I thought you had 12 O2 sensors but then decided that must have been some kind of fever-dream. Wrapping the headers sounds like a great idea. What about putting the coils in a combination heat shield and fan shroud enclosure with a 12V computer cooling fan at each end?

I really, really want 6 O2 sensors on my bike, but I just don't see any way to fit them.

Which reminds me - can you share a pointer to the adapter you use to bridge your set of MAP sensors to CAN?

I got thew AN to CAN thing for a guy named Esa at :

etesta

He does a lot of ECU support items, many are not listed on the site you have to ask.  This was called an ANA2 and reads 12 AN channels and outputs to CAN.  Just ask him.  I'm sure there are other AN to CAN devices from many sources.

So I did originally buy 12 NBO2 sensors and planned to use them mostly to keep an eye on TB sync and use just a main output from the multiMAP.....but decided that the sensor were kind of ugly and ate a lot of power and I could do nearly as well by looking at cylinder MAP because I know they are all flow matched so that is where I am now.  

I still do have 6 O2 sensors, 2 WB in the F/R banks and NB in each of the 4 quadrant collectors that I log but the ECU doesn't act on and I mostly use to help spot misfires.  The ECU has 2 built in WB controllers that I'm using but also has 100k pull up resistors on the AN channels which the NB don't love so I keep mentally going back and forth on keeping it as is or say buying 4 external WB controllers and just having 4....and the new ones are very fast so in theory I could pull cylinder O2 info from them if I push the ECU a bit...maybe....but for now I'll leave as-is until its running well and I see what I really need data wise.

Heat wise I want to see what the wrapping does and go from there....for sure I could add more shielding/flow to the coils .....or move them rather than continue to insist a bad design will work