ShopTalk Forums | Aircooled VW Tech & Restoration Help

WOW- Three weeks of hell are behind me!!!! Now all the 2005 racers are ready to finish their seasons and I can finish Beth's engine and the "Mighty Spyder" engine....( what fun thats gonna be!!)

After 3 weeks of not really leaving the property except to grab chow and take a test drive or two Tom Burdge's F production engine is 100% finished and dynoed!

This engine fought me in every way possible from the machine work clear till the last pull on the dyno.

I have had to neglect the phone, neglect emails and even neglect Beth to give this engine my full and undivided attention. I have logged well over 200 hours of labor into this project and I can literally say that it is mathmatically and mechanically perfect, but my god what it took to get it there!

HP figures are proprietary - we'll just say that it spins to 8500 RPM like nuttin and is still making power at 8, 000 RPM!!! The HP doesn't fall off until 8250 or so! Its smooth as silk at sub 8K, but idles smooth at 1K RPM.. The engine makes absolutely no power below 4800 RPM but as soon as it hits 5K its like a rocket....

14 full dyno pulls today, passed all the chacks and now its ready for mid ohio in just 3 weeks! You guys will be able to watch the footage on SPEED in December!!

Whats interesting is that we'll have two entries running RAT power in the same race... The Tangerine Racing 914 Sponsored by yours truly will be battling it out with Tom who is also wearing MassIVe banners...

This is going to be very interesting because I know the power differences between both engines

So thanks guys for letting me go under ground for almost 3 weeks- damn I have A LOT of catching up to do around here....

hope I get a little of that magic...

Great job Jake. I wish I could make this hobby my full time job so I can give it my full attention. Tim

I got to see first hand the extreme detail that went into an F production 1.8L as I was up at jakes for the past few weeks off and on to build a 2L Camper Special. Even the smallest details are polished to perfection to squeeze out every bit of HP that can be had within the rules.
After 3 weeks of keeping his nose to the grindstone and not seeing his girlfriend he still hung in there and dyno'd the CIS Camper Special I had finished and got out of the shop late (Sorry Beth, Joel and I owe you one).

Hey Jake,

I noticed in a previous post you commented how you had 90 hours of labour in the short block alone and I wonder what sort of stuff your actually doing for those 90 hours? Ya know, the usual stuff like checking bearing tolerances, degreeing the cam, etc etc, then what else do you do for it to take that long?

P.S. Before anybody comments that i'm trolling or something...i'm really not, i'm interesting in what sort of work goes into a massive engine.

Cheers,
Tom Kettle

First off this was no "Normal" massIVe engine.. It was built to standards that even exceed the standards for a "Super Hero".

Taking an 1800cc engine, and making it not only make 100 HP per Liter, but also sustain life at sub 8,000 RPM for 45 minutes at a time is not easy by any means.

These engines are restricted by the most strict rules I have ever had to adhere to. Things like rtaining stock valve sizes, not being able to run beter rod journals (stronger) and not being able to use Titanium rods and the like make things even more heaktic.

Unlike many racing sanctions the SCCA REALLY enforces their rules, especialy in the "Production" categories. Basically if you get protested, or end up on the podium a trip to the after race impound will be in store for you. In the impound I have heard of a race being forfeited by a valve size being ONE THOUSANDTH too large!

So what do I spend all the time checking?? Damn near everything! These engines are the most expensive engine that I can assemble and also the ones that are the wildest and have the biggest chances for catastrophic failure with their crazy compression ratios and extreme chamber filling capabilities at crazy sustained revs.

Len had as much work (in hours) in the heads as I ended up with in the engine alone. Chamber volume is perfect down to 1/10 of 1 cc!

As for exactly what gets done- well the enemy is always listening and a few of the racers that fight against these guys read this forum.... I can't go into further detail.

As I said, a normal MassIVe engine is allocated 80 hours of design, machining, assembly and dyno time between Brent and I. A "Super Hero" ends up with about 110 hours of the same because each one of them are unlike any of the rest. The E and F production engine weighs in at around 200 hours, but this one posed many other crisis for me because I was working with the customers existing crankcase and a few other items that were not originated at my shop and that always is a bitch..

The final results were what we expected and then some! If I could share pictures of this one everyone would be astonished.

It is not the 'Burdge' engine which is on the 'whats cooking' part of your site then?
I wanted to ask why you did not mount the steel (pulley) ring on the fan: its the ring where the alu blade reside against? I understand it gives a reduction in reciprocing mass but wouldn't it effect cooling negatively also?

That engine does look killer tho!

Tnx,
Walter

Congrats for getting that engine done Jake! Can't wait to see it tear things up on Speed.

Yep, Its Tom Burdge's engine... This one

These are not proprietary photos because you can't see whats inside it.

As faor not running the steel ring- well the customer has been running this engine for about 8 years the same way and his head temps run in the acceptable level without it. I actually tried a couple of other fans with different blades and etc removed and this one worked the best of all them... This engine saw well more than 8,500 RPM on my dyno and it doesn't start to pull until 5,500- so its definately not "typical"...

Ok; He is not running an alternator than either right? Does the battery hold out then for one race ?

Other q: is this the fan shroud from the 'CU' cased engines (the ones with the enclosed breather tower) or the 'regular one?

Tnx,
Walter

They keep a constant charge on the battery in the paddock.. No alternator needed.

This shroud is not from a CU/CV engine, its a standard 914 shroud.

Yeah, that one of the advantages of the type 4 cooling: the crank driven fan, so you can run cool even when you loose a belt (or do it on purpose )

Is the CU/CV shroud not allowed then Jake? Cause I thought you mentioned once that it might cool even better than the 914 shroud...

Tnx,
Walter

cu/cv fanshroud doesn't have outlets for heaterboxes..

It is allowed, I just didn't have one..... The engine has Nickies, and full coatings so heat should not be an issue.

Jake, are those 912 Solex split-shaft carbs on that engine?