napa's machine shop in stratford, guys name is rob, im not sure if its directly related to NAPA or if hes a private operator, ive known his work for at least 10 years now, and hes done all of my buddys v8 race motors. Fonse performance is terrible, they wanted like 1600 bucks to do my block, not even assembled and 1900 for a 298 ford lol

 

So, its possible to say from the get go, this motor wasn't 100%.

Hrm..

 

i dont think the P2W was the result of low power output, but soon as all my gauges get here, ill know whats really going on

 

No , but i just took my scope into my cyls a few days ago, and i dont even have those marks on my walls and my setup is a limit pusher lol.. so i can tell you, your motor probably wasn't even 90% or so when you were getting tuned.. i would say the bore is out of round for sure if its that much vary.

 

you know i specifically had it bored out to 84.5 to avoid all this lol

 

I know bud.. .. its a real shame.. Had this happened to me i would have put a hole in my head already..lol

 

the low power was because of m45 and non vtec head. bad match up.

the vtec head with a tvs 1320 would be sweet.

the vtec head flows better low end and up high. the cams are what matter for the for power up top or mid. not non vtec vs vtec.

the p2w was off or your fuel setup could of caused the pistons to get real hot and expand more than factory expected with there tolerances and caused that scoring.

thats another reason why i like the vtec blocks. the oil squirters keep the pistons cooler.

i would suggest for future make sure the on paper theory sounds better for the dollar invested. 170whp is not acceptable for the ammount spent imo.

good luck with your future build and remember to check everything twice before you put it together and tune it

 

that sounds about right. need to measure it and see. id whip napa's *** if they had one. thats if the cylinder is not true

 

who are you exactly? there's no way to put a TVS1320 on a honda, they dont rotate in reverse and a custom manifold would have to have been made. The M45 was making roughly 7psi which was fine for what I was doing. The head flow wasn't the issue, there were other issues with the head, like bad valve seats from weak guides bleeding off compression. The on paper theory was just fine, I put too much faith in other people to hold up their end of the work that was required to be done. The machine shop that did the head never checked the guides to see if they were worn, so the power that I had initially eventually disappeared as it ruined the seats. Every set of cam's i used in the car were too small and the wrong profile for the head flow numbers, i needed duration and moderate lift, the 402T's that crower recommended were a bad choice for this head without an aggressive race port. I had virtually stock duration and .470 lift on a head that stopped flowing past .430. Crower 403's would have been a better choice.

First night I took the car out and started tuning it I rolled a modded 2011 WRX (turbo and all) in the rain spinning at 60mph on 22* of timing. I knew something was wrong a week later because the car didnt feel as fast as it did the week before, all the way up until the actual dyno tune about 2-3 weeks later. If i could have taken a picture of the look on my friends face to describe the way the car felt the first day, I would have. Or the look on the kid in the WRX's face when he realized he was getting rolled by an auto teg. You can ask anyone who saw the car in person the day I got it running, i was doing part throttle burnouts every time I pushed on the gas pedal it was making so much torque, a week later it could spin the tires from a dead standstill at WOT.

I'm tired of trying to justify the build to people, what little support ive gotten from people im thankful for, but its been constant criticism since the day I started buying parts. I'm ready to move on, the potential was there, but i just don't have the financial resources to dump into this project anymore to make it work the way I want it to. Set back after set back has taken its toll, I don't even have another car to fall back on to drive back and forth every day. It's just fortunate i work from home most of the time.

 

doesn't matter what anyone thinks, i rode in this bad boy with 4 people deep and it rolled.

 

What do the valve tips and rocker arm tips look like?

 

Who tuned the motor before it hit the dyno, it seems as if this is when the damage occoured. Was close attention paid to the intake air temperature and compensate properly? Is it possible that poor methanol distribution could have washed the oil from the thrust surfaces?
With a very similar setup the 403's worked excellent and the OEM bottom survived 2 seasons of autocross abuse without an issue and you were able to see this first hand.

Probably one of the more "fun" engines I have had.

 

I tuned it myself, so I knew exactly what was going on, only reason I took it to randy was because I was unsure about how aggressively I could push the ignition timing. I wanted an expert opinion on the entire build and see the results first hand on the dyno, that was when we started discovering the problems. Never ran rich for more then a couple minutes before correcting the issue, never ran lean in the slightest, and the timing was never overly aggressive, most i pushed was 22* @ WOT.

Never even ran the methanol once to make sure that would not be an issue if a problem arose. I wanted to be certain the motor would run good for a couple of months and a few thousand miles before I introduced that variable.

Final tune I ran when I made the 14.6 run....




and this came away with clean plugs and good AFR's and no unusual heating of one cylinder or another when measuring the header primarys with the IR gun.

I know for sure the low power was caused by the bad seats, I had carbon build up on the intake valve faces, and those were clean when the head was installed, only reason I suspect this happened was from it blowing past the valve seat during combustion. Whether or not this plays a factor in the wear on the one side I dont know, its possible it could have been very hot on that one side from just this factor alone, but I figured I would see that on the top of the piston as well, and for all intents and purposes those pistons look fantastic.

 

Rob's pretty good - Honestly we spent alot of time before my last trip up there to tune speaking about this.. he's not stupid. He knows what he's doing, just alittle iffy on limits of things because he doesn't do this for a living like some of us do.

Its a real shame this happened though, it was a really..unique / odd setup. lmao

put a vtec head on it damnt..

 

Well I have good news and I have bad news, good news first...

BORE IS GOOD! Only measured 1 thousands out of round on the center two cylinders which I expected and 5 ten thousands out of round on the outer two, this means I can reuse this without having to worry about getting it rebored.

Bad news is, P2W's are anywhere from .0050 on piston #1 with the most wear, to .0030 on cylinder #4 with the least amount of wear. These means that Im either gonna have to have the pistons coated again, or replace them all together. This also means our initial measurements of .0040 p2w when assembling was wrong for whatever reason. The progressive wear from 1 to 4 still remains a mystery, but I do plan to have the rods checked next. I am however delighted to see that the aluminum on the pistons took the brunt of the wear vs the actual iron sleeve.

In the meanwhile ive been prepping the other P8R head, finished cleaning up the dog **** port work finish that it had previously on #1 cylinder and we are going to flow bench this cylinder vs the rest to see where we can improve. Also going to bench this head against the previous head as well. So i should have numbers for that very soon.

 

You could run a tvs, just flip the drive gears and snout like everyone does with the Eaton's.

I'm still baffled how the p2w got that far off

I have an early early set of arias 10:1s to put in my motor and I just realized I don't know what material they are lol

 

I'd rather just replace those pistons personally. Those cheapo Supertechs don't exactly cost an arm and an leg .

Are you sure it's ideal to grind so much off the guides ? I was going to have my guides blended but I decided against it as I wanted as much support on the valve as possible.

 

Some argue cut guides offer less valve support. Especially at high rpm.
I don't know if the flow improvement is worth reduced valve support..

It can cause seat wear, guide wear and allow the valve to move on the seat

 

Im not sure what to make of it either. Supertech gives you such a wide range of measurement on the actual piston itself for measuring the P2W, if you measure dead center of the skirt you get the widest point, if you measure 3/4's up you get a completely different number. Yet they claim you can measure anywhere from the middle to just below the oil control ring on their specification sheet. Those measurements were taken from dead center of the skirt. Since #4 is the only piston with no wear, im using that piston as the reference for what the P2W was prior to startup. Which would have been between .0026 and .0030, which according to most is perfectly fine for 179whp and 4032 alloy with is a low expansion alloy.

They are being replaced, but not with supertech's, I ordered a set of YCP AC8A cast pistons this time around with hasting rings, which was my original choice in pistons when this was actually a "budget" build. Should be roughly the same compression the supertech's were. 10.95:1 or so, and AC8A has roughly the same thermal expansion rate as 4032. Roughly 19.2% @ 100*C vs 19.4% of 4032.

As far as the guides go, the head came like that from DFE enterprises when I bought it off the marketplace, I wasnt too thrilled with just leaving the ports with an 80 grit finish on either end. Nor was I happy about the fact that whoever did this work started to touch the chambers and then stopped after hitting it with a sanding roll, so I finished that out as well. Once I have some initial flow bench numbers compared to my previous head, i have a full set of ferrea bronze guides that are getting installed, along with likely new valves, whoever did the valve job, well I should say whoever didnt do the valve job, decided it would be awesome to hit the valves with some lapping compound and a powerdrill, now every valve has a nice lip on the edge of the valve that makes the edge look like a letter L.

 

The looser p2w will allow for more piston rock and that's what you are seeing on the skirts and cyl walls. Even OEM pistons have those wear marks but just not as noticeable given that their p2w is like .001-.002 so a lot tighter. It's only on the intake side because of the offset wrist pin of the engine so that's why.

I honestly wouldn't worry about it.

Your machine shop that you are using on the other hand would be of concern. If definitely start looking for a new shop.

 

rehoned the block today, whatever that line is, its deeper then the hone can remove, yet I cannot feel it with my finger at all, im not entirely worried about it at this point. Just gotta roll with the punches.





did all this with a flex hone from brush research, 400 grit stones, about 5 seconds on each cylinder moving it rapidly, about 2 strokes up and down per second.

 

I also found this....



yes thats right, my timing belt was rubbing against the lower cover, and I dont know why. All the belt guides were in place as normal, so this should have never happened.

 

Um check to make sure you have both of the "washers" that go in between the block and a the timing belt sprocket and the crank pulley, depending on what block it is.

 

Of course I did, cmon now, you really think I would make an amateur mistake like that? lol B20 only has one guide on the outside because of the shape of the cog at the bottom which has the block side guide built onto it along with the notches for the crank sensor. Which Im not using. Honda shows two different ones in the parts diagram, the older style has two of those guides which i am familiar with from my b18.

 

Loved the plan, hate it didn't work out.

I had a B18C1 shortblock that I swear to this day is/was cursed. I never had so much random crap happen to a motor. I hope your engine isn't the long lost NE cousin.

Good look man, looking forward to what you end up with!