A flathead V-8 engine

I really enjoy this thread. Stunning work.:worship: After you step milled the combustion chambers did you finish them all by hand with a die grinder? If you don't mind my asking, how many hours up till now just in machine work? What scale are you building this in? Looking forward to the rest of your build.

Regards
Darrell
 
18w,
Yes, after the milling was done I used a Dremel handpiece on a flex shaft with small burrs and mounted stones to get close. I really don't like using burrs anymore than I have to. They're very unforgiving. I then went in with various riffler files to smooth everything out.
Hours? That's a good question. In machining alone on what you have seen so far, the block and heads I would say somewhere in the neighborhood of 475. That includes making special tooling, odd-ball setups etc.
In the drawings I probably have another 250 hours.
The scale is approximately 3 tenths. I started by getting all the dimensions I could for a Ford flathead and made initial drawings to full scale. After I realized I couldn't make a true Ford flathead some dimensions were altered to suit the new block style, bore spacing etc. Once I had a plan of attack I used the overall dimensions from the Ford block and scaled everything by .3.
 
:man:

I hope to be able to complete a project like this one day.
Great looking work!
 
I got an email from a fellow asking about what type of mounted stones I used for working with aluminum. I figured it would be good to share the information here also. Here's a copy of the answer that I sent him.

Hi Darrell,
These mounted stones are all on .125 shanks. They come in 3 grades that I know of, coarse, medium and fine. They are categorized by their colors, brown, blue and white. Generally I use the blue grade. They also are made with varying shapes, cylindrical, conical, disc type etc., and they also come if a multitude of sizes. For instance you can get the conical ones starting at about .125 at the tip and .187 where they are bonded to the shank. They go up form there in many different steps. I have a single point diamond dressing stone that I use for my bench grinder and if I need a certain shape I just spin it and reshape it with the dressing stone.
Most of the tool suppliers, Enco, Travers etc carry them. Most of the time I buy mine from a local tool and die supply business.
For cutting aluminum I have a stick of cutting lubricant. It's a green waxy substance that keeps the aluminum from sticking to the stone. The piece I have I've had for years. You just spin the stone and rub it on the stick. Once the grains are coated you can grind quite a bit of material.
I hope this answers your question.
George
 
The next piece I started was the front timing cover. As with the others I started with a piece of 6061 aluminum.

The stock was squared up and the mounting holes drilled. some for the eventual clearance size and some were tapped to hold the piece to the fixture plate. The back cavity was drilled and bored to size and then the distributor hole was put in.

I made step-off charts for the various shapes, distributor boss, central housing etc. The piece was then screwed to the fixture plate and the cutting begun. First was the outside of the distributor flange.

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The original intent of mounting the part and fixture plate to the rotary table for cutting was twofold. First, once the part was mounted and indicated square with the axis of the mill I could then rotate to the required angles without having to reposition it like if it had been clamped directly to the mill table. Second was for cutting the groove with a Woodruff key cutter. I used a standard thickness cutter, (.062) but had to offset the position to get the proper radius for the eventual O ring seal. The final step was to stand the part up and using the boring head in reverse, cut the diameter of the distributor flange. View attachment 92023View attachment 92024

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Here are a couple of pictures of the finish machined piece bolted to the front of the block.
gbritnell

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I am so enjoying this thread, stunning work. Please keep posting!
 
Gbritnell, I am extremely, impressed and fascinated with this project. I always had a soft spot for flatheads because my first car was a 41 ford coupe which had a flathead. I only wish that I had the time and your patience to complete such a project. Thanks for sharing. Bob
 
I have insufficient superlatives to describe this thread.
:man:
Hanging on for the next installments.
Thankyou for sharing.
 
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