Steve
Thought you were doing better with the new cam ? Dave Andrews told me you had another 9 horses ?
Durability depends very much on how much you use the engine, and how much you rev it. track use will shorten any engines life enormously !!! Do you really think these Hondas are lasting 100’000 miles on the track !!!
!!!Honda Mugen were completely rebuilding thier BTCC engines every race, they were completely knackered and those engines were limited to only 8500rpm. I think the balancing help I gave them helped a lot , but if you rev any engine hard for sustained periods it will wear .Thats half the point of forced induction engines, lots of go without having to rev it, therefore they last better.
Simon
Last year’s engine made ~215bhp and with the cam timing set in a particular manner 160lbft, and all this was only possible with the addition of the unequal length trumpets. The way I ran it gave ~156-157lbft.
My new scholar evo2 block (just laguna liners, no block welding) and fully balanced tungsten inserted crank made the same mid range, better bottom end - >10lbft between 3000-4500rpm, but less top end. When I asked Steve at Vibration Free about the lack of top-end he wasn’t surprised and explained that the crank was made 2.5kg heavier so I’m not going to get the same top end - there is more work for the engine to do simply spinning. So it made 208bhp.
I tried a new cam grind and that gave torque everywhere and got me back to 215bhp and 159lbft.
There isn’t much left to try now, so to get real world 220bhp/160lbft figures isn’t easy at all.
Also your point seems to be that the K is a great design. But it clearly isn’t in reality - just in principle - given that most of the components need changing to build a powerful version.
The list is unmodifed parts left on my engine are:
Water pump,
Crank ladder,
Oil ladder,
Cam ladder,
VHPD flywheel (this has been balanced)
Hmmm…
And what’s all this about durability? The story you are telling is that the tuned K will outlast Honda’s etc… But the Honda’s being run in track cars including Elises are lasting 10s of thousands of miles, as do Audi’s and Duratecs. the other engines don’t need to be completely re-engineered to cope either!
Please stop refering to BTCC Mugen engines. They are not at all relevant to this discussion - we are talking how good the K series is and how easy it is to get 220bhp and that it will be bullet proof. Not how we can get a production block to make as much power as possible with the limitation of the F3 air restrictor.
Your poor case for the K keeps going off topic by trying to discuss too many claims that you are makign in one thread.
In the main it is cheaper to get better reliabiliy and 200bhp performance from a different brand of engine. Unless you can DIY things like I have done, but even then I expect mine will go pop before an Audi/Honda?Duratec providing the same power and given the same useage.
If it were possible to do it with the K then people who’s skill in life is not Sculpting would be doing this already. There was/is a big enough market for it. Judd have recently entered the market, but the prices they are charging are astronomic, and the rebuild intervals are VERY low.
No-one has done it successfully. I feel what Brian Drought and I did to my engine is the most reliable yet to be fitted in my car - it solves the liners issue and the crank counter balance issues. But its still not making the power and it uses one the best head ports Dave Andrews has done (proven by the results I get compared to others with similar specs of engine in the past). And its only been running for 4k miles, and is one of a kind so doens’t really give much bases to make across the board assumptions for reliability.
SteveB