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Mike K's '79 242 Barn Car Revival

There's one sitting on the shelf from me doing my heads the first time. It's in the box with all the valve tools - didn't think of it last night.
Can play with it when we degree the cam.

On the variable intake valve length,
wonder if it's where the seat is cut on the valve that is the variable. The next thing to check is if they ground the tips of the valves, which you could check by measuring from the top land of the keeper to the tip. If the numbers are different, then RSI did something even I wouldn't consider.

The tips of the valves are cut down. 98% sure of that.
 
The tips of the valves are cut down. 98% sure of that.

think they would have been cut to individual lengths, or intakes cut longer than exhaust for a purpose?

I think a lot of the variation across valves is in my measurements, but the intakes being longer than the exhausts is constant on average.

All this is at least a good excuse to buy the micrometer I told myself not to buy for myself before Christmas :)
 
think they would have been cut to individual lengths, or intakes cut longer than exhaust for a purpose?

I think a lot of the variation across valves is in my measurements, but the intakes being longer than the exhausts is constant on average.

All this is at least a good excuse to buy the micrometer I told myself not to buy for myself before Christmas :)

The intakes being longer on average can be because of a few different things, but it mostly comes down to how they cut the seats and the relation of the valve seat to the valve face.
The intake seat is about 60-75% the width of the exhaust seat, and that gives you some options on where to place it.

As far as Ferrea on the springs, valve spring harmonics are definitely a thing. By having the spring be 1-2mm from blocking, it's driving the springs natural frequency really high. It also disrupts the waves that are passing through the spring as the coils will smack into each other creating smaller destructive waves. You'll see this by clean areas between the coils that make you think the spring is binding... but it's not.

Beehive valve springs with ovate wire are the "new" fancy thing. Higher natural frequency, and reduced reciprocating mass. Win-win.

Are you planning on staying with the 3-groove keeper, or stepping up to a single groove setup? I highly recommend a single setup to prevent the keeper grooves from burring out, and to reduce the risk of a keeper being spit out.
 
On the side I'm reading forums about turbos (subaru and mistubishi guys change turbos like tires it seems). I'm in familiar territory where what I WANT to do is very expensive, but I don't want to half-do it. So it's going to be a whole lot of something or nothing at all.

If you want someone to bounce your ideas off of, I'm glad to be that someone. I'm curious to hear your plans and might be able to offer alternate ideas to help reduce the expense. Turbo matching challenges are my favorite!
 
The intakes being longer on average can be because of a few different things, but it mostly comes down to how they cut the seats and the relation of the valve seat to the valve face.
The intake seat is about 60-75% the width of the exhaust seat, and that gives you some options on where to place it.

As far as Ferrea on the springs, valve spring harmonics are definitely a thing. By having the spring be 1-2mm from blocking, it's driving the springs natural frequency really high. It also disrupts the waves that are passing through the spring as the coils will smack into each other creating smaller destructive waves. You'll see this by clean areas between the coils that make you think the spring is binding... but it's not.

Beehive valve springs with ovate wire are the "new" fancy thing. Higher natural frequency, and reduced reciprocating mass. Win-win.

Are you planning on staying with the 3-groove keeper, or stepping up to a single groove setup? I highly recommend a single setup to prevent the keeper grooves from burring out, and to reduce the risk of a keeper being spit out.

I'm not quite there yet, but expect to go with a single groove. I have to get my stuff down to Ferrea so we can start actually spec'ing the valves out. I just checked a few RSI valves and I'm finding variation in measurement between the top keeper groove and the valve tip, which would indicate they were ground down to length. Either sloppily, or very specifically to set valve lash - which would be a really stupid decision made by someone building a head, but doesn't look like I should rule those out :roll:

It's got me a little locked up on moving forward, as I need to decide what I'm telling Ferrea I want to do with lengths. I at least know that I'm not going to make a bunch of different length valves, so I need to get a length that is somewhere in the middle of the range of adjustability with the Supertech buckets and caps-or-shims (I've not made a decision there yet. Taking the advice given here, but at the same time the lash caps should work the same as shims when properly set up. And it would save me ~$300 in new buckets). That could be as simple as just sending them stock valves as well and saying make them stock length, but I need to prove out that that would play with a Supertech bucket setup. My local machine shop is pushing me to go back to stock shims and buckets, but I really, really don't want to.

If you want someone to bounce your ideas off of, I'm glad to be that someone. I'm curious to hear your plans and might be able to offer alternate ideas to help reduce the expense. Turbo matching challenges are my favorite!

You are on my to-do list! My brain is a little consumed with the valvetrain now, but once a few last decisions are made I have to get serious on the turbo. The smart thing here is do a quick and dirty rebuild and slap the Holset back on.. but that'd be a little unsatisfying :lol:
 
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You can figure out the pressures based on spring height as long as you know the spring rate. Start with installed height and measure your lift and then use the spring rate to get open pressure.
And what culburro said if you ever watch a spintron video that spring wobbles around and has a shock wave going thru it -the pressure wave. Its like a tall building being in an earthquake. Good rule of thumb for coil bind was .060" iirc. Closer to that the better.
 
I'm not quite there yet, but expect to go with a single groove. I have to get my stuff down to Ferrea so we can start actually spec'ing the valves out. I just checked a few RSI valves and I'm finding variation in measurement between the top keeper groove and the valve tip, which would indicate they were ground down to length. Either sloppily, or very specifically to set valve lash - which would be a really stupid decision made by someone building a head, but doesn't look like I should rule those out :roll:

It's got me a little locked up on moving forward, as I need to decide what I'm telling Ferrea I want to do with lengths. I at least know that I'm not going to make a bunch of different length valves, so I need to get a length that is somewhere in the middle of the range of adjustability with the Supertech buckets and caps-or-shims (I've not made a decision there yet. Taking the advice given here, but at the same time the lash caps should work the same as shims when properly set up. And it would save me ~$300 in new buckets). That could be as simple as just sending them stock valves as well and saying make them stock length, but I need to prove out that that would play with a Supertech bucket setup. My local machine shop is pushing me to go back to stock shims and buckets, but I really, really don't want to.


Grinding the tips of the valve down to get the stem protrusion into spec is very common. If you don't, then you can easily run out of available shims (like on a stock 8v). There's a factory spec for stock 8v, for instance.

The stock volvo valve length is 111mm I think, maybe 112, maybe 110.7? (it's in that range, but I don't have it right in front of me)

What will help, is if you can measure the distance from the valve tip to the base circle of the cam on one intake and one exhaust. Then send those valves to them. They can then spec a valve, retainer, and shim combo that will work with the buckets you have.
 
Grinding the tips of the valve down to get the stem protrusion into spec is very common.

from my conversations with the pros the ~.020" variation I'm seeing is NOT a common amount to be cutting valve stems down. Remember that's variation across intake valves, no two valves are the same.

What will help, is if you can measure the distance from the valve tip to the base circle of the cam on one intake and one exhaust. Then send those valves to them. They can then spec a valve, retainer, and shim combo that will work with the buckets you have.

valve tip to base circle - I can get that BUT Ferrea will get me from the tulip to the retainer, they're not in the shim and bucket business (their words, not mine) so it'll be on me to make sure the valve length plays within the goal posts of the shim/bucket setup I choose.

Gotta take a break from work here and call Supertech. If I can confirm the effective thicknesses available in the lash caps (or shims) then I can get the lengths in sight. Right now would look like I'd want a bunch of thick caps and then grind them down to spec to set lash.
 
from my conversations with the pros the ~.020" variation I'm seeing is NOT a common amount to be cutting valve stems down. Remember that's variation across intake valves, no two valves are the same.

valve tip to base circle - I can get that BUT Ferrea will get me from the tulip to the retainer, they're not in the shim and bucket business (their words, not mine) so it'll be on me to make sure the valve length plays within the goal posts of the shim/bucket setup I choose.

Gotta take a break from work here and call Supertech. If I can confirm the effective thicknesses available in the lash caps (or shims) then I can get the lengths in sight. Right now would look like I'd want a bunch of thick caps and then grind them down to spec to set lash.

KL Racing sells 8mm lash caps that are 1-5mm thick in 0.5mm increments. Should get you a good head start, if that's what you're wanting to do.

With the valve stems, it all depends on what has been done to the head before. I've seen a bunch of odd variations on 8v heads that have never been worked on.
If the head was dropped off and they told the machine shop to make everything fit and use these shims and this cam, well then you get some odd valve stem protrusions to make up for the variations in all of the parts. I've done this exact thing before for customers at my dads shop. Sometimes they just don't want to pay the $$ to get everything perfect, or they need to get a car finished up so they can make it to work ASAP.
 
KL Racing sells 8mm lash caps that are 1-5mm thick in 0.5mm increments. Should get you a good head start, if that's what you're wanting to do.

With the valve stems, it all depends on what has been done to the head before. I've seen a bunch of odd variations on 8v heads that have never been worked on.
If the head was dropped off and they told the machine shop to make everything fit and use these shims and this cam, well then you get some odd valve stem protrusions to make up for the variations in all of the parts. I've done this exact thing before for customers at my dads shop. Sometimes they just don't want to pay the $$ to get everything perfect, or they need to get a car finished up so they can make it to work ASAP.

thank you for the tip on KL!

on the second portion, that's good perspective. I still think it's a stupid decision :-P
 
Mike Senior found some supertech buckets for cheaper than I had seen them, which makes swapping over to recess/shim less of a cost imposition. Might head that way simply from an "adjustability" standpoint. The KL-Racing lash caps are in .5mm increments, so it'd be a grind-to-lash procedure. A bag of shims in .05mm increments definitely offers some advantages from a maintenance standpoint.

having fun learning!
 
Happy Spring! Learned quite a bit, made a lot of decisions, spent a LOT of money. Finally getting to the point where I can unbag the car and get down to it.

Next week is going to be a fun one :nod:

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will be running the Tate special. EFR 7670 with the 1.05 TS EWG turbine housing, but went for the SX-E style compressor cover mod. Even got it all pretty and ceramic coated... stupid money.

I'll post up pics when it comes in of course. Will also post some details on the package I ended up with from Ferrea that was an interesting process.
 
while I've been waiting for parts I needed a project so I finally got into the seats which I've been wanting to do for a few years.

This was the interior before, clean but just black.
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I've been wanting to add some lighter tones to the interior. I picked up on an old Recaro fabric they offered in the 80's which was a grey gradation. I bought fabric ages ago and finally put it to use.

The front seats were refurbished with new OE Recaro foam. I also had a torn lower bolster replaced with one made from the fabric left over from the seat centers, and the centers got the gradation fabric.

For the rear seat I had been casually looking at different rear seats I might be able to swap into the car. Partially because I hadn't found one I liked and partially out of boredom I decided to just play with the stock seat. Hackster did something similar and it was a good motivator for me to try it.

I wanted to try and add some shape to the rear seat so it didn't look like a padded park bench (stock 240 seats are abysmal no one can convince me otherwise). I stripped off the corduroy covers and drew a pattern for bolsters on the foam.

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then I scored the area I wanted to remove in a cross pattern, I had a razor blade with a mark on it so all of the lines were at the same depth. This way I could slice off the rows of squares (which looked like croutons) and have the base pretty much level.

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to smooth it out and shape it I used a scotch brite disc on a die grinder and just sanded through it, messy but worked out really well.

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The outer lines are where I wanted to cut in a bevel to blend the bolster. I used a serrated bread knife to cut a 45? then blended it by hand with the scotch brite. This is the result all shaped.

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I brought everything to my upholstery guy and he used the stock covers to make patterns. The back seat got a black Ford fabric which is a pretty good match to the black Recaro fabric (good enough for a back seat, buying Recaro fabric was out of the question $$$). Also did a red top stitching to match the fronts. I'm really excited with the results, it looks way better than the old cover and I think the shape did a lot for the looks of the seat.

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It should make the interior a lot more 'finished' looking, and help break up all that black. Can't wait to get them in the car. I think I'd like to make door panels next, and incorporate a little bit of the Recaro fabric there to tie it all together. I bought a huge sheet of ABS plastic to make custom panels and replace the cardboard. Have a vision to get rid of the door flimsy door lever and replace it with a GT3 RS style fabric door pull.. Will probably put that off for a little bit because I have a fair amount of engine work to get done now.
 
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