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Mike K's '79 242 Barn Car Revival
- Thread starter Stiggy Pop
- Start date
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2002
- Location
- Rockville, MD
congrats for getting it out before the salt returns.
redblockpowered
bad username length
- Joined
- May 5, 2015
- Location
- Swampscott, MA
Big fan of clutch pedals that require a normal amount of effort. Makes a huge difference in drivability.
Enjoy the car!
Enjoy the car!
mikezohsix
Active member
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2008
- Location
- granville ma
Few would understand the amount of effort, thought, money and emotion that you invest in your cars. As usual, the results speak for themselves. Congratulations. Keep working the tune and enjoy it!
Ginger Ninja
Member
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2011
- Location
- Australia
That sounds like it means business. What's the cam in there now?
Stiggy Pop
In the cool kids club
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2011
- Location
- Granville, MA
Wooo! Thanks guys. Boy I managed to condense more than half a year's hard work into under three pages. Back in the day this would have been a daily blog 
Flattering! Need to get you some videos when I can drive it in anger
me driving my car wondering if the head will break:
I think it sounds like ultimate Volvo. 16v's are what don't sound like volvos (or good)
hit me up this weekend!
I think I got my head above water right about as you were leaving town? My timing is impeccable yet again. And thanks, that was a big part of the push... well that and my wife is due with our first kid on 10/17 so I knew my 9 hour garage days are limited.
ditto! and my firewall appreciates it too.
Or how difficult I am to be around when I JUST WANT TO GET IT DONE. Thanks for the garage time.
Doesn't it? The cam is from Kyrk Motorsports ground based on specs from Erland Cox (I guess, I reached out to Erland first then he conferred with Reine at Kyrk and sent me over there).
14.7mm lift on the intake, 14mm exhaust, 267-264 at .050" 108* LSA.
Sounds awesome, congrats on getting it on the road again! This makes for the second video of your car that has made it in my all time favorite redblock videos
Flattering! Need to get you some videos when I can drive it in anger
me driving my car wondering if the head will break:
I think it sounds like ultimate Volvo. 16v's are what don't sound like volvos (or good)
Looks like it's time for me to return those wheel spacers that I keep forgetting I still have, need to hear that thing in person.
hit me up this weekend!
I think I got my head above water right about as you were leaving town? My timing is impeccable yet again. And thanks, that was a big part of the push... well that and my wife is due with our first kid on 10/17 so I knew my 9 hour garage days are limited.
ditto! and my firewall appreciates it too.
Or how difficult I am to be around when I JUST WANT TO GET IT DONE. Thanks for the garage time.
Doesn't it? The cam is from Kyrk Motorsports ground based on specs from Erland Cox (I guess, I reached out to Erland first then he conferred with Reine at Kyrk and sent me over there).
14.7mm lift on the intake, 14mm exhaust, 267-264 at .050" 108* LSA.
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2002
- Location
- Rockville, MD
I am hoping to come back for Labor Day weekend. Maybe I can take a drive down then
Stiggy Pop
In the cool kids club
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2011
- Location
- Granville, MA
LMK if you do, if things are going alright I may try to drive out to Lime Rock that weekend and GB is a quick trip from there.
Stiggy Pop
In the cool kids club
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2011
- Location
- Granville, MA
I was indirectly reminded I never came back to update this thread. In order to avoid another massive catch up I'll try to stay a bit more on it. I do tend to be more "real time" on IG @heykornely.
Well, to the surprise of maybe few of you the head is back off the car. Yes, really, and has been since the end of August. I think I made it just under a month and 100 miles of run time... a new (low) record! It sure was good while it lasted.
There was no actual failure, or indication there was a problem. I pulled the valve cover to check lash and advance the cam timing a bit. This is the second time my hyper vigilance has caught something before it caused bigger issues, so I'll take that small win. As I was going through lash I noticed a little wiggle wiggle on a bucket. Started giving them all a wiggle test and knew immediately I had a problem, too much play in the bore... definitely more than I had on assembly. Bit the bullet and decided to pull the cam.
Luckily I had bought the Volvo cam tool from Ian he mentioned a few posts ago, thanks Ian!
The tool grabs a cam cap stud and a VC stud. Due to the size of this cam and spring pressure I was a little iffy pulling off two studs so I decided to modify the tool by mirroring it and having it bridge across the head. Ended up being basically two tools welded together, doubling the anchor points.
This worked out well and felt much more secure for lifting the cam out. I'll say that even with the tool install/removal of this cam gives me the heeby jeebies, just a tense process. Worth a note that the cam lobes looked great after being run in, so the REM polish and break-in worked out great.
As much as I tried to do mental gymnastics to tell myself it was ok (and my Dad telling me to reassemble and send it!) I knew it wasn't right and ripe for failure. Comparing it to my spare stock heads made it easy to condemn it. I haven't taken any precise measurements but it's +.003" of clearance easily. I pulled a bucket out and put it next to a stock Volvo bucket and smacked myself on the forehead...
Left stock, right Supertech. These supertech buckets are basically the last piece of the head I've carried over from the way RSI originally built it. I don't know if anyone from RSI is still on the boards, and please don't take this personally... but you guys didn't know **** about putting a head together. Stock buckets are 30mm tall, the Supertech's are 26mm. I got away with this with smaller, full base circle cams. I emphasize it as getting away with it because it was a mistake from day 1 and really never should have been selected for the application. By taking ~3mm out of the base circle of the cam the short bucket is now coming that much further out of the bore and getting all wobbly, accelerating the bore wear significantly.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D14U5VuCRko" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I won't lie, this really sucked. All of the time pulling my hair out over valve lengths, lash caps etc. and this was just totally overlooked. It's a fundamental consideration with a small base circle cam but I've never done this stuff, so I learned the hard way. I haven't been too hard on myself over it, but I sure wish I had thought of it. I am quietly frustrated with my machine shop as well. They could have caught this/thought of it when I was spending thousands of dollars with them this year, it's not like it's a Volvo specific concern. This was just an extremely expensive waste of time.
This is where I stay up at night wondering what I'm doing, throwing good money after bad. There is a major sunk cost fallacy going on with this head. Do I bin the whole damn thing, park the car for 2 years and swap the entire drivetrain? 5 pots sound good, but it'd be a full out build to make one as fast as this measly 8v. T6's are very interesting but again difficult and expensive. I have a 2JZ on ice, do I use that? Do I LS swap it? HAHAHA just kidding if I wanted a camaro I'd buy one. But don't get it twisted, I could put any engine in this car I set my mind to... there's a reason I'm still here with the 8v, I just like it.
While I'm still weighing options, I have decided the head has enough value it's worth fixing and above all else I want to spend some time driving and enjoying the car. SO the head is fixable; I just need to have the bores opened up from 37mm to 37.5 or 38mm. Luckily this is a done thing in Sweden where they know more about these things! So I ordered a set of 38mm buckets from KL Racing. Aside from being wider they are also 35mm tall to account for the big cams, a whopping 9mm taller than what I was running.. sheeeesh.
The working height/thickness of these is ~6mm which is basically all of my lash cap height. I cannot run without lash caps for two reasons: the valve tips aren't hardened and I don't want to have to re-tip valves to adjust lash anyways. I ordered them anyways thinking I could machine the height of the post down to suit. Unfortunately the "roof" section is quite thick and there is less than 2mm of actual post on the inside to work with so it's kind of a non-starter. On top of that KL advised that the manufacturer "does not recommend any additional machining", I suspect due to concerns over hardening. My plan was to have the post itself hardness tested pre-and-post machining but I never actually got to that point. Note that I can't take all of the length here off the valve tip itself because I'll foul the lash cap on the lock/retainer. It's all of the same math I did in my spreadsheet earlier this year, balancing the heights here and there to get the assembly correct.
I also found a set of 38mm buckets at ACM, which had a ~5mm post height. That could work with my setup if I went from a .080" lash cap down to something in the ~.060" range. I ordered those the first week of September and have heard nothing from ACM since, so I just filed a PayPal dispute
. If those came I could theoretically get this thing into the shop.
I am still at work stop for this... if anyone can get me a lead on buckets that meet spec I'd really appreciate it. Like I said need 37.5-38mm diameter, 35mm height ideally, and a post/effective height in the 3.5-5mm range. ACM actually had the 38's listed as SAAB? But that hint has not helped me find good alternatives.
Once I kind of fizzled out on parts I just got sick of chasing the numbers and don't want to find myself in March with no way to put the car together again. So I started emailing with Erland Cox again. We are still working out details so I won't really get into what it'll end up being, as I don't even really know yet. The short version is I told Erland I wanted a complete 8v head that would support 600bhp, and that I could drop on my block and just drive the stupid car. He makes heads like this all day long for race cars in Sweden so he basically told me he could do it no problem, and his price is barely more than I paid to do the valve job on the RSI head this year... SOLD. My goal with the Erland head is to shut my brain off and just be a customer. He's the expert, his credentials are hard to challenge, and I trust him... I'm ready to be the guy who cuts the check and just assembles things. It feels like freedom!
As part of our conversation about shaping and building this new head Erland pushed gently to use the nicer version of the cast KL Racing intake manifold which he ports out. I really don't want to. I'm kinda attached to the NIW manifold, I think it's nicer looking, a little more "special" and I don't feel like doing all of my piping and crap again. So, Erland asked me for some basic measurements of the NIW intake. We decided to take the response to the extreme to both give Erland as much data as possible, and also to prove that we are trying to think about this with some intelligence. I'm not sure how this could be relevant to other people but we did it, so I figured I'd drop it here for posterity.
Below are the dimensions and volumes of a NIW 8v intake manifold. Probably the key takeaways here are the overall volume at ~5,445cc and the volume of the runners at 138cc per or 552cc overall. I am not smart enough to use this information for head building or tuning... but maybe Erland or someone else is? Feel free to check the math, the numbers are definitely approximate but hopefully reasonably close.
So that's about it for 2022. Quite a year for the car, a ton of progress but a little bit of the two steps forward, one back deal. I am really hoping that things go well with Erland this winter and I can pull the car out of storage in the spring, drop a nice head on it and just drive it in 2023! Then I can get the RSI head fixed on the side and keep both, sell one... whatever. Erland has sent me a few examples of race cars in Sweden running his heads and it's hard not to be impressed. He sent one running a setup similar to what he said he'd do for me that was making 675bhp at 2 bar. Why ARE the swedes so much better at this than we are?
Part of the push in this direction to kind of simplify some things is that I had an baby on 10/10. Little dude named Graham who is going to keep me plenty busy. I'd rather spend the winter hanging out with him than banging my head against the garage wall. Being that his last name is Kornely he will eventually be hanging out with me in the garage, he will appreciate and have a deep familial connection to SAABs and Volvos, and his first car will be cool. These are non-negotiable's in this household
I do have one big change planned for the car for 2023, something I actually got the ball rolling on like 4 months ago and am just waiting on backordered stuff. I am keeping it top secret for now, though. It is ostensibly performance related but it is largely just something I've wanted for a while and a bit of fun. If this car is back in action in the spring with that new gear and a Swedish head I'll be super happy. Hell I might even like it enough again to get back to thinking about painting it
Well, to the surprise of maybe few of you the head is back off the car. Yes, really, and has been since the end of August. I think I made it just under a month and 100 miles of run time... a new (low) record! It sure was good while it lasted.
There was no actual failure, or indication there was a problem. I pulled the valve cover to check lash and advance the cam timing a bit. This is the second time my hyper vigilance has caught something before it caused bigger issues, so I'll take that small win. As I was going through lash I noticed a little wiggle wiggle on a bucket. Started giving them all a wiggle test and knew immediately I had a problem, too much play in the bore... definitely more than I had on assembly. Bit the bullet and decided to pull the cam.
Luckily I had bought the Volvo cam tool from Ian he mentioned a few posts ago, thanks Ian!
The tool grabs a cam cap stud and a VC stud. Due to the size of this cam and spring pressure I was a little iffy pulling off two studs so I decided to modify the tool by mirroring it and having it bridge across the head. Ended up being basically two tools welded together, doubling the anchor points.
This worked out well and felt much more secure for lifting the cam out. I'll say that even with the tool install/removal of this cam gives me the heeby jeebies, just a tense process. Worth a note that the cam lobes looked great after being run in, so the REM polish and break-in worked out great.
As much as I tried to do mental gymnastics to tell myself it was ok (and my Dad telling me to reassemble and send it!) I knew it wasn't right and ripe for failure. Comparing it to my spare stock heads made it easy to condemn it. I haven't taken any precise measurements but it's +.003" of clearance easily. I pulled a bucket out and put it next to a stock Volvo bucket and smacked myself on the forehead...
Left stock, right Supertech. These supertech buckets are basically the last piece of the head I've carried over from the way RSI originally built it. I don't know if anyone from RSI is still on the boards, and please don't take this personally... but you guys didn't know **** about putting a head together. Stock buckets are 30mm tall, the Supertech's are 26mm. I got away with this with smaller, full base circle cams. I emphasize it as getting away with it because it was a mistake from day 1 and really never should have been selected for the application. By taking ~3mm out of the base circle of the cam the short bucket is now coming that much further out of the bore and getting all wobbly, accelerating the bore wear significantly.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D14U5VuCRko" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I won't lie, this really sucked. All of the time pulling my hair out over valve lengths, lash caps etc. and this was just totally overlooked. It's a fundamental consideration with a small base circle cam but I've never done this stuff, so I learned the hard way. I haven't been too hard on myself over it, but I sure wish I had thought of it. I am quietly frustrated with my machine shop as well. They could have caught this/thought of it when I was spending thousands of dollars with them this year, it's not like it's a Volvo specific concern. This was just an extremely expensive waste of time.
This is where I stay up at night wondering what I'm doing, throwing good money after bad. There is a major sunk cost fallacy going on with this head. Do I bin the whole damn thing, park the car for 2 years and swap the entire drivetrain? 5 pots sound good, but it'd be a full out build to make one as fast as this measly 8v. T6's are very interesting but again difficult and expensive. I have a 2JZ on ice, do I use that? Do I LS swap it? HAHAHA just kidding if I wanted a camaro I'd buy one
. But don't get it twisted, I could put any engine in this car I set my mind to... there's a reason I'm still here with the 8v, I just like it.While I'm still weighing options, I have decided the head has enough value it's worth fixing and above all else I want to spend some time driving and enjoying the car. SO the head is fixable; I just need to have the bores opened up from 37mm to 37.5 or 38mm. Luckily this is a done thing in Sweden where they know more about these things! So I ordered a set of 38mm buckets from KL Racing. Aside from being wider they are also 35mm tall to account for the big cams, a whopping 9mm taller than what I was running.. sheeeesh.
The working height/thickness of these is ~6mm which is basically all of my lash cap height. I cannot run without lash caps for two reasons: the valve tips aren't hardened and I don't want to have to re-tip valves to adjust lash anyways. I ordered them anyways thinking I could machine the height of the post down to suit. Unfortunately the "roof" section is quite thick and there is less than 2mm of actual post on the inside to work with so it's kind of a non-starter. On top of that KL advised that the manufacturer "does not recommend any additional machining", I suspect due to concerns over hardening. My plan was to have the post itself hardness tested pre-and-post machining but I never actually got to that point. Note that I can't take all of the length here off the valve tip itself because I'll foul the lash cap on the lock/retainer. It's all of the same math I did in my spreadsheet earlier this year, balancing the heights here and there to get the assembly correct.
I also found a set of 38mm buckets at ACM, which had a ~5mm post height. That could work with my setup if I went from a .080" lash cap down to something in the ~.060" range. I ordered those the first week of September and have heard nothing from ACM since, so I just filed a PayPal dispute
. If those came I could theoretically get this thing into the shop. I am still at work stop for this... if anyone can get me a lead on buckets that meet spec I'd really appreciate it. Like I said need 37.5-38mm diameter, 35mm height ideally, and a post/effective height in the 3.5-5mm range. ACM actually had the 38's listed as SAAB? But that hint has not helped me find good alternatives.
Once I kind of fizzled out on parts I just got sick of chasing the numbers and don't want to find myself in March with no way to put the car together again. So I started emailing with Erland Cox again. We are still working out details so I won't really get into what it'll end up being, as I don't even really know yet. The short version is I told Erland I wanted a complete 8v head that would support 600bhp, and that I could drop on my block and just drive the stupid car. He makes heads like this all day long for race cars in Sweden so he basically told me he could do it no problem, and his price is barely more than I paid to do the valve job on the RSI head this year... SOLD. My goal with the Erland head is to shut my brain off and just be a customer. He's the expert, his credentials are hard to challenge, and I trust him... I'm ready to be the guy who cuts the check and just assembles things. It feels like freedom!
As part of our conversation about shaping and building this new head Erland pushed gently to use the nicer version of the cast KL Racing intake manifold which he ports out. I really don't want to. I'm kinda attached to the NIW manifold, I think it's nicer looking, a little more "special" and I don't feel like doing all of my piping and crap again. So, Erland asked me for some basic measurements of the NIW intake. We decided to take the response to the extreme to both give Erland as much data as possible, and also to prove that we are trying to think about this with some intelligence. I'm not sure how this could be relevant to other people but we did it, so I figured I'd drop it here for posterity.
Below are the dimensions and volumes of a NIW 8v intake manifold. Probably the key takeaways here are the overall volume at ~5,445cc and the volume of the runners at 138cc per or 552cc overall. I am not smart enough to use this information for head building or tuning... but maybe Erland or someone else is? Feel free to check the math, the numbers are definitely approximate but hopefully reasonably close.
So that's about it for 2022. Quite a year for the car, a ton of progress but a little bit of the two steps forward, one back deal. I am really hoping that things go well with Erland this winter and I can pull the car out of storage in the spring, drop a nice head on it and just drive it in 2023! Then I can get the RSI head fixed on the side and keep both, sell one... whatever. Erland has sent me a few examples of race cars in Sweden running his heads and it's hard not to be impressed. He sent one running a setup similar to what he said he'd do for me that was making 675bhp at 2 bar. Why ARE the swedes so much better at this than we are?
Part of the push in this direction to kind of simplify some things is that I had an baby on 10/10. Little dude named Graham who is going to keep me plenty busy. I'd rather spend the winter hanging out with him than banging my head against the garage wall. Being that his last name is Kornely he will eventually be hanging out with me in the garage, he will appreciate and have a deep familial connection to SAABs and Volvos, and his first car will be cool. These are non-negotiable's in this household
I do have one big change planned for the car for 2023, something I actually got the ball rolling on like 4 months ago and am just waiting on backordered stuff. I am keeping it top secret for now, though. It is ostensibly performance related but it is largely just something I've wanted for a while and a bit of fun. If this car is back in action in the spring with that new gear and a Swedish head I'll be super happy. Hell I might even like it enough again to get back to thinking about painting it
- Joined
- May 11, 2007
- Location
- Niketown, OR
Congrats on Graham Kornely, good job tossing sunk cost aside, and looking forward to finding out what this top secret business is all about.
redblockpowered
bad username length
- Joined
- May 5, 2015
- Location
- Swampscott, MA
I have a stock BMW S14 bucket here on my desk that is 37.5 mm bore and 29 mm tall. S38 might be the same or similar, this one's OEM BMW and set up for shim over bucket. Surely there are aftermarket ones for gnarlier cams.
Edit: also, congratulations!
Edit: also, congratulations!
Stiggy Pop
In the cool kids club
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2011
- Location
- Granville, MA
Thanks again, and for all of the commiseration this week. I know you in particular are going to dig the new parts? I would just say what it is but I?m afraid if I do it won?t work out somehow!
I actually think the supertech?s I?ve got may be commonly used in s14 apps. Do you have the working height by any chance? My thought on length is a) the Swedes use 35mm and they?re smarter than me b) stock 30mm+3mm base circle reduction as a minimum length.
Wouldn?t it be cool if I ended up with both heads in hand and enough time to play with them on your flow setup? Would be super interesting to see the ?RSI+? vs Erland head by the numbers.
The candle that burns twice as bright burns for 100 miles.. or something. Don't hesitate to hit me up if you ever need a flashlight holder to help you put things back together.
And congratulations!
Tentshedtrev
Member
- Joined
- May 6, 2016
- Location
- Vancouver Island, Canada
Congrats dude! and hats off to sticking with the 8v platform. Its inspiring to see someone push them, without the massive knowledge base that those on the other side of the pond benefit from. Thanks for documenting all the success and failure, however, I feel like I am taking the easy way out with a whiteblock now..
redblockpowered
bad username length
- Joined
- May 5, 2015
- Location
- Swampscott, MA
I don't know on the BMW buckets off the top of my head. I agree they're too short as is. I'll measure. And yes, that'd be very cool. Lots of fun stuff going on here lately.
Ginger Ninja
Member
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2011
- Location
- Australia
Secret sauce is gearbox for 600hp yeah?
Stiggy Pop
In the cool kids club
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2011
- Location
- Granville, MA
Thanks guys! Trev I get little pangs of FOMO when I see you truckin through projects and I haven?t touched my tig in two months now lol? but there will be time!
Will have to see if Erland is quick enough that I?m not too antsy to get it on by the time it?s here? I would love the data.
I can?t believe you spoiled my swangaz reveal
Ya know I never really launch the car and the t5z has all the mods? I feel like it?s got legs to survive. I did tell Tate yesterday when he has the DCT package and tune completely dialed I could be swayed?