Air Head
Now to put my attention
on getting the valve gear completed and ready to run it on air. Found
that the piston valve rings that I bought were too small. Instead of
trying to find the right size, I decided to makes the rings myself.
After a couple attempts, the results were excellent. Here they are on
the valve.
I put the new
rings in, lubed her up, connected the air hose and - Wa La; She ran on
air for the first time! Super Cooooll!!!! I video taped the event but
it's too big to put here. So instead I took this picture when she was
running (can't see her moving in this photo but she was).
I was so anxious
to get her running on air that I forgot to set the valves and the valve
gear. So need I say that it ran, but not too well. After I spent a
couple more days tuning everything, I tried running on air again and
this time it needed almost no air at all to start the wheels moving.
Reeeeaaal Smoooooth! Here's a picture of the valve stem with marks
(hard to see) which were used to set the valve gear.
After checking some things out, I found that the
rings in the piston valve had too much blow-by. I decided to re-machine
the piston valves to take beefier rings and then made stronger rings to
go with it. Solved the blow-by problem. Re-timed the valve gear and
then ran it on air again. With the rings in the main pistons and
beefier piston valve rings, the engine ran with very little air
pressure. I also noticed that the engine ran faster on the same amount
of air when I moved the cutoff from about 80% to 60%. It used less air
but you don't get that nice strong exhaust sound with the smaller
cutoff. |