Engine Preparation and mounting
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Before I mounted the engine in the chassis it was necessary to carry out a little preparation work.
All Bikes Sump Windage Plate
First thing to do was to fit the All Bikes sump windage plate. I emptied the final few drips of oil from the sump, laid the engine down on its side and removed the oil pan. Looking inside the crankcase was really interesting. Everything was so clean with no signs of wear anywhere and there is a surprising amount of empty space in there.
As supplied the sump plate was a little rough round the edges. I took some time to remove any swarf that might end up inside my engine. The oil pickup and loop tube were removed and the oil relief valve simply pulled out. it was then possible to lay the plate inside the engine in order to determine where to drill the crankcase web. Turns out that the holes are required either side of the coolant pipe. With the plate removed and the engine protected from swarf by a combination of duct tape and cardboard I set about drilling and tapping two 4mm holes into the crankcase. To say my arse was pouting would be an understatement, not the sort of thing you want to make a mess of, although the web was actually quite substantial and very tall so nothing would get knackered. I drilled two 3mm holes stopping regularly to vacuum out the swarf and then set about tapping these to M4. I was very careful with this, backing the tap out very often, as the last thing I wanted was a broken tap stuck in my crankcase.
The oil relief valve tulip simply sat on the end of the relief valve assembly which then just pushes back into the brankcase. The plate was secured by the oil pickup and loop pipe screws and the additional two M4 screws that I tapped. At this point it was possible to see that the tulip was fouling slightly on the plate and I removed the plate to elongate this hole slightly. All the bolts were liberally loctited and torqued to an agonisingly low 10Nm. A new oil pan gasket was used and I attempted to put the oil pan back on only to find that there was no hole in the plate for the oil level sensor. I could have removed this and it will be pretty much redundant with the addition of an oil pressure sensor, but I decided to keep it and cut a small hole in the baffle plate. The location of the sender is fairly central and as such another carefully cut hole isn't going to allow lots of oil to surge out of the sump. The plate was in and out of the engine a few more times now for fine adjustments to the new hole and being thoroughly cleaned before going back into the engine for the final time. Getting the oil pan on was quite tricky as there is a return pipe with an o-ring on it that goes through the plate and into the crankcase further up. Needless to say that this fell off above the plate and so it all had to come out again...Finally it was all back together and the oil pan screws were loctited and torqued to 10Nm.
The sump plate sits approximately 10mm above the oil pan to crankcase joint - certainly below the max oil level and the oil pickup and loop pipe is lowered in the engine by about 1mm due to the panel being clamped by these. Hopefully the pickup will still pull sufficient volume of oil out of the sump and the loop pipe o-rings will still seal. I'm sure they do...The relief valve tulip ends just below the level of the oil pan gasket thus redirecting all the oil from this into the rearmost baffled section of the sump. Overall the baffle plate and tulip look very effective and if they can prevent oil surge in a F1 sidecar outfit then my Striker should be fine.
Oil Temperature and Pressure Sensors
I also wanted to fit oil temperature and pressure sensors to the engine to keep and eye on things. I originally considered tapping the oil temp sensor into one of a pair of mounting lugs on the oil pan that were very substantial. there were a couple of places to put the pressure sensor. The R1 has a single oil circuit with oil flowing from the pump round the loop pipe, into the oil cooler matrix back along the front gallery to the filter and then along the central galley and up to the crankcase, gearbox and head. Possible sites for a pressure sensor are then in the big oil cooler nut or into the end of one of the galleries with the front being the most accessible and also where All Bikes has their pressure sensor. I didn't really fancy the idea of pulling out the core plug in the end of this gallery and tapping to to 1/8" NTPF and so I decided on an alternative, less potentially destructive solution. I decided that a modified oil filter sandwich plate would be the easiest way of getting two or more sensors into the oil flow. The R1 oil filter is 69mm outer diameter with the o-ring 56mm ID to 62mm OD. I made a few calls and eventually found what I needed at Think. They did a billet aluminium sandwich plate which was 68mm OD with an o-ring seating 54mm ID and 65mm OD and could supply an M20x1.5 threaded hollow bolt for the centre. This had two 1/2" BSP ports and they had 1/8" NPT adapters. The sandwich plate was provided with a 50% discount because it was scratched inside and the adapters with 25% - I wasn't fussed about the scratch because I needed to drill though the plate anyway. This is very important - a sandwich plate is designed to divert the oil flow out around an oil cooler or whatever and blocking the ports will block the oil flow and your engine will go pop. In order to prevent this I drilled eight M6 holes through the outer portion of the plate as the oil filter has eight M5 holes into its outer part. It was also necessary to file down the inner surface of the plate to accommodate the nut on the M20 screw onto which the filter screws, which would otherwise foul on the plate and prevent the o-ring compressing and sealing. Also the space for the straight side of the sandwich plate where the ports are is very limited on the R1 to around the 4 o'clock position and it was necessary to file a slight chamfer on the edge of the plate in order to clear the crankcase and not prevent the o-ring compressing and sealing. Also the sensors I used from ETB need earth continuity, so it was necessary to remove some of the anodising where the sendors mount to the adapters, the adapters to the plate and the plate to the oil filter screw. All in all one very second hand sandwich plate, but a very neat, non duestructive and reversible manner of attaching two sensors in the oil flow.
Air Injection System Removal
The 2000 model year R1 engine has an Air Injection System Fitted that allows air into the exhaust headers idle and part throttle/fast idle to burn off hydrocarbons. I wanted to tap the exhaust port inlets before the engine was fitted so that this could be removed easily after I saw what the emissions were like with it. It was my original plan to see if this would be good enough to get the engine through the SVA emissions test. I suspect that there is a chance that it would pass the CO2 and HCO test at fast idle but unlikely that the engine will run absolutely stoichemetrically for a lambda reading of 0.97-1.02. In which case, in common with all other carbed engines, I will need a full closed loop cat system with air bleed valves and might as well ditch the AIS now. That is what I decided to do. The AIS valves and plumbing was removed in about five minutes and I set about tapping the exhaust port unions. These were IRO 7mm ID so I set about them with an M8 tap. These unions seemed to be made of something very hard indeed and it was very difficult to tap a thread into them, literally a tiny amount at a time. It took me half a day to tap about 4 threads into each one! I think that these unions would actually pull out of the head very easily, I could certainly rotate them by hand, and then they could be blocked with a small core plug. For the time being my ports are blocked by four M8 cap head screws, loctited in with a copper washer to seal them. The manifold pressure pipe into cylinder 1 was blocked by simply glueing a screw up a short length of the rubber pipe. The engine now looks really bare without the AIS plumbing, but I suppose it is one less thing to go wrong!
Engine Fitting
With the prep work completed I was able to put the engine in for (perhaps) the last time. The original location of the engine as mounted by Sylva had the sprocket absolutely in line with centreline of the chassis and the diff. This unfortunately meant that the front of the cam cover protruded by about 3-5mm outside of the chassis rail. I had originally considered sawing off the corner of the cam cover as it seemed possible to lose a couple of mm off the casting without causing any problems, but probably not enough. As I really didn't want a tiny bit of engine sticking out the side of the bonnet and was prepared to sacrifice a degree or two of prop angle to cosmetics, I therefore turned my attention to trying to push the engine over as far as possible to the right-hand side of the chassis with the existing mounts. By elongating the mounts on the chassis for the front right-hand side engine mounts and generally giving the engine a good shove with the bolts all loose it was possible to get the cam cover back inside the extremities of the chassis. With the engine mounting bolts all torqued up I lifted the chassis back onto the axle stands ready for the suspension to go on.
With the engine in I was then able to fit the exhaust manifold. A bit of careful shoving to get the studs lined up and being careful not to ding the freshly panelled side.