Coach's Booster Plate...Step by step

[coach]

Hey Guys,
I made a few plates for some fellows and decided to take a few photos. They go from raw Stainless steel to the finished product. It takes about 2.5 hours to make one. Any questions, just ask.

Pics are,
1. 316 SS sheet.
2. 4x4 plate and scale drawing of program
3. Centered drilled
4. Holes finished and slots sized. Ready to cut shape.
5. Shape cut on Charmilles 4030 wire EDM machine.
6. Finished plate ready to flat grind.
7. Totally finished plate, flat within 0.0005.

:biggrin:

 

[coach]

Pics 5-6-7.

 

[Red C5]

Nice work, Coach. Why are you using 420 stainless? Is that just an alloy you guys use on a regualr basis?

 

[coach]

Hello Red,
The original Kenne Bell plates were aluminum. They had terrible wear under your gears and I have seen plates with better then a 0.010 groove. The metal particles in your engines oil would become slightly magnetised and make a slurry under the gears because it wanted to stick to them. I originally used 304 Stainless because it is totally non magnetic and would not allow the fine metal particles in the engine oil to form the slurry. This created a problem for me when flat grinding the plates as they would not hold flat to grind them. I switched to 420 so I could have a little magnetism for the machining part on my end, then I run them thru our huge de-magnetiser along with the oil pumps gears to insure there is no residual magnetism left. Since particles become magnetised from a hammering action, just running thru the pump should not allow this to happen and greatly reduce the amount of particles that will stick to the gears. The SS has much great resistance to wear then the original aluminum plates did. It is now possible to set up your oil pump with incredibly tight tolerances for great oil pressure. I would guess these are a much better product then the others, but also cost more to produce. When it comes to your engines oiling, it is a small cost compared to replacing items from bad oil pressure.

:biggrin:

 

[Red C5]

Great info. I didn't doubt the switch from aluminum to stainless. Was more curious about the reasoing behind the 4 series over a more common 304. I appreciate the reply. Makes perfect sense. I have a bit of metal a few machines as well.

 

[TurboBob]

I've seen this wear before and a lot of times it wasn't 'even'. Kinda like the pump drive shaft wasn't square to the surface where you bolt the oil filter adapter.

It might make sense to check this and true up that surface to ensure the gears hit flat.

Also, the gears I have seen were not very flat on the 'bottom' and you might tune this up some also.

All this begs the question: is it better to have the bottom of the gears dead flat against a dead flat plate.

Need to find an oil pump engineer to ask......

Bob

 

[coach]

I've seen this wear before and a lot of times it wasn't 'even'. Kinda like the pump drive shaft wasn't square to the surface where you bolt the oil filter adapter.

It might make sense to check this and true up that surface to ensure the gears hit flat.

Also, the gears I have seen were not very flat on the 'bottom' and you might tune this up some also.

All this begs the question: is it better to have the bottom of the gears dead flat against a dead flat plate.

Need to find an oil pump engineer to ask......

Bob

I have seen that pattern as well. I honestly never thought about the bottoms of the gears, but they are not square cut, they do have a small radius on them, so it is not a knife edge cutting in. It would take a pretty good set up to cut the pump cover and true up the shaft bore to insure it is running 90 degrees to the pump. I might set mine up and check this out. If I can make a fixture to do this, I will test it out. I would think that boreing the shaft and sleeving it for wear would help keep it aligned better. It is only aluminum. I few oil rings ground into the shaft wouldnt hurt neither.

:biggrin:

 

[techtool]

Subscribed.

 

[Paul Lohr]

This is a great idea. Thank you for taking your time to work on this and being so kind to share the idea.

I have noticed that my cam sensor and oil pump drive gear nearly bind when test assembled in the new front cover. The same soft binding occurs in my old timing cover - it does not bind as tightly as the new cover. Probably because it was used for 150K miles. I have come up with three possibilities for the binding (maybe you can add/subtract from the list):
-The oil pump shaft bore is not parallel to the cam sensor bore.
-The oil pump shaft bore is not concentric to the cam sensor bore.
-The cam sensor is not parallel/concentric to the oil pump shaft bore.

Looking at the wear marks inside of the oil pump housing (within the old front cover), it is obvious that the oil pump gears were doing some kind of weeble-wobble motion. This unintended movement of the oil pump gears surely wears the oil pump housing quickly.

I don't have any solutions just yet.

Paul Lohr