Keep it comin along, were all reading!!

Why are the rod bolts welded?
Why are there little pin holes in the top of the pistons?

Rich

A 2.6 Ltr will make one hell of a street engine! Those look like steel cylinders. Have you done this sort of thing before? I've heard so many bad things about large steel cylinders. I've been thinking of doing something similar although a little smaller. What heads are you using? Are you doing anything special to help the heads seal better?

Keep us informed!! Thanks for posting.

Why not just degree it and find out for yourself? It's not uncommon for actual cam specs' to not jibe with the card. Sometimes they get mislabled or misboxed, or even ground wrong. Degreeing is a good way to ensure you got what you wanted, or find out what you have.

I don't quite understand going with the stock weight flywheel. I'm using a 10lbs flywheel with an aluminum pressure plate and solid disc and I don't have any trouble with it being "too light", far from it! It just makes the thing easier to shift for me, and stop-and-go traffic on the bayshore doesn't bother me in that car.

I autocross my car and drive it on the freeway. Didn't notice much difference in mileage when I got the light pressure plate. I can get at least 14mpg if I drive the speed limit. How much difference have you noticed in mileage?

I would think you'd get worse mileage with a heavy flywheel. I thought they were beefy to handle the heat.

Mostly they're heavy to improve idle and keep idiots who can't handle a clutch from stalling at stoplights.

Consider this - when the car is in motion, THE ENTIRE CAR is attached to the rotating mass...

There was a guy from Hawaii trying to promote the 'heavy flywheel makes for better mileage' theory about 20 years ago. You can tell how god an idea it is by observing all the 100-lb flywheels on Hondas and such...

By itself the weight of the flywheel has nothing to do with fuel mileage,
except that if a person has difficulty operating an engine with a lightened flywheel they may experience reduced mpgs.

Well, there is a tradeoff... acceleration. And a point of diminishing return... which I'm sure is well short of 100lbs. A heavier flywheel will keep the engine speed more constant, which will result in better fuel economy. How much better? I dunno. Probably still depends more on the driver.

I know of a guy that put a huge flywheel under his Pinto. He'd spool it up, shut the engine off, and drive home on the flywheel. Regenerative braking put energy back into the flywheel.

Light flywheels impact MPG because they require more constant throttle trim and that works the accelerator pump action more than anything..

I choose the flywheel based o the application.. I left the flywheel stock weight for my 2.4 going in the double cab, because it has a 915 trans and is heavy.. The larger the engine, the less notable the light flywheel actually is.. and remember, the stock 901 steel shoes pressure plate weighs 9 pounds by its self.

The heavier flywheel means higher system inertial which reduces shocks to the motor and tends to balance and smooth things out. When you have a heavier flywheel, you increase the resistance to changes in the motor's rotational rate. This can be a good thing if you want to increase the durability of your motor and keep rapid changes in rotational momentum (aka shock and Jerk) from trying to stop the motor. The shock and "jerk" loads apply instantaneous high pressure spikes to the motor components and the pressure fed bearings, and these loads can cause the oil film in the pressure fed bearings to be thinned dramatically or squeezed out.

Hmmm.... that may help explain why there are no 30 year old Honduh engines left- low mass flywheels, marginally sized bearing and wear surfaces resulting in high wear and high shock loads to the system...

Sorry Jake, it's the engineer nerd in me....

You must be referring to an old series of Hondas that I'm not familiar with. the D-series and B-series honda engines I've seen have been very reliable, and have pretty damn heavy flywheels.

Who cares....

Show more pics of the motor build....

Rich

Do you have any idea how much mass would be required to actually accomplish that? The only way to put energy back into the flywheel is to increase its rotational velocity. A rather complex system would be required to transfer braking energy to the flywheel.
An engineer friend told me that BMW was trying to develop a flywheel system and killed someone during testing. They didn't have the test cell adequately built to protect people from a runaway flywheel, and something went wrong. If it was a good, safe idea and not too complex it would have already been implemented by a car mfr.

Who manufactures those 103s?

May be BS, but I came across it while I was doing research on alternative power in 1982. I have always been skeptical of the regenerative braking claim... as I recall, it was in an issue of Pop Science or some such. Braking energy could be fed back into the flywheel via an electrical motor... not terribly complex. The most complex part of the claim would be converting braking energy into electrical energy. It was a test mule built by a college professor.

The article also did not say how far his drive home was... I assume it could be measured in blocks.

Superior in what way? What type of testing?

Easy peasy...
Use an elec generator as the drive system on the wheel...like Porsche did.
Its a very simple way to brake.....
Very proven old technology.

Rich

looking good.

Can you come up with a safe crank for rabbit rods....one that wont break?

Rich

You can grind a 2.0 crank to rabbit rods if you want a stock stroke. That's what I have in my car, as do at least a dozen other 914s in this area.

There is nothing wrong with the journal size on it's own, the diesel rabbits used that journal, and I can't imagine anything that would put more load on it than a diesel.

The tricky area comes when you take a crank designed for a larger journal and take it down to a smaller size. Thats where knowing what you're doing becomes the important part.

The Williams F1 team announced last year that they were developing a flywheel based KERS system (kenetic energy recovery system) for this season. It has not yet been used in a race and probably won't be. Williams have not said much about their system. All of the teams that have used KERS this year have used generator/motor and battery systems.