Build Thread 1978 Mercury Cyclone. The pig is in the pen.

I’m gonna go home tonight and tighten the belt....hell, I may even replace the perfectly good belt with a new one....seems I read somewhere that certain belts are more prone to squealing than others....then,...I’m taking it out and beating on it.

Saturday night I’ll drive it to Alabaster (30 miles one way) -in hopes of seeing my red car at the cruise-in if I can get out of here at a decent time.

Man.....


You know what fixes a persistent squealing serpentine belt?

Exactly one full revolution of the clevis that tensions the belt.

I should be stood up in the center of a circle and repeatedly blasted with a smart ray. Cause I desperately need it.

So,...I tighten the belt and start the car,....No squeal. No big deal, it routinely started cold with no noise, and only after getting hot would it do it.The plan was to let it get hot. But while it was idling,...I heard something.

The tell tale "bluh-bluh bluh" noise you hear when you have an exhaust leak.

I had one.

Right at the turbo flange. The v band clamp that I was using was the cheapest chinese piece of sht on the planet, and it wasn't properly merging the two flanges when tightened.
So I swapped it out for another one that i was using under the car and restarted it.....No more "Bluh-bluh-bluh", but I could still smell exhaust. So again I shut it off.

The two v band clamps at the merge were loose.

So I fixt that.

And restarted it. This time it's quiet... ( well as quiet as you can expect for such a noisy assed engine) But more importantly, I'm not smelling exhaust.

Yea.

I let it run.

When the fans come on, it's 190 degrees inside the engine.....This is my reference standard for a hot, fully warmed up engine. I shut the thing off, and wait.

I want it to heat soak every piece of steel attached to the engine.

I give it ten minutes.

And then a restart.

No belt squeal.

Let me say it again....

Yea!

So,..we move on to test drive. This time were checking for blowby....The required ingredients for checking blowby is:
One Monster+ One driver (me), and a liberal dosage of right foot.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Several times.
* So I don't forget to say it,..this thing gets into boost stupid quick...way faster than the previous turbo. Whether or not it makes more power I couldn't say, but it is a noisy little wheezer.....and he lets me know that he is honkin well before I feel him...
Good little wheezer....
When I'm not flat footing it, I'm cruisin.....and It's just tooling along in 4th...I'm thinkin' "What the hell am I worried about?" "It runs beautifully."

I return to the garage for the tell tale,..I lift the hood....and look.

Nothin but wet.....under the glass. Where it's sposed to be. No oily fittings,.....no oil covered valve cover....

Anybody up for a third?

Yea.

I look into the little mason jar that is the catch can....there is about 1/4" of water in there...slightly oily...It's what I want to see.

The stupid little oil/water contraption is wicking the water out of the crankcase vapors, and the monster is eating the crankcase vapors minus that moisture.

The hood bubbles are my fault....It probably happened as a result of running an unwrapped hotside within inches of the hood paint..

This is what the bubbles look like..

It's no wonder....
Now that there is a wrapped hotside, and only after running the thing at idle last night,...look at the temp difference.

Hotside,.....


cold side...

I may have to insulate the bottom side of the hood on that side to keep from advancing the problem that has started to show up there...

So,..the take away tonight is that I "think" I've remedied the squeal......I "think" I've fixed the vent issue.....I "think" I'll think about keeping the car for a little while longer.

The plan is to drive the monster to work today. A whole 5 mile one way excursion. It will serve as confirmation the the belt squeal is truly fixed.
I gotta decided what oil to put in it now that it's been running a minute.

As a rule of thumb, I have always sought out a non-detergent 30wt as a break-in oil for whatever reason. I always start an engine on a crude oil, but up until now, didn't know why it needed to be "non-detergent". After doing some research since writing that sentence, it appears that the reason for doing so is that ND oils tend to embed small debris and metal particles against the sidewalls of the engine so that bearing damage is minimized should you have any of that in your engine. Apparently, These oils were used exclusively in the early pre-oil filter days of the automobile....and was the primary reason old assed engines looked like sludged up holy hell at rebuild time.

According to what I read, converting over to a conventional detergent motor oil after that will "wash" those particles off of the engine sidewallls, and they'll be free to embed themselves anywhere they choose.

So,...what's the point of doing that? I'm damn sure not gonna keep that heavy assed oil pumping through my engine now that I've started it, and will convert over to some synthetic viscosity just as soon as I make time to do it.

The belt driven pump on this car is adjustable for pressure. When it was on the old engine, and using the temperamental digital gauge as a guide, oil pressure on a 5w30 would go down to about 30 hot idling, and stay at 45-50 cruising. But because of the stupid crap digital gauge,...there were times I'd look down and see 0. Now that I have this ND SAE 30wt in there, and on the new gauges I'll see 100+psi hot at wot, and 50-65 psi at hot idle.

If that's right,.....I wonder how much power it's taking to turn that pump to move that goop through the engine?
I'll bet more than I want to give up.

This is the same oil that I started the car on earlier this year after I got the ITBs on it, but it probably doesn't have 5 hours of total run time on it.

The plugs are the same ones that have been in it since last year when I was trying to get the thing to stop rattling before adding the water/meth, and comparably are fairly cold. But they got a lot more time on them....( But still no more than 20 hours)
I haven't as much as pulled one of them since...if the engine ain't running funky,...they're doing their job.

So thoughts turn to syn oils...last time I landed on a oil was a 10-40 syn made by pennzoil I think....

What do you guys use?

Ok....I’m saying it’s fixed.
I drove the thing to work with zero belt squeal.

But now I got this new noise to live with...

The turbo spool is so freakin loud!

I passed a truck on the highway that was a block or so ahead of me,...I was just casually accelerating, and in boost...and once I got next to the truck where the spool noise was reflecting back into my car off of the side of the truck,.... it was equivalent to you turning in the passenger seat and yelling at me.

Just by my limited understanding of turbochargers,...I have to be spinning the piss out of this thing to make it do that,...and that in turn goes directly to the turbine a/r....which must be a little too small for my engine.

Or...

I must’ve picked one that is perfect for a street driven car,...and at the same time, be done at 6k rpm.

Back home again....

Ok,...ill admit it.

The car is freakin fun now.

Now it's time to turn on the EBC, and make it awesome.

As a note of caution though, there is still oil making its way out of the engine past threaded fittings..

There is still positive pressure in the engine.

CarMichael Angelo said:

well hell.

I am literally waiting on paint to dry.

That ricer part claiming itself to be an oil/water separator is installed....kinda.

It's freakin tiny. I plumbed a -10 hose from the valve cover into the "in", and a -8 from the "out" that is now plumbed into the intake air tube in front of the turbo. The other fitting on the valve cover has a -6 running to a check valve that will not allow blow by to push out, but will allow negative suction to have a "relief valve" of sorts to ensure that I won't suck a gasket while cruising, or any other high vacuum situation.

I put a fitting into the bottom of the thing where it was plugged with a pipe plug. I'll run another -6 line to a small jar of some kind so I can see how much oil is passing into it.
we'll see if that thing doesn't end up in the trash.

The air box is painted....and like I said earlier, is waiting on paint to dry. I'm gonna have to reserve my opinion on how this thing is gonna work, because I haven't used the actual glass during the mock ups..

Maybe it'll be together for Saturday,....maybe it won't.

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xecute said:

Its time to play ketchup.





Um, Catchup....

Thumb Up Support from Down Under



I'd really press for Blow Bye checking to ease your concerns. As you add H20 base to a turbo engine, you have a huge increase on exhaust hydrogen, it doesn't lower the exhaust gas temperatures significantly, its just a way to keep it at bay without killing an 10.7;1 compression turbo engine.

I'm guessin' out loud here, but reckon somewhere, a physical leak will be found. At some stage, you might have to dye penetrate the head if you have evidence of blow-by.


I've cooked all my engines, my X flow 4.1, my wifes RAV4. As long as the head casting is well fettled aluminum, you'll be able to fix it if its a leak.

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I'm not worried about a compromised head gasket, or a crack in my cylinder head. Water is not getting into my oil, and not going out the tailpipe. If I have to guess why I have blow by issues, ( if I do) ...it's the pistons moving in the bores compromising my ring seal.

droopie85gt said:

Fixt!

I would pick an oil viscosity. 5w-30 or 10w-30 then do some logging of hot and cold starts and then adjust your oil pump accordingly. 20psi is fine at hot idle and then about 10 psi/1000 rpm. So 60-70 max, since I don't guess you're twisting that John Deer to 7k. I'm not sure what the undue stress on the external pump would do (shred the belt??) but on a 455 Buick, running 20W-50 when it's 26 out, with hot idle about 40 and running about 15psi/1000 resulted in shearing off the the roll pin in the distributor drive gear. I found an interesting read not too long ago. It's a guy who does his on oil testing. On his site he talks about how running too thick of an oil will actually cause an engine to run hotter. Which might explain why that Buford always ran HOT. It never boiled over or anything, but even in winter it would run about 210-220 no matter what I did.

https://540ratblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/motor-oil-wear-test-ranking/

Of course, when it went to methanol injection, we disconnected the water pump and never worried again!!!

Electric scavenger pumps in case you're pushing oil past the Chinee turbo oil seals.
https://www.rbracing-rsr.com/oilsystems.htm

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I was always a card carrying member of the too much oil pressure is costing me power school of thought. All of my race cars ran stock pumps, and syn oils immediately after break in.
After my oil change ( I've decided to go 10-30 syn) I'll ck my pressures...and turn that thing down if things don't settle down.

droopie85gt said:

I think the answer is machine guns...or a vacuum evac system. Not a full on racing pump. But there are electric ones you could use with a pressure switch to only run when there's more than X psi of boost. Put it at the end of your separator so the oil mist gets filtered out and with the amount you drive, it would probably last forever.

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Everything I've read is that the commonly available automotive 12v vacuum pump isn't up to the task of pulling enough vacuum to offset the pressure...do you know something that I don't, and if you do, point me to it. I'll use it in a heartbeat.