Alright! Time for a big update!
The engine is in and dyno'd, first oil change has been done and have about 1000km on it. It goes like fkn stink! The cam is a bit of a pig so no rolling burnouts, but the mid range and upper range is amazing.
You just put your foot down, the downdraft carb making amazing sucking noises and you almost slam into the car in front of you.
Some pics!
We went with short stacks on the Dyno just to get the initial fueling right.
The long stacks, with a stupid 'keep the dirt out' filter.
Swapped out the crappy black plastic cap for a nice aluminium one.
Polished up and re-bushed the engine steady. Much better. New engine shakes like an old v8.
Fixed the gear linkage
stripped a bunch of crap out for polishing
Stuart modified the dizzy for a better advance curve. Noticeable increase in power.
Ok, so the following 3 pics are of the induction system and we followed these principals.
1. You want power on a tuned engine, you use a Weber.
2. You want better torque, you use a Weber IDF.
3. You use a lairy cam, you want low torque so you use a longer inlet tract.
To get to this point we had to cut the bonnet, but as I said before, convention be damned, we knew we would have to cut. The first issue we had was pressure differential between ram stacks and air jets because of the Mini windscreen. We were expecting this after dyno testing with an old carb guru. To remedy this we tried different length ram stacks and finally settled on a plenum with built in wide radius stacks. Massive improvement in driveability.
This has been a fair amount of trial and error and so far this is the absolute best to have an excellent and linear power delivery on a lairy engine.
Those of you who have read Vizard will know he advocates a 48 IDA for ultimate power, we went IDF 44 because it's more compact, cheaper and more driveable without sacrificing too much.
Also other benefits to quote the mini guru Graham Russell who designed our manifold
"In a back to back comparison with a 45mm Sidedraft Weber and a fully ported short Redline manifold, it was 5-7Ft/lb of torque better across the board from 3-6500RPM. The 45mm wouldn’t take full throttle below 3500 revs. Where as the downdraft would go down to 2500 revs. The beauty of this setup is you don’t have fuel blowing back in your face through the speedo hole, and hopefully doing away with the fuel smells you get with the sidedrafts."
Simple really.
This is my 3rd +60thou Mini engine and it is hand's down the fastest with the cleanest torque spread. Much credit has to go to Stuart Neil Greig and there is more to come with out a doubt.
We got the plenum from a racing Beetle shop in California (Same as the carb).
Next up will be some painting, wiring and removal of the dizzy completly, this is the blanking plug that goes into the dizzy hole.
Little car got lots of love at Cars in the Park.
Bonus shot! More to come...