Putting the finishing touches on next race motor. Girdled block with TA1511 pan. What are people using for windage control?
I believe that the mesh "can" aerate the oil, given the right circumstances. That's why I stopped using it and use louverd trays now. I've personally ran mesh for years with great oil pressure and no issues, but with the wrong application it can do harm..... so I'm told.
Which way do you orintate tbe louvers in tbe tray? Is the idea to grab the oil like a scraper. I have a center sump pan in my Riv. Street build almost to point of recomended girdle. I put a baffle in the center to deflect oil forward when accelerating. Im either going scraper , tray, or is both possible. The factory tray seems rather small. Probably baffel, scraper, stock tray combo would be the easiest.
I generally try to put the louvers towards the crank, but when clearance is really tight I've also put the louvers down towards the pan. The idea is to cut the "ribbon" of oil coming off of the crank with a sharp edge, and in reality it doesn't make much difference which way the louvers are punched.... towards the crank or towards the pan, as long as they're punched in the correct direction to create that "edge" to catch the oil.
Yes, it's been proven that mesh airates the return oil to a good degree and since air is compressible and takes a good amount of time to bubble it's way out of oil in a running motor if at all , it totally defeats the non compressibility that any fluid has! All that's needed is a close fitting Crank scraper, a window type windage tray above the shallow section of the pan and a baffle over the sump section of the oil pan.
I just watched a dyno session on a BBC testing pans. Windage trays and pans are engine specific needing actual testing to validate anything other than a good sounding idea. Who has real data on a Big Block Buick in the form of measured HP gains and or oil pressure stability to back up all of the great theories?
Not only engine specific, but rather stroke, rod type, crank design, oil pan type and design, etc. Unless you have unlimited time and funds, all you can do is use the best common sense approach that you can. Spending $100k plus on an engine I would expect no less than the optimum, but I dont know of any Buick builds near that level of perfection.
So I put sight glass on the oil pan when it was last off the engine. I also removed half of the mesh and put a louvred front section in
Years ago I actually did a test on the dyno.. Girdled motor that I had built a unidirectional mesh tray for ... Actual before and after tests showed 10 HP and 10 psi of oil pressure with the tray installed.. 550 HP 464. More recently, my solid tray/crank scraper Tomahawk combo has eliminated oil pressure drop off on the dyno in those engines.. I have done 3 now that either held the pressure stable, or it actually increased with engine rpm, depending on which length gears I had in the pump.. These are internal pickup/stock type oil pump setups, 4.365-4.400 stroke engines. I am prepping two more of them for the dyno as we speak. JW
So Jim thats good news that you got a handle on the oil pressure situation you had with the Tomahawks. Is it that the TA block being thicker in all the previous thin places of the iron block, the oil run off as it makes its way to bottom of pan gets whipped up into the crank. Almost as if there is not enough room for the oil now to flow down the walls of the block to the pan. I know not all of the oil flows down tbe walls of block but some does.I wonder if Mike T who never thought much of the crank scraper will think more if them now. So are you actually getting taller gears made by someone or cutting down high volume gears? Im guessing your not using full legnth hv gears.