Voodoo 5.2 block for a DIY A52XS

[302 Hi Pro]

Steve, glad you found the piston squirters, please post a pic of these once you have them installed. I'd like to see their exact installed location(s).

Thanks,
Dave
302 HP

 

[thehueypilot]

I'm glad you found the root cause of your oil pressure loss issue. Do you think it was installed incorrectly or machined wrong or wrong plug? Could this be the issue Ford was having with the rods through the block with no warning? Wonder why they are keeping it a secret? Fifty cent plug kills 10k motor? Why no oil pressure loss light?

Tim

 

[pufferfish]

I had not considered that may be why coyotes have failed before. It's entirely possible. I recall when I first built this engine, that that particular plug was not included. In its place was a larger one. I had to have ford find me another. I don't recall it being too easy to press in, but that was 3 years ago. Maybe its just a coincidence I had issues with that very plug on assembly, but it's a bit unnerving.

The oil pressure idiot light never lit up on my original engine when it ran completely dry and welded the entire rotating assembly into 1 glob. It's entirely useless.

But, it won't be happening again. I am making spacers front and rear out of a spare chunk of brass rod with the proper diameter. Nothing fancy. Just cut to length and give it a good coating of petroleum jelly to keep it in place during assembly. Once it's locked in by the cover, it can't go anywhete.

As for the squirters, I don't believe they will be visible once installed, but I will try to get some photos that better illustrate the block machining for them.

 

[302 Hi Pro]

Thanks Steve,

After looking at the piston squirters, I was wondering how they are even installed to tighten them. Is there a special tool to torque then to a set value? Do you use a thread sealer or locker?

I should pull up the shop manual, but thanks for your help on this. IIRC, the 2011 5.0L coyote engines used these, but thought I read that they were removed on 2012 plus MY engines to reduce windage to net more HP?

Not sure though if that is true.

This is an ground breaking build!
Dave
302 HP

 

[pufferfish]

they appear to seat in the bottom of the threaded hole. these are different than the older models. the older models plugged into the crank case ceiling, where the main oil galley is and had tubes that directed to the cylinders. there have been block options for with or without the provisions for squirters. there have been theories that squiters cause too much windage, thus excluding them from the high winding boss engines. then, speculation over when ford eliminated them all together...and when they were brought back. then, speculation over whether the squirters produced more oil consumption. now, we have the highest hp naturally aspirated american engine in the voodoo and it winds to an astounding 8250rpm from the factory and it uses squirters on the backside of 12:1 compression pistons. maybe they perfected the stream to effectively cool the piston under the extremely high pressures, while reducing windage? maybe they have always been effective and this change was just to reduce complexity and/or cost?

this and how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, may be 2 of life's greatest mysteries?

 

[TMSBOSS]

this and how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, may be 2 of life's greatest mysteries?
[/quote]

Mister Owl determined the number to be three. Three licks.

Fords decision on the squirters??? Only god knows.

 

[pufferfish]

Ford waffles more than Brett Favre!...At least there aren't any sexting alligations ;D

 

[thehueypilot]

The oil pressure idiot light never lit up on my original engine when it ran completely dry and welded the entire rotating assembly into 1 glob. It's entirely useless.

I would test out your low oil pressure idiot light before you fire up your new engine. Cheap insurance when it works.......

Tim

 

[pufferfish]

those idiot lights only work when all pressure is gone and its too late to save it if you are going full tilt. an aftermarket version with an adjustable range would be nice. you could then find your lowest idle pressure and set it a few ticks under. id rather know there is a problem at 20psi than 1psi!

update is that i got my rotating assembly back in balance yesterday afternoon. i am hoping to start file-fitting the rings this afternoon. then, install the crank and main bearings and check clearances. the build begins!

 

[TMSBOSS]

update is that i got my rotating assembly back in balance yesterday afternoon. i am hoping to start file-fitting the rings this afternoon. then, install the crank and main bearings and check clearances. the build begins!
[/quote]

Looks like you may have the motor together and tuned in a week or so. Good luck with the build!! Anxious to see the dyno numbers!!

 

[pufferfish]

dyno is scheduled for next thursday, so i hope its all back together by then

 

[F.D. Sako]

Sounds like everything is on track!
Snaps some pics for us during assembly.

 

[ford20]

nope. super fine thread. but i retract my earlier statement. i was just cleaning up and found a little bag-o-hardware in the box that the crank came in. lookie what we have here!



those are the piston cooling jets and a plug. now, what the plug is for, i still don't know. and why they put this in a different box than the block is beyond me. but, it looks like i will be sporting cooling jets for this build. now i kind of wish Manley had a 12:1 piston option on the shelf.

I just went through all of the pictures I have of my motor and a I'm still not seeing that plug unless I am missing something or they changed a press in type plug for a threaded plug on the 5.2 block.

 

[pufferfish]

it has definitely been there since 2011, but my '11 block had a larger plug than my '12 block. the voodoo block has the same diameter plug as the '12 block.

i filed the rings yesterday. the manufacturer's recommended gap is .0045 x bore (3.700) = .017". The top and second rings needed to have their ends filed to open up to this gap. i don't have a proper ring grinder, so I had to carefully use a hand file and try too keep the ends parallel. rings are measured 1" down from the deck, while in the bore and squared up.


i then assembled the pistons, rods and rings. the manufacturer of the rings has a recommended clocking of the ring gaps and I folowed them. 12:00 for the top ring. 6:00 for the second ring. 1:30 for the corrugated oil ring. 4:30 for the top oil ring. 7:30 for the bottom oil ring.



while i was gapping the rings, i got a chance to see the tops of the oil squirters. they are just a tiny orifice directed at the bottom of the pistons. squint and you might see it there on the bore landing.



i was ready to lay the crank in and realized i never got my bearings. tracking says they will be here today. in the meantime, i decided to do a complete port job on my boss intake. i had cleaned up the injector boss area before, but decided to remove material in the hopes that this engine will need more air. i also eliminated the TB opening fins and smoothed everything out. i understand there have been no gains from removing the fins, but its all subjective. if you are doing it on a gt motor, yeah, you probably wont see any gain because it doesn't draw in enough air that the fins are a restriction. in my case, i believe they may have been. doesn't matter. they are gone now!




thats all for now!

 

[pufferfish]

stalled again. I was planning to reuse my mmr oil pump gears after a cursory inspection and just put them in a new housing, but when i cleaned all the oil off, i noticed the faces were scored. not sure how i missed that before? but, now i am waiting for a new Boundary gear set to be overnighted for arrival tomorrow. in the meantime, i was going to set the heads. another setback. the head bolts ford sent are nearly 5" longer than i can use. i have no idea how this happened? while i look into that, i decided it was a sign to get some proper ARP head studs. i had studs on the last engine, but they were 11mm and the new block takes 12mm, so i couldn't reuse them. i should get those tomorrow as well.

little issues like this are bound to happen. i planned for complications, but its getting a bit too close for comfort.

 

[ford20]

stalled again. I was planning to reuse my mmr oil pump gears after a cursory inspection and just put them in a new housing, but when i cleaned all the oil off, i noticed the faces were scored. not sure how i missed that before? but, now i am waiting for a new Boundary gear set to be overnighted for arrival tomorrow. in the meantime, i was going to set the heads. another setback. the head bolts ford sent are nearly 5" longer than i can use. i have no idea how this happened? while i look into that, i decided it was a sign to get some proper ARP head studs. i had studs on the last engine, but they were 11mm and the new block takes 12mm, so i couldn't reuse them. i should get those tomorrow as well.

little issues like this are bound to happen. i planned for complications, but its getting a bit too close for comfort.

NO!! Do not use Boundary gears at all!!! I have talked with a few of the top engine builders and they do not have the strength needed to really survive. One of the engine builders I spoke with is very low key and I won't say his name, but he had a customer come into his shop with a GT500 engine that had melted a piston. He tore down the engine and opened the oil pump and he said it looked like WW3 in there. The gears were chipped and scored to shiznit. They just can't take the abuse that is needed of them especially since you will probably be bouncing off redline every now and then on certain parts of tracks. Not to mention JPC had found them to be out of round and not flat. Stay away from them. Stay far away.

 

[pufferfish]

Its time for a soap box speech...

JPC's Facebook post about it was garbage. The Boundary gears they showed, looked exactly like my MMR gears do now. They were used and chewed threw a slurry of oil and metal shavings. Nobody's gears would survive this. Their claim of out of tolerance is also crap, as again, they used f-ed up used gears compared to untouched, new gears.


I did my research. MMR uses 9310 alloy, TSS and Boundary both use 4140 alloy, all harden their materials, all use the same machining methods and, I assume the same QC. The difference in the 2 metals is mostly insignificant with the 4140 being marginally stronger. The more important parts of OPG's is billet is far stronger than the cast pieces in the OE pumps and the microfinished ground faces instead of the OE EDM cuts. For me the choice was easy. TSS is stupid money, MMR won't have stock until Friday. Boundary had gears in QC yesterday and were able to ship today. If you are right and Boundary does really suck, then I will publicly eat my words. Until then, I have seen nothing compelling enough to tell me Boundary gears are anything less than the others.

To a lesser mechanic, my failure could have easily been chalked up as a OPG failure. Look at the gears and see the starved bearings. Put 2 and 2 together and start the conspiracy of MMR being a shitty company again...just as JPC did to Boundary. Its unconscionable actions from a business who ought to know how damaging these rumors can be to other businesses.

If your engine builder really said those things, you need to find a new builder. He's out of his mind. OPG failure didn't cause a GT500 piston to fail. How on earth could it? The likely scenario is piston melts a hole through because of detonation. Aluminum arc spray gets into the oil. The pump sucks it up and the fine particles gall the face of the OPG. This would have happened with anyone's gears. If it were a TSS gear set, the conversation right now would be different.

JPC sells TSS gears that are 2x as expensive as Boundary. They have a lot to lose if they just stocked up on them right before the Boundary gear company went viral...just days before the JPC "public service announcement". They couldn't be unbiased if they tried.

In this day of social media and endless information at our fingertips, we need to take caution in all the information we absorb and regurgitate. All too often, exaggerations become truths, speculations become truths, theories become truths, lack of a complete analysis of information becomes truth. I love the internet and the collective mind coming together to offer opinion and facts that otherwise may never be known, but we have to will ourselves to not just believe what we hear and take information from multiple sources to interpret truth..and even then, not be so resolved in this truth, because we all are human and we make mistakes.

rant over. carry on.

 

[ford20]

I understand where you are coming. You, just like myself are a small business so we really see what happens when some bullshit story comes out against us. I remember when you first released the blowfish bracket and everyone would say it was junk or they had such and such of an issue or that you didn't do any R&D which was bullshit in all honesty. It probably cost you time, money and sales in the long run. So, I can understand some sort of negative feeling towards the post.

I on the other hand will say in your words that parts of your post is garbage as I had gone straight to the source and spoke with Eric who published it on his own personal page which then got passed everywhere. It was never any PSA made by JPC at all, just Eric saying how shitty the gears he got were. The gears that Eric got his hands on were from a good friend of his and they were brand spanking new out of the box with that nice wax seal and quality control sheet that you get. Then they measured everything and found that they were out of round which if you will notice isn't something that is on that nice "quality control" sheet that you get when you open the box. Now I could care less how the set of oil pump gears looked at this point. When you have gears that are out of round from the air tight packaging, how good is your quality control? You are a manufacturer, you tell me.

Now when I have a few of the best modular motor builders in the country. You know the guys who build the engines for the fastest, quickest, most powerful blardy blar blar cars in the country; when I have those guys telling me that these gears are shiznit, when I have a brand new gear (verified by Juggernaut Performance btw, not used like your MMR gears) that has been previously checked by the manufacturer yet in the hands of a reliably trust worthy source measures them and says not only are they out of round and they are not flat. Then we have a problem here for me.

For the record, I never said that he said that the oil pump gear caused the melted piston, that would just be ludicrous not to mention this person is not my personal engine builder. The engine came into his shop with a melted piston, the cause of which I never cared to asked. If I am remembering correctly it was a pre 2011 block GT500 motor so the Arc spray welding wouldn't have been an issue here, but you are right, I could see that happening. That was just his background info on the motor. After tearing down the motor and opening up the oil pump he found gears that by the sounds of it were worse than yours are right now.

When speaking with Eric he had said that as an example TSS orders something on the order of 100 gears out of hardened alloy and they get sent to him. So now they are already hardened when TSS gets them. Now TSS inspects each set and they throw away something like 40-45 sets get thrown out (This was an example BTW, not the actual numbers) because they were inspected and they didn't meet TSS's quality standards. Mind you TSS's tolerances are +/- .0005 compared to Boundary gears which from what I have seen are .004-.006 which are within their tolerances. So now they have ordered these 100 gears and can only use 60 of them. So now they fire up the rockwell and then they finish those 60 and they recheck them from what I could remember from the conversation. That part is beyond my pay grade so to speak as I don't know much about machining. So they buy 100 and can only use say 60 so their prices are higher because 40% of what they got was no good. Boundary's process from what I was able to gather is a cheaper process - as they get the material cut them and then get them hardened then inspect them - the way the TSS manufactures their gears which is why TSS gears cost more, not because of marketing as Boundary claims. When is the last time you had seen TSS market their gears anyway?

As for the types of materials, I have just pulled this up as my first link when I searched the differences a while back:

4130 AND 4130 HEAT TREATED ALLOY STEEL
4130 comes in both round and hexagon styles that can be cold finished, stress relieved, or heat treated. 4130 is widely used in aircraft construction because it is easy to weld and fabricate with only mild hardness.

9310 ALLOY STEEL
9310 is low in carbon and high in alloy content, making it high in hardness as well as toughness and strength in the core section. It is ideal for creating aircraft components that need sections with a lot of weight.

Seems like 9130 has a higher tensile strength and hardness to me, but again, this is above my pay grade, but if Kindergarten taught me anything, it was that I love naps, how to tie my shoes and which numbers are bigger.

You are 100% right, we need to take the information that we see and process it completely and see what is real and what isn't. This whole Boundary craze has been going on for months now, in fact the first time I heard of Boundary was on SVTP sometime last year and it has been continuing since then because lets face it, we all want to save a buck or two. This wasn't some new craze that started a few weeks ago, this isn't some conspiracy theory about JPC trying to sell a few oil pump gears. I mean that is ridiculous. These guys make thousands of dollars building engines or race cars or winning races or selling their custom made parts. If they don't sell a $350 set of gears it is no big deal to them, they aren't some facebook store who has to stay on facebook groups all day trying to market their products to get people to buy them. When I have 3 among the best who look at these engines every day; who know what parts are crap and what parts are good and their telling me that this is crap and stay away, then that is what I am going to do. I'm just trying to warn people who use these gears that that is what they are. These are the real experiences, not people taking a picture of gears going yeah they look good to me. Take it or leave it is all. I know I left it and will advise people to do the same I'm not risking a $20,000 motor to save $150.

 

[Mad Hatter]

I am just envious of the quality of work you can get done up in the USA...... That is something you guys still have, down here in Chile finding a decent engine builder is near impossible. I see the Evos and WRX cars pop a motor at almost every event and we only have and average of 50 cars. If anything happens to my motor, crate engine is the only way to go!

 

[VoodooBoss]

Hey guys this is a great thread and many of us are learning a lot from it. But let's bring it down a notch and keep focused on moving forward with the build.