Racing with a wet sump ?

[Elanintheforest]

This is the big-wing sump as fitted to the Escorts. It was standard fitment on the Twincam, the Mexico (1600 GT Kent) and the RS1600 (BDA).

There are no baffles under the windage tray, but each 'wing' has a baffle (the original sump side) with a 1 inch hole cut for the oil to flow though.

These sumps look pretty amateur-ish, but they really were made like this at the Ford AVO factory, with the 'wings' being added by hand to standard sumps.

Mark

[cabc26b]

Thanks Rohan, I will look these over. I will most likely will take a look at Col's set up as well. Anywhere else to look ?. [/i]

[rgh0]

Have a look at Steve Waterworths site he has a photo of the QED supplied baffled sump their - http://steveww.org/index.php?id=105

I think from the look of it that you may still have problems in long hard right hand corners as the pick up is still on the rh side of the pan but it is certainly better than the standard arrangement.

I also dont like having the baffles and windage tray permanently welded in as it make cleaning any crap out of the sump hard. I am sure QED do it that way because they dont want the baffles coming loose and dont trust people to assemble it right so that they wont.

cheers
Rohan

[GrUmPyBoDgEr]

I've been pleased to read the comments made about the succes members have had using "windage trays" & well baffled sumps.
This comfirms my years of practical experience designing & developing Automotive lubrication systems.
As a point of interest our German friends call the "wingage tray" an ?lhobel.
The translation of this make make it's function perhaps more understandable.
That is "Oil Plane"; Plane as in Carpenters Plane.
It shaves off the oil exiting the main & big end bearings & allows it to drain into the sump via the previosly described longitudinal slits. The other function is to prevent oil surging up into the area where the crank spins.
Apart from the mentioned additional resistance the, causing loss of power; oil "thrashing" has two further negative effects. It will cause an unwanted increase in oil temperature & also cause air entrapment "foaming".
I would also like mention that the both of these latter effects can be caused by an oversized oil pump so please give careful consideration before going for the HV / HP pump alternative.
Other than that the "bigger" pump will also draw more engine power.
Dry sump systems generally use a pressure pump similarly dimensioned to the original or even use the original, adding a scavenge pump to return oil to the collector tank.
This additional pump will also be a drain on engine power.
The main plus point with dry sumping is not necessarily higher cornering power (See how fast well sorted 26R's can take corners),
is the increased oil capacity which provides more time for the oil to de-earate especially when combined with well designed tanks with de-aeration trays etc.
Another point that has also been mentioned is the position of the pick up pipe.
A good generalisation without "tilt testing" would be to opt for the geometric mid point in the sump.
A further improvemeent would be to position the pick up pipe as close to the bottom of the sump, so that it can pick up oil under extreme surge conditions.
The optimum height away from the sump bottom can be easily calculated.
The oil pickup has a given opening diameter. Assume that to be the original design optimum.
From that the area can be calculated (Pi x D x D x 0.5) from that the minimum distance of the suction pipe to sump pan (H) can be calculated
(Pi x D x D) - Pi x D) = H
(Pi = 3.142)
Add 1 or 2mm as a plus tolerance .
Do not go closer to the sump bottom as this could throttle the suction side of the pump.

Nix f?r ungut
Cheers
John

[GrUmPyBoDgEr]

Oops!
last equation should read:-
(Pi x D x D x 0.5) - (Pi x D) = H

[ceejay]

I don't think I would like to try fitting a big wing sump to the elan, in the escort case this was most likely a factory "quick fix" for the oil surge problem that all twinks suffer from, at least there is plenty
of room under the escort for the wide sump wings.

Look guys, you can kick this oil surge problem around the yard until the cows come home, but the honest truth is you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars, or get some guru to tell you and sell you on the ultimate newly designed Mickey mouse sump... what Rohan & I have been trying to tell you is that this system works absolutely
110%, nothing more, nothing less, and the great thing is if you have metal fabricating skills and Oxy welding skills you will build it for less than $20.00 material cost, yep, I am not B..l Sh.....g you, the "how to build" ebook explains it all. The system even has a curved windage tray fitted.


Before I built the sump baffle system for my twin cam I did think about fabricating some wings out the side of the sump, but then this is not really the right option, the first reason being that access to the sump fasteners is restrictive enough, let alone restricting
access even more with fabricated side wings.

Sump side wings alone wont cure the oil surge problem, more oil in the sump does not equate to zero oil surge.

The only answer is to completely control what the oil is doing inside of the sump under hard cornering and braking, the gated sump baffle takes care of everything, the unique system is designed to constantly control and release the oil to either side of the sump and feeds the correct amount of oil to the pump pickup pipe at all times no matter what attitude the car is in. There's no clever maths involved or smoke & mirrors, but inertia is a wonderful thing.


The How to build sump baffle book has sold well, but a couple of customers have mentioned that they will change this and that with the design, I say to them... DON'T change a bloody thing because it just works brilliantly as is.

All the bits and pieces are contained inside of the original lotus sump, not even a wise eyed racetrack scrutineer would know what is fitted inside of the engine sump!

For just a few bucks the book will show you how to build a gated sump baffle for less than $20.00 material cost (if you do all of the work yourself) and the baffle could also save you from an awfully expensive engine blow-up... and everyone knows how bloody expensive twinks are to rebuild these days.
Col.

[twincamman]

D. J. ---man --easy with them umlauts dude --you may hurt some poor Morris Dancer with an austpoufen --or a stuk --[and here is your new screen saver-] -ed

[GrUmPyBoDgEr]

Hi Col. (ceejay)
Stay cool. I's wot I said 'innit?


Cheers
John

[sebring]

interesting discussion guys - but why the necessity for a large pressure + capacity oil pump? - if the baffles in the sump works there should be no need for it and i have heard that these HC pumps can fill the cam cover with oil, thus starving the rest of the engine - anybody had this experience?

[rgh0]

For a racing engine the High volume high pressure pump gives you greater oil flow through all the bearings this has a number of benefits in a competition engine

1. Improved bearing cooling - the oil is the primary coolant for the bearing surfaces
2. Improved bearing hydrodynamic film stability - the oil film that keeps the bearing surfaces from touching is more stable if more oil is flowing though the bearing at higher pressures.

These improvements lead to longer bearing life in high reving and heavily loaded competition engine bearings especially when oil temperatures are high.

For the average track day car doing a few laps at a time with an engine running to say a 7000 rpm limit a stadanrd pump will be fine. For an historic racer running 30 minutes races and using 8500rpm a Hv/HP pump is good insurance around achieving satisfactory bearing life.

cheers
Rohan

[GrUmPyBoDgEr]

The main points that Rohan has mentioned are of course the reason for using a HC / HP pump in competition engines.
The negatives mentioned in my previous submission pale into insignificance in comparison

Cheers
John

[rgh0]

John

One thing I forgot to mention is that having the head flood with oil is symptom of another problem not a hp/hv pump.

Typically it occurs when the cam bearing clearances are to great. Cam bearings are not cheap and lots of people dont replace them when they should. The large clearances lead to more oil flowing into the head and you get the oil flooding problem. The problem becomes worse with a hp/hv pump but if you have in spec bearing clearances you have no problem with a hp/hv pump.

People also put a head oil flow restrictor in for the same reason - to hide the problems caused by excessive bearing wear leading to excessive oil flow to the head.

I have run hp/hv pumps in lots of engines over lots of years and never had an head oil flood problems because I always make sure the cam bearing clearances are right when I build the heads

cheers
Rohan

[GrUmPyBoDgEr]

That's a good point.
Even new (modern) cylinder heads consume a high proportion of the oil supply.
The cam bearings are, in the case of the twincam & some other engines, the only parts directly supplied with pressure oil.
The cam lobes, buckets etc. are dependant on the leakages from those bearings to provide splash oil for lubrication.
Getting oil to return from the head to the sump is a problem that designers have to overcome even on modern engines.
The problem occurs especially at high RPM when not only is the flow of oil higher but also the blow-by across the piston rings.
This blow-by tries to go up the route that the return oil is trying to go down & could therefore cause head flooding if the oil return routes are not adequate enough.
The point made earlier that head flooding occurs could well be valid if an oversize pump is fitted.
(This is easy to check on a test bed but not so easy in a car.)
My experience with modern engines that use the oil as a hydraulic medium for such things as hydraulic valve adjustment & variable cam timing apart from for cooling / lubrication is that the bigger pumps required are only the start of the design changes needed.
The subsequent oil return to the sump, higher oil temperatures & increased foaming have to be overcome; problems that are much more difficult to resolve than the addition of a couple of millimeters to the pump rotor width, that caused the problem to occur.
Dry sumping is the easy but expensive & complicated answer due to the fact that the scavenge pump is on average 1/3 bigger in capacity than the pressure pump.
The increased capacity of the scavenge pump ensures that not only the oil is returned to the collector tank but also the blow-by gasses are extracted from the crankcase, thus providing a better oil return from the cylinder head.
But that as you know is another story

Cheers
John

[folding_bloke]

An original Escort big wing sump is on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140991099928

[Tahoe]

What about this solution?

http://omnitech-engineering.com/images/articles/ReMarque_May-Jun10_p10-11.pdf