SwayBar

Hi Rob, thanks for showing up; welcome!

It's great that another group of 928 enthusiasts have 'shown up', and would really like to hear your thoughts regarding our favorite car.

Your car is intriguing since we do not know much about it except that it looks great and it's a racing 32v 928 with individual throttle-bodies. Can you share your thoughts on the 928 as well as what you guys have done to the car to prepare it for racing such as suspension, brakes, transmission, fuel/ignition computers, engine-displacement, pistons, camshafts, induction, resultant horsepower/torque curves, etc? Did I leave anything out?

Of course, I understand if the information is considered proprietary.

I did find your website: http://www.havikrs.com/

..but not much info available yet.

Carl Fausett

Hey Rob - welcome to the Forum!

Glen - no valve in this, it is just a simple restrictor. I tried a low-cracking pressure valve a year or two ago. The weight of the oil on top of it was not enough for it to open wide, so the oil would drain back to the crankcase too slowly... and if there was any crankcase pressure, the valve would close (like it is supposed ot) and the oil would not drain from separator back into the pan at all.

Thats when I thoughth a restrictor may be more fool-proof.

Carl Fausett

I was able to finish the bottom-end of the race motor this weekend.

Here are a few pictures of the 2nd Generation of the Johnson Scraper System in the 928.

I really like the current design and have high hopes for it. I took about 60 pictures during the fitment and installation section so I can write a comprehensive how-to-install-it guide for our customer if it tests out and we go on to list it in our catalogs.

Here are a few photos...

SwayBar

Great pics, thanks; that's one elaborate system.

So we should know something one-week from now regarding it's effectiveness as Glen will be running at Road America July 10-11, as well as the Dutch Stallion team will be running in their part of the woods too.

Can't wait to hear the results since if it works, I'm in!

Airflite40

Great pics! I went for the stage 2, and although I havent put many miles on the car yet (other issues) I have high hopes as well! Carl, did you put two oil pan gaskets in?

Carl Fausett

I did put two gaskets in. The OEM gasket is attached to the oilpan with Permatex Forma-gasket #2, and our thin-style gasket is attached to the motor with same. No gasket sealant at all between them.

Before I did this, however, I made up a stainless braided clutch slave hose so that moving the oilpan down will not cause a problem.

Basically, it gives me about 1-and-a-half gasket widths - all the better to get the rotating assembly away from the oil pan runoff.

GlenL

Getting fully on-topic here.

I ran the car Monday and half of Tuesday at Road America. The results were very disappointing. After a very positive result at Heartland Park the car was puking a lot of oil again. The amount was variable depending on how hard I was driving and what shift points were used. The captured amount was between 3/8qt and 5/8 qt in a 20 minute session. This is a bit more than I would have expected without the scraper and sump cover. I can't make a hard comparison due to engine changes and a more aggressive driving style since last running there. I'd have predicted about 1/4qt in 20 minutes without the oil control mods.

It looks like a key part of the equation, for my car, is the track being run. Heartland park is 2.8 miles and about 17 turns, dpending on how you count them. Lot's of short bursts followed by hard braking. Brainerd is 3 miles and 10 turns with a 1mile straight. RA is 4 miles and "14" turns but closer to ten if you ignore slight bends. At RA I'll be going from third to fifth gear 3 times so lots of long, high-reving use.

The oil pressure was always good with no drop-outs in corners or the carousel, so that's good.

Bottom line is that the oil ejection is not solved.

Where to go from here? I'm thinking that one reason my car has a larger problem is 175k miles on the cam towers. The engine is rebuilt with good compression numbers and strong dyno numbers. Maybe a rebuild of the cam towers with new sleeves and lifters. (That sounds pricey.) Maybe there's a bad seal around the camshaft. Those were replaced, but who knows. What I do know is that the engine puked oil before the rebuild and, I believe, the ingestion contributed to the broken rings and pistons that required the rebuild. (Oil mist lowers octane and will cause knocking.)

Another option is to remove the scrapers and see what happens then. Personally not feeling another weekend under the car now.

One more is resigning myself to the situation and routing the catch back to the sump. "Out of sight, out of mind." I don't like that as the captured fluid often contains visible water. However, after hard sessions the oil does look pretty pure. I think the trick is to get the catch can itself hot so the water stays in a vapor while the oil, which is an aerosol, is condensed. Maybe warm the car well and do a quick drain in the paddock.

Carl,

I got that control body installed right before lunch but didn't get a chance to try it out. I was hoping for it to clear and then planning to go on the street tires. While making the switch they closed the track. Sorry.

Hacker,

Stuck a scrubby in the oil filler but got no noticable change.

Rick Carter

Glen,
I understand your frustration and appreciate your ongoing efforts.

hacker-pschorr

FWIW - Todd recently made an oil seperator for the extreme supercharged cars that seamed to solve an oil injestion problem they were having with the 550+ hp S4's. I'm sure Todd is setup to produce / sell these if anyone is interested. Might be premature throwing this out there since I have not talked to him about making more, but if there interest is there....

Benton

Glen,
Do you think the water is resulting from running the car, or a result of condensation in the lines? Does your catch tank split the oil/air, then vent the air to the airbox? Maybe the line to the airbox is getting condensation in it when the car is sitting? My catch tank is currently draining to the sump, but I'm worried that water will get in the oil. My car will (hopefully) be ready to run in about a month (although not ready for track duty), so I guess I will have to see then.

BC

Glen - is this more or less with the new directional drains? I still have the original design, and can use that if there is not much difference.

I also think, (I may have mentioned) that the 2V heads motors are WAY more prone to this oil ejection, either because of the draining/oil cloud, or simply because there is no path out the top of the heads for oil vapor. Do I make any sense?

Is dumping the oil back into the sump, as long as it doesn't smell, smoke, or leak, may be the best we can hope for apart from a dry sump? The crank is getting scraped, we seem to be keeping more oil in the sump where it needs to be -

GlenL

Kevin,

The analytical side of me agrees that removing the scrapers and sump cover is wrong. The practical side knows something is wrong and needs to be fixed. I'm not discounting completely that the engine is screwed up (again) but the compression and dyno numbers don't show that.

Mark,

The water is just a component of the normal blow-by. Hydrocarbon + Oxygen => CO2 and H2O

The concern is putting it directly into the oil. Would anyone pour a cup of water into their oil? I have taken good looking drainage and poured it back in. If there's any "milkshake" it does not.

My opinion is to not dump back the oil, and water, from the catch in street driving at all. With less flow through the catch/separator more water, proportionately, is caught. The engine operaiting temp is less as well to boil it out of the oil. One last thing is that water is heavier than oil and will go to the bottom of the sump where the pick-up is.

Brendan,

Yes, this is the new drains. It looks like an improvement over the flatter drains but without running on the same track that can't be quantified.

It does look like the 16v cars have more issues with this. Not sure about the mechanics of that but Porsche did change the system a lot for the 32v engines.


I'm also thinking about re-routing the line from the cap to go up over the spider or something like that. Perhaps one problem is that the hose from the filler run flat and then slopes down into the catch. Oil that falls out in it runs into the can.

GlenL

Compare that front-sump oil pan to what we've got:

Floor is much steeper.
Oil flow along sides, from heads, is better protected.
Plate in sump to prevent back-flow under acceleration
Much deeper.

I like that rounded edge, too. Really sucks the oil in.

SwayBar

It will be interesting to see what happened during his race weekend as he installed the entire 'kit' whereas Glen chose not to. So the pending question is whether the oil scraper system must work as an entire sum of it's parts, or fail because the other supporting pieces were left out as in Glen's case, or, there are still issues even with the entire kit that Rob ran. Hopefully Rob will have time to post soon.

Let's suppose though in the meantime that there is still oil ejection, but excellent oil pressure as reported before. Why not just vent that 'ejected' oil through the oil filler cap into a Provent, and return the oil back into the oil pan via the oil drain plug with an inline one-way valve? The one-way valve is important so that the oil cannot work it's way up the oil-return line and into the Provent during a sustained right-hander such as RA's 'The Carousel':

Road America: http://www.roadamerica.com/2006/imag...a_map_2006.pdf

Provent: http://www.mann-hummel.com.sg/EN/ind...ProVent-en.pdf

That is the system I have on my GT which I ran at Road America this past weekend (..best-time of 2:37.1, getting closer to my best all-time of 2:31.61 in a stock '02 Z06), and which Glen saw. There was no oil residue whatsoever in the Provent 'Output Port' shown on page 5 of the linked pdf, proving that the Provent is successfully separating the oil from the blow-by.

The end result would be superior oil-control by the I-J scraper system providing the engine with consistent oil pressure, and, whatever oil is ejected is simply returned back into the engine for re-use. I really appreciate the latter as Amsoil 20W50 is over $8 a quart.

It should be noted too that I removed the fibrous covering of the 'Oil Separator Element' (..yellow in the pdf) as it proved to be too much of a restriction when soaked with oil when I blew through the 'Tangential Input Port'; instead, I stuffed a plastic 'scrubby' into the center of it, which provided minimal restriction.

Carl mentioned problems with his Provent, but evidently the amount of blow-by produced by his ailing engine appears to be the root-cause.

GlenL

Right.

Nothing rattling around. I thought (and think) that the quality was good and fairly priced. Seeing better oil pressure. Just not the panacea I'd hoped for. (5hp and no ejection.)

As is said: "In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they're not." The intersection is experimentation and those results have got me thinking.

Swaybar,

$27.80 per gallon for the TRO2000 last month.

As to your points and questions, most were covered above, and over dinner on Monday. I knew the writing style was familiar.