I consider myself to be creative. I have learnt to become very competent in my trades, some would say an expert and I now hold an office job which being as versed in my trades as I have become has brought me to. When I was a floor level worker I always felt as if I needed to do something to satisfy my mind, do something creative, I NEEDED to get it out of my head as soon as I could and I couldn't wait to get home to draw something pulsating from my mind. More often than not I would have to build what was on my mind. Perhaps this is a personality flaw know as an obsession. I admit, I am obsessed with building things which are unique and original. How this started is by wanting to own things no one else had.
Others have this too. I was approached by a friend of mine who owns a Hot Rod shop who is building a Volkswagon bus to commision some work to me. Now this isn't a drab, boring restoration. Not that I dont like restorations, I respect the work that has been done on them, but I really respect something unique and well crafted, well thought out and planned. This hippy wagon is getting a Porsche engine and transmission, yeah baby, LETS DO IT! The owner has some kinda of vision an I LIKE IT!
The first order of business was to build some custom valve covers for the 6 cylinder dual overhead cam engine. There a 4 Valve covers in total. The owner wanted something no one else has so we sat down, talked numbers and got to work. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the valve covers in production, but I did get one of the finished product.
I will admit, these were alot of work, was it worth it? I think so. You cannot just buy something like this and its exactly what the owner had wanted. What drives people to do or build such crazy and insane things? Status? I really don't think thats the answer, how many people actually care if someone has custom made valve covers on their Porsche engine? NOT MANY. In fact most "normal" people could care less. But we are not normal people. We are creative people and the owner sure does care if he has custom made valve covers, in fact I care if he has custom made valve covers. This kind of thing exacerbates my obsessiveness and gets me really excited and the ideas flow, thus leading us to the next part of this entry.
The timing chain covers on this thing were hideous, I suppose as hideous as the perfectionist German engineer can perform (which means every single part is though about functionally and as aestetically as possible). I thought we could improve things. When the engine cover is lifted on this beast the engine is in plain sight. Who wants plain timing covers on their engine? I am sure that purist Volkswagon and porsche people are going to HATE me after the post, but myself, my buddy and the owner want something different.
Here are the timing chain covers laid out and center punched. The patterns were made by clamping the originals over top and using transfer punches to align the bolt holes. If you don't own a set of transfer punches, go out and buy a set as soon as you can. If you don't know what they are FIND OUT!
This is a shot of right after I cut the timing covers. I admit, I used a bandsaw and cleaned up the edges with the milling machine and a die grinder where appropriate.
Someone had mentioned to me, "why not go and get these water jet cut?"
Well, for starters, both sides are different, so 2 different pieces need to be programmed into the waterjet. Something else I took into consideration is, how many of these do I need to get produced, 1 pair. The most major factor is finances. Sure for a smokin $400 I could drop off my sheet of T-6 aircraft grade wonder alloy and get the outsides of these thing cut by the most modern high pressure water cutting computer controlled magic box, but, thats money I would have to add a percentage onto that number for the customer for covering transport, my time talking to the waterjet dude and so on. However, it took me 4 hours start to finish to cut these out, in house, start to finish and I did it myself, no time wasted.
Now, as you can see from this picture I went to the milling machine, clamped this thing into the machine tighter than a depressed fat girl holding onto a doughnut, indexed it and did the 'ol drill, countersink repeat routine.
In this picture, you can tell I spent alot of time measuring and laying out. Porsches use O-ring style gasket which which sit in a channel and are far superior to cork, paper or other types of gaskets that are between surfaces. When the O-ring style gaskets get compressed they fill the slight clearance engineered into the cahnnel creating maximum sealing capacity. In the picture you can see the 1 inch diameter hole and the channel running parallel with the engine.
When someone becomes proficient with something, that person, be it an artist, motorcyclist, race car driver or tradesperson, they get into a state of being in tune with what they are doing its something that cannot be explained, it can only be experienced. When I machined the O-ring grooves I set the machine to a straight cut on the long side, for all the curves and the other part I free handed them. To me this seems natural, perhaps its muscle memory, perhaps it just me being in tune with the machine and using it as an extesion of my body. Perhapes its all in my head.
Here are the almost finished products. If you look closely you can see the 1 inch hole with the oil groove run across the inside. So far into this project, I felt pretty good about what has been accomplished. When I thought about it, something was really bugging me. I had to take a few days off from these and really think about what I needed to do to really make these high quality and outstanding.
What I had came up was to chamfer the edges and put a wicked polish onto these. Now we were ready to install them.
So far so good, I apologize about the quality of this picture, this is still in the project stage and once it is installed in the frame I will capture a better shot and add it to a later post.
In retrospect on this project, what is it that made it so special? Well for starters, I dont know of another engine like this, so it makes it special to me. I also enjoyed the look and the reaction of the customer when he came and looked a the pieces I made. This brings me a great deal of satisfaction and a feeling like no other.
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