Jump to content
Model Cars Magazine Forum

Ford DOHC engine


Recommended Posts

James and Andy, thanks for that link. Really interesting! That was a lot of power for a little engine, and a lot of races won. And the list of drivers, A. J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, Jimmy Clark, Parnelli Jones, Al and Bobby Unser. It looks like Mario was pretty much unbeatable in '66.

Also, thanks Andy for the heads up on the Olsonite Eagle. I will put that and the Lotus Greg mentioned on my "look for" list.

Isn't it interesting that engines now have the same concepts for turbo and pollution regulations that the DOHC ford had

greg

Yeah, Greg, sometimes what's old is what's new again.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Having been an avid Indy car builder back in the years 1966-84, and built more than one car using the 4-cam Indy Ford engine, MPC's is the way to go for 1/25 scale, as it's the only really accurate rendition of that engine. As said in another posting, it's one of the two engines in the MPC Olsonite Eagle Indy car (Dan Gurney, Dennis Hulme).

Art

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jim Busby raced a dragster with two of them.

One of my favorites! I have two Olsonite Eagle kits stacked on an AMT Two Much kit. Now I just have to actually build it. There were several feature articles on the car back in the day. Hot Rod had a full page color article, I think. maybe it was Car Craft.

i would have loved to hear it mak a run!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As a avid Indy car builder I have a few of those kit too!

Art you are spot on with regards to the MPC Cammer being the most accurate. If memory serves me right the other engine was a highly modified small block ford (maybe a 289) I have a Sinmast and a Jorgensen Eagle (blue) I'm looking for a Olsonite eagle (white) to trade, I have many Indy kits. (I want to keep my other two) I have a friend of mine who is a 2nd generation hobby shop owner and I can buy them but I would prefer to do some trading. You should see the stash he has of vintage kits, When his father would buy kits he would get a extra container of kits and stow them away in a warehouse that he had. (His father was a collector too) When the father retired he had a spot adjacent to the hobby shop that was only open on Saturdays for a few hours where he would sell all types of vintage kits of which he had multiple copies of at reasonable prices. He passed away a few years ago but the stash still exists

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of my favorites! I have two Olsonite Eagle kits stacked on an AMT Two Much kit. Now I just have to actually build it. There were several feature articles on the car back in the day. Hot Rod had a full page color article, I think. maybe it was Car Craft.

i would have loved to hear it mak a run!

The 255cid 4-cam Ford Indianapolis V8 had a sound all its own back in the 60's. The very high rpm's (IIRC, that engine was capable of 9,500 rpm) coupled with the legendary "bundle of snakes" tuned headers which exited into that pair of megaphone tailpipes made for a hair-raising, shrill scream on the straightaways at Indianapolis. They were, to put it mildly, fairly labor-intensive to start up from cold though: Where the Offenhauser required but the driver and a single crewman on the remote electric starter, the 4-cam Ford took four--Driver, the starter operator, and a crewman on EACH side of the engine. These latter two crewmen each had a trigger-operated oil can, which was used to squirt raw methanol into each injector stack, and in the correct firing order in order to prime the engine sufficiently to fire up!

Art

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Art, You know your stuff and have done your home work, I'm old enough to have been able to see and hear these cars racing at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Track in West Allis ( I still can't get myself to say the Milwaukee Mile) they indeed had a unique sound. I smiled with the mention of the snakes not many people know that fun fact.

I saw Dario run the car at the Speedway in the pre race events the day before the big one. We have seats entering turn three and he gave it a squirt in the short chute and it gave me chills and great memories of my Father taking me to all the races back in the day. Their was a article that I read, I think it was in Autoweek where Dario said what a thrill it was to lap the car as Jimmy Clark was his hero.

Colin Chapman changed INDY much like the Beatles changed rock and roll. It was indeed a revolution!!!

Art, thanks for all the fun facts, it brings back great memories! jwrass

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The 4-cam Indianapolis Ford V8 was done at least 4 different times back in the 60's in 1/25 scale.

The first one in kit form was in the 1965 Lotus Ford Indy winner, by Industro-Motive (IMC). However, given that their kit was simply a retooling of their 1963 Lotus Ford kit, the tub was too narrow for their designers to stuff an accurate 4-cammer in it, so they made the heads too small, and much too plain (little if any surface detailing). The second was by AMT, who introduced their 1963 Lotus Ford with an optional 1964 4-cam, but it lacked the "bundle of snakes" exhaust system, instead having a set of individual exhaust stacks, which were used on test engines at Ford, and in a test mule Lotus 34 (the upgraded Lotus 29 chassis from 1963).

IMC also featured a 4 Cam in their earliest version of the Ford GT40, I believe. The original plan was to run that engine at LeMans, but I don't believe it made the grade.

And then, of course, there was the MPC version, which is by far the most accurate model of that engine in 1/25 scale.

Art

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the info Art, An interesting side bar was the sale of a GT 40 at Barrett and the ding bat announcer stated it has the 'bundle of snakes' exhaust which were on the DOHC not the regular V8s the tuned pipes did converge at collector boxes like The DOHC but they were not the bundle 'bundle'

greg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the info Art, An interesting side bar was the sale of a GT 40 at Barrett and the ding bat announcer stated it has the 'bundle of snakes' exhaust which were on the DOHC not the regular V8s the tuned pipes did converge at collector boxes like The DOHC but they were not the bundle 'bundle'

greg

Well, the '63 Indy Lotus Fords used modified 260cid stock block engines, with pushrod heads, and they had that bunch of snakes look to their headers, albeit splity between the two cylinder heads having their exhaust ports in the conventional, outer side of the heads.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=golden++star+roadster&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBIR&pq=golden+star+roadster&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=#a

This is the Golden Star Roadster.

Art is this the same engine but ran with conventional exhaust and intake configuration ?

Yes. Although if you look really closely--the injectors are in the same place as on the Indianapolis configuration. That cannot change with the 4-Cam Indy Ford V8, simply because the intake passages are in the middle of the cylinder heads, between the cam towers. What the builder of this car did was to swap the heads side-to-side, which put the exhaust cams and ports outboard, as opposed to inboard above the center "valley" of the engine block. I want to say that Ford actually experimented with that setup, but determined that the tuned headers ("tuned" as in each pipe in the header is exactly the same length, which explained the very convoluted "bundle of snakes" look) actually added more HP and rpm's, due to better, more balanced breathing.

Art

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As an addendum, famed Los Angeles race car and engine manufacturer, Harry A. Miller, producer of a number of highly successful straight 8 and inline 4 cyl DOHC racing engines (and the cars to put them in) back in the 1920's and early 30's, built, in 1932, a pair of 4WD cars for Indianapolis, which were powered by 300cid DOHC V8 engines which had a then exotic center-of-the-cylinder-head (even though Miller engines almost NEVER had detachable heads) design. The cars and engines ran at Indianapolis during the so-called "Junk Formula" which drew production "stock block" engines into the 500 for a couple of years in the depths of the Great Depression.

While those two DOHC V-8 engines didn't win the 500, they captured the attention of Ford's racing engineers in the summer of 1963.

Ford Motor Company located one of those engines at a funeral home & car museum in Frankfort IN, owned by an acquaintance of mine back then, William Goodwin. Goodwin was a major Indiana antique and classic car collector, with a side interest in old Indianapols racers. Ford arranged to rent that engine from Goodwin's, took it back to Dearborn, where they studied it, and adopted Miller's pioneering intake layout, which helped result in the unique and still somewhat exotic-looking layout of Ford's 4-cam Indianpolis engine.

Art

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the info Art, An interesting side bar was the sale of a GT 40 at Barrett and the ding bat announcer stated it has the 'bundle of snakes' exhaust which were on the DOHC not the regular V8s the tuned pipes did converge at collector boxes like The DOHC but they were not the bundle 'bundle'

greg

Beginning with the destroked 260 Ford V8 stock block engines used in the 1963 Lotus Powered By Ford Indy cars, Ford used tuned exhaust headers, with the pipes collecting together at the back of the engine, up above the bellhousing & transaxle all the way through the 427cid Ford GT Mk IV. And, those headers too, were called "bundles of snakes" back in their day, so B-J's announcer was very correct.

Art

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 7 months later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...