Revisited: Is Toyota’s 4A-GE Worthy of its Legendary Status?

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Tune In podcast. I'm Andrei, your host. This is a heads up to let you know we'll be taking a short end of year break over the next few weeks and we'll be back in action mid January. So, while we won't be producing new episodes for a few weeks, this is a good opportunity to revisit some of our earlier episodes that we think deserve another listen or, if you're new here, a first time listen. For this week's revisit. We're going back to episode 87 with Matt Trivena from MT Performance Engines. Matt likes to keep what he does pretty low key, but what he lacks in public attention he definitely makes up for in the engine building department, especially when it comes to Toyota's iconic 4AGE 4 cylinder engine. This is a great chat that gets right into the nitty gritty of these fan favourite motors, and even if 4AGE's aren't your cup of tea, there's a huge amount of priceless engine building knowledge to be found in this episode. Enjoy.

Speaker 2: 0:52

When I was younger I couldn't afford an AE86 and one of the guys in my neighbourhood had a KE70 which had a 4AGE in it and it was a mad little car. The amount of torture that he gave that thing was abnormal and it just copped every bit of it. So I just fell in love with it. The 4AGE obviously naturally became the engine that you wanted in that car and then obviously you look into the former Atlantic as being the pinnacle of the 4AGE world.

Speaker 1: 1:24

Welcome to the HPA Tune In podcast. I'm Andru, your host, and in this episode we're joined by Matt from MT Engines in Australia. Matt specialises in building Toyota 4AGE's of all different varieties, and this is an engine that holds a near and dear place in my own heart. One of my early cars was a DX Corolla KE70 and we'd gone through a few iterations of engines, but ultimately it ended up with a 4AGE ZE bottom end, a silver top 20 valve head and a turbocharger, and it was a huge amount of fun. I've built and tuned all manner of 4AGE's over the years, but I'm definitely not the expert on the field that Matt is, so it was really interesting to dive into this conversation with Matt and learn what makes the 4AGE what it is. Most importantly, how do we get more power out of the 4AGE and, of course, the mythical former Atlantic version of the 4AGE that anyone who's owned one of these engines probably has aspired to build or own. We find out what actually went into these engines, why they were able to make so much power and, just as importantly, what it would actually be like living with one on the day to day in terms of maintenance, drivability and all of those other things that are easy to forget about when you're just looking at a spec sheet of power and torque. Now, you're probably getting the idea that this conversation is going to be very 4AGE centric and yes, it absolutely is. But if you don't have any interest in this particular engine, don't worry. There's still a lot of generic information in this podcast that you're going to be able to take away Before we get into our chat with Matt.

Speaker 1: 3:09

For those who are fresh to the HPA tuned in podcast, high Performance Academy is an online training school where we specialise in teaching people how to build performance engines, how to tune engines, how to construct wiring harnesses. We also cover topics on race driver education, race car setup, data analysis and even fabrication. Our courses are delivered via high definition online video modules that you can watch from anywhere in the world, provided you've got an internet connection. If you want to learn more about our courses, you can head to hpacademycom forward slash courses. There's a full list of our courses there. You can also use the coupon code podcast75 and that'll get you $75 off the purchase HPA course. I'll put a link in the description to that coupon code as well as our courses page. Alright, enough of our introduction, let's get into our chat with Matt now. Alright, welcome to the podcast, matt. Thanks for joining us and, as we always do, let's start by finding out a little bit about your background and, specifically, how you got into the automotive industry.

Speaker 2: 4:14

Yeah, so I left high school and started working at an electrics place that we were doing electronic pool equipment, and my mum begged me to get a trade so I moved into engineering conditioning. I was taken under the wing by a man named Adam Moore and he owned a company called LW Parry Engineering with his father. So engineering, conditioning, fitting, machining, and, yeah, I basically got taken under his wing and he was into car racing. He actually had a clubman which he used to race and it had a 4A, 7a stroker which was a 2 litre, and he was racing this over 20 years ago, so very early on he was doing the 7A strokers and he was making about 240, 250, naturally aspirated on these engines at about 8,500 RPM. So pretty good power to and talk for a 1.950 cc 4A.

Speaker 1: 5:01

It's also an engine that's quite dated by modern technology standards as well.

Speaker 2: 5:07

Yeah, but he shared a passion for 4As, like I did, and I was in fitting machining there with LW Parry for about 4 years before they decided to close the business down. Then I was taken into Matuk's racing. They sort of needed someone who could machine, didn't know anyone and our business was closing down. So a friend of mine, rob Arbalino, who was working for Matuk's, basically said Anthony, we need to get this guy in, buy the machinery and get him working so we can keep up with demand for building engines. So I used my experience aspirated horsepower, combined that with what we were doing at Matuk's with turbo charging and yeah, we were turbo charging RBs and basically just at the time taking down records left, right and centre.

Speaker 1: 5:48

So it sounds like you've really got experience at both ends of the spectrum. 4a engines great little engines we're going to dive into them in a lot more details as we go, but certainly not going to set any world records for power and then obviously the big turbo, massive power RBs, which absolutely are. I want to come back a step though, just talking about getting this trade under your belt. You said your mum was basically begging you to do that and, in terms of becoming an engine reconditioner, what does that process look like? You said you worked at that place for 4 years before they sort of shut the doors. How long of that 4 years was getting your trade? And what is a trade, even in tail in Australia?

Speaker 2: 6:30

So in Australia the trade background is generally about 3 years, sort of carpenter electrician. It's about 3 years going to TAFE, which is a college for learning, and you do that about one day a week, every week, for the first 3 years and on the 4th year you spend one full year in that industry and then generally you get signed off as a tradesman. Sometimes there will be a test and an electrician needs to do the capstone, which is a test. They pass out, they become an electrician. They get a licence for an engine reconditioner. Basically, your boss at the 4th year would sign off, send the paperwork down to the college or the government and then they would send you back a trade certificate to say that you're qualified in this industry.

Speaker 1: 7:11

Okay in terms of my own experience with engine reconditioners or engine reconditioning shops that I've dealt with, because my own engine building I don't have a machine shop, so obviously we become reliant on outworking their element. But where I'm going with this is the quality of results that I see from engine reconditioning shops are quite variable and I've always put this down to the fact that I think probably it's safe to say 95% of engine reconditioning shops deal with your average garden variety streetcar, probably mostly naturally aspirated, very low specific power levels, low RPM range, and what this means is therefore the attention to detail, I guess, and the clearances, the tolerances, are not quite as critical as they are in a 2000 horsepower RB or a 200 horsepower 4A for that matter. And I think again I'm reading between the lines here it's not an industry. I've directly gone through and done my own trade, cert. But I kind of feel like in a lot of people that maybe breeds a little bit of complacency and a she'll be right mentality. Am I right here or am I missing something?

Speaker 2: 8:23

The shop that I work for. We specialised in very small engines, down to lawn mowers and whippersnippers, piston size. We used to do Briggs and Strat motors for junior dragsters, and then we would go all the way up to like these 16 locomotives with four turbos on them, 38 litres plus, so these engines were the size of cars. So we done such a variety of things. We used to do a lot of restoration stuff too. I can actually white metal bearings so I can actually make bearings from scratch.

Speaker 2: 8:53

One of the guys that I worked with was from South Africa. He used to do white metal bearings for vintage restorations. So we still a lot of vintage restoration engines. So I got to learn such a broad variety of stuff and everyone that I was, particularly that I worked with in that facility, really cared, but they actually cared. So quality and attention to detail was very, very high standard. And then, after leaving that industry and then utilizing other machinists, sometimes you almost have to risk sending out an engine block to a workshop, getting them to do some work on it, and then you get it back and they've essentially ruined it, because so you have to be prepared to trial and error because, like you say, that attention to detail or care isn't there.

Speaker 1: 9:37

Yeah, and I mean I don't want to. Obviously we're probably going to have a bunch of mechanics and engine machinists listening to this and shaking their heads right now and I'll probably be getting death threats in the morning. I'm not trying to say that this is across the industry. Obviously there's some great operators out there turning out super high quality work, but I mean, unfortunately I think it's just that's maybe not the norm in that industry. Which kind of brings me back to another related question.

Speaker 1: 10:04

I'm kind of just touched on it anyway, but with our own engine building courses, one of the common questions we get and we try and deal with this in the course as well is okay, cool, I want to build my own engine at home. I'm going to have to deal with an engine machinist. How do I choose one that's going to actually give me good work? Now you just mentioned you can sort of send out a block as a bit of a test and sometimes it's going to come back ruined. I mean, obviously we don't want to do that. If we can avoid it, that gets pretty expensive and sold a strain for that matter. Are there any other kind of like tips that you can give our listeners on how to sort of sort of sort out the good from the bad in the engine machining world.

Speaker 2: 10:44

Look, I think maybe doing like one of your courses, where you get taught how to use measuring equipment and taught how to identify what you're actually trying to achieve, would be one of the big ones.

Speaker 2: 10:56

I mean, you could walk into some of these machine shops and just ask them to see their work and then go out the back of the workshop, if they're happy to show you, and then basically just look at the quality of work they're doing, look at the facility that they're working in, their attention to detail in their day job.

Speaker 2: 11:10

I mean, if you're going to spend money with these guys, you really sort of want to know that they're actually doing the right job for you. One of the things I do for my customers when I build engines is I film everything, photos of absolutely everything from the process, because one of the things at the end of the day is if I assemble an engine and I've told you I've put all these parts into it and charged all this money, how do you know for a fact that those parts are in that engine? So one of the things, yeah, like you say, is just photographs and video evidence. It's really easy to do and it gives the customer sort of this like look how clean this thing is. It's almost as a piece of art. You don't really want to start it up and run it in the car sometimes.

Speaker 1: 11:45

A little story that just popped into my mind as you were saying that, about not knowing what's inside the engine and just taking for granted that it's actually what you paid for. I mean, obviously you're dealing with someone who's got some integrity that's going to be the case, but unfortunately this industry is a bit checkered. So back when I was running my old tuning shop I had a customer who had a Skyline R32 Skyline with a build RB30 and I'd been sort of involved in the tuning of that from when he brought the car to us. So it was a previously built engine, no real back story on it, and it always had a really weird vibration to it. And we chased this for a couple of years while the customer owned it and it only happened at a certain RPM range, but that happened to be quite noticeable sort of a low speed cruise. And we went to the point of having the flywheel and clutch removed and checked and rebalanced and that made no improvement. The front pulley was replaced all of the sort of normal stuff you did and we got nowhere with it and anyway I think after about three years the engine suffered some kind of failure. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it gave us the opportunity to open it up, and the reason it had a vibration is that it had five rods of one brand and one completely different, random rod that weighed something in the region of about 15 or 20 grams more than the others. You sort of look at this and you're like you could not make this shit up, honestly. So that's the bad side of things. Unfortunately, some people will do whatever they need to do to get through and deliver the customer a subpar engine, and obviously we don't want to be dealing with those sorts of people.

Speaker 1: 13:27

Where possible, what I would say is a couple of things to go towards. How do we choose a machine shop? I think everything you just mentioned there's a really sound place to get started Looking at a machine shop that at least has some experience with the type of engines you're dealing with, and once that deal with race engines, that would probably be my key. I've always suggested a really good place to start would be talking to people in local car clubs and seeing who the car club members are actually using to build engines or machine engines, because word spreads pretty quickly and if they're dealing with a machine shop, that's no good. You're going to hear about that very, very quickly.

Speaker 1: 14:05

One element that I find quite hard to sort of pin down is the quality of the machine equipment and how clean the workshop is and the reason. These are sort of two separate elements. I have dealt with machine shops over the years where there's engines stacked floor to ceiling, the places in absolute shambles to look at and you sort of shake your head walking around thinking this is just a health and safety violation waiting to happen. But they turn out some impeccable work. So it's one of those. I can't always judge the book by its cover in that regard. And then, on the same note, these days modern machine equipment is almost always going to be CNC based and the precision that that can offer, the repeatability, I totally get it. But there's also some of the older operators who've been using manual equipment for decades. They know it inside and out and they can turn out amazing work with this manual equipment. So what's your take on the quality of the equipment versus the skill of the operator on the equipment? What's the most important factor?

Speaker 2: 15:12

I think maintenance of the equipment is probably one of the big ones.

Speaker 2: 15:15

One of the things, just as an example, I've seen a milling machine that mills blocks or cylinder heads and if you're machining, say, like a four cylinder head, which might be, say what, 50 centimetres long or 30 centimetres long, and if you're only machining a lot of four cylinder heads and the head is mounted in the centre of that travel bed, you generally find that the machine actually starts to get some wear just in the range that it uses.

Speaker 2: 15:40

A good machinist will actually run the whole length of the bed and run the mill cut, even though it's not cutting the cylinder head, run the entire length of the bed for every cut and although it takes longer, you'll find that it won't wear the bed right where the machining task is happening on that four cylinder head. And you could be talking V8 cylinder head, which is essentially a four cylinder head length, a six cylinder head and then obviously then you've got space on either side of that cylinder head. So things like that a good machinist. You'll see them run the entire length of the bed because they know in 10 years time the machine's still going to have the same amount of bed wear along the whole travel.

Speaker 1: 16:17

Yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Obviously not something I would have thought of, not being an engine machinist, but that's why I think it's so important. The machinery is one element, but it's the case of the operator that knows how to get the best out of that equipment and, in this point here, how to make sure it's still going to do a great job in another 10 years time as well. Let's come back full circle to getting into engine machining, and at that point you could have chosen a number of fields within the automotive industry. What was it about building engines that really stood out to you?

Speaker 2: 16:50

Engines just seem to fascinate me. Over the general mechanics of a vehicle. It's hard to say is a mechanic just a parts fitter, or are they repairing the clutches and diffs? You've got these individual tasks. There is a diff shop that's specialised in differentials. You've got manual gearbox transmission specialist, automatic transmission specialist and engine specialist. Is the mechanic the guy that just puts all that together? And then within these specialist trades, you've got this highly skilled workforce of guys that specialise in that component, compared to then the mechanic that puts it all together. I didn't want to be the guy that put it together. I wanted to be the guy that fixed the engine, because I knew that I could also be the guy that puts it together. That's, I guess, an easier task. In saying that, the machinist is generally the guy that's the diff guy, he's also the manual gearbox guy and he's also the engine guy. But to become a mechanic, I didn't see that as hard. I guess I wanted something that was going to be more difficult.

Speaker 1: 17:47

Yeah, okay, that's fair and it absolutely is. I think that's reasonable to say In terms of other areas as well. I've always found, at least from my personal standpoint, that engine building and engine tuning there's a lot of crossover there, which is why I sort of specialised in doing both of those myself. Is the engine tuning something that you've also got involved with?

Speaker 2: 18:11

Oh yeah, so I'm an engine calibrator as well, because, I mean, I don't know if this had been your experience growing up, but I was building my own engines as a kid and I was relying on other tuners to tune them. And I was going to tuners and I just was paying too much to get a bad result. They were making mistakes and I just thought this can't be that hard. So I ended up actually getting injured snowboarding and broke my spine. So I was bedridden for a little while and whilst I was in bed I decided, hey, might as well use my time sitting here in bed.

Speaker 2: 18:42

So I actually started reading the MoTeC manuals, the Daptronic manuals, every manual for every ECU that was available out at the time, and, surprisingly, the amount of information that you get from that, plus my mentor. I called him and was bombarding him with questions how does this work Like, how does the timing gun work to this, and how does that correspond with the ECU? And he was also tuning his own engines. And I've listened to one other podcast talk about the old MoTeC M4. And finally, enough, that was the first ECU I tuned and wow, how far has ECU technology come since that.

Speaker 1: 19:17

Yeah, I must admit I haven't dealt with an old MoTeC M4 for a number of years and there are a bit of a blast from the past when you do dive into them. But I mean, hats off to MoTeC. They still do a great job In terms of putting your book knowledge I guess with tuning into real world practice. How did that pan out? How did you get proficient at actually pushing the keys on the keyboard and making sure that you're pushing the right keys?

Speaker 2: 19:46

I had a lot of good help. I had a lot of guys steer me in the right direction, with good mentors. Basically, one of the guys that I was asking questions said hey, if you want to tune, don't be scared, give it a try. And he goes I've got these knock ears here. He goes hey, take these knock ears and then go have a listen and just drive your car around and just tinker Like play with your wideband, play with your ignition timing, and we're talking about naturally aspirated forays.

Speaker 2: 20:09

I mean, they're pretty resilient, pretty hard to break, yeah. So it was just really just trial and error for me, and this was a long time ago and I just don't think I just there was no real fear because I was an engine machinist and builder. So if I broke the engine, it's like well, I've got another few spare here, I'll just build another one. And although I never broke an engine, there was no reason for me to be scared of it. So I just tried. And, yeah, I guess that's not. A lot of people don't have that opportunity. So if they break an engine, it's catastrophic, like there's a lot of dollars involved.

Speaker 1: 20:41

Yeah, I think there's this misconception, though, that in order to become a proficient engine calibrator or tuner, you have to break some engines. I hear that said so many times and my personal opinion is that it's absolutely, completely inaccurate. You should not be breaking engines, with some exceptions. I mean, I was involved with drag racing where I had customers that wanted to break world records and we absolutely did that. And sure, if you're taking an engine and you're trying to put out for five times the factory power and maybe rev it to 10 or 11,000 RPM, you're at the absolute knife edge of. Everything has to be working right. The stars have to align properly to get good reliability out of those engines.

Speaker 1: 21:28

Yes, under those circumstances, some failures are going to happen. That's kind of the risk we are signed up for to build engines at that level. But with your sort of normal, slightly to moderately modified engines, I mean, if you understand what sort of if your ratio targets you should be aiming for, you understand knock or forms of abnormal combustion, and you have ways to monitor it, as you mentioned, knock is and you stay away from knock. You should not be breaking engines. That's my strong opinion. And there's something random goes wrong, that's sort of outside of your control, and I think this is kind of the expectation that a lot of dodgy tuners have built up in the aftermarket industry is I'm going to take my car to a tuner and there's a better than average chance it's going to come back broken and I accept that and that just shouldn't be the case, in my opinion anyway.

Speaker 2: 22:18

But you've just said there, one of the things that I get asked a lot to do is I want an engine that makes, let's just say, a thousand horsepower, and I want it reliable. And I'm like those two words do not go together. It's a thousand horsepower out of a, say, an RB6 cylinder or whatever engine you want, a 4G63 or an SR20 and reliable they don't go together. These engines were never meant to be designed to be pushed to this level of power. So what is your definition of reliability? And it's just that doesn't work.

Speaker 1: 22:49

I think it comes down to expectations and unrealistic expectations that, sadly, are formed by the internet, because any car magazine or any car blog site that's got articles on the sort of cars that we're interested in looking at, cool cars that make a lot of power Just about everything these days has 600, 800 or 1000 horsepower. So people are preconditioned to these numbers that they throw around. It's easy, but the reality, the back story behind some of these car articles, you don't get to understand how little or often the car's being driven, how many kilometres it's doing between rebuilds, what is actually required in terms of maintenance, those factors, they're not interesting or sexy, so they get left off. And when you actually dive into reality, as you say, I mean a thousand horsepower RB absolutely can do it, no problem at all. It's a pretty well known recipe and it's not that difficult. But is it going to do 100,000 kilometres between fresh and up? Absolutely not, particularly if you're going to drive it the way it's designed to be driven.

Speaker 1: 23:56

And that's the element, I think, setting that expectation with a customer as to what is realistic, what the upkeeper maintenance is going to be and what the cost is going to be. So those factors need to be dealt with in order to so we're all going in the same direction and we're on this journey and we know what we're up for. I think that's really important, would you agree? Definitely, 100%. Yeah, let's come back to the little 4A, because it is one of my favourite engines, and I'm going to pick your brains on this throughout this podcast, because I've got a project in mind which may come up a little bit later down the track, which will involve a 4A. So I'm pretty keen to sort of see what I can learn from you. For a start, why the 4A, 4age? Why did you sort of embrace that as an engine that you've got a particular passion for?

Speaker 2: 24:45

Two main aspects. One was a cartoon called Initial D. I'm sure everyone's heard of that, and when I was younger I couldn't afford an AE86 and one of the guys in my neighbourhood had a KE70 which had a 4AGE in it and it was a mad little car. The amount of torture that he gave that thing was abnormal and it just copped every bit of it. I fell in love with the design of the shape of the car. Although there's square box, essentially that, basically a brick on wheels, I just fell in love with it. So the 4AGE obviously naturally became the engine that you wanted in that car, because in Australia some of them they didn't come with the 4AGE, the fuel injected version. So that was the engine. And then obviously you look into the former Atlantic as being the pinnacle of the 4AGE world and obviously in Initial D they had the Group A20 valve which was like also, that's like the epitome of where you want to be in the 4AGE world.

Speaker 1: 25:41

There's definitely a lot of recipes in terms of 4A parts, swapping between different bits from the Toyota parts bin, and it is a very easy engine to make moderate power out of, probably a much more difficult engine to make really high power levels and I'm talking about the former Atlantic spec, which I'll dive into as well. In terms of the back story of the 4AGE design, I had in the back of my mind I can't remember where this information came from that this was actually based around the Ford BDA, cosworth engine, toyota sort of, I guess, essentially copying what worked for Ford. Is that correct or is that sort of urban myth?

Speaker 2: 26:19

If you actually get a Ford BDA head gasket and lay it over a 4AGE, you'll be very surprised how everything lines up bore spacing, bores, head bolt holes, everything pretty much.

Speaker 1: 26:30

So Toyota just took that and added the Japanese engineering and reliability potentially to it.

Speaker 2: 26:36

I won't say that Toyota stole the design, but yeah pretty much.

Speaker 1: 26:40

Okay now in terms of the 4A family, this is again quite vast and this probably could get quite deep pretty quickly for those who maybe aren't super into 4AGE engines. But let's look at that holy grail, the former Atlantic engine. So this was used in a race series, former Atlantic, obviously. If my memory serves correct, the best of these engines were supposedly around about the 240 horsepower mark and, I think, revved to sort of 10, 10,500 RPM or there about, and my number's about right.

Speaker 2: 27:11

Yes, that's correct. So 250 horsepower was the good ones, the real top of the end, top of the line, hassle ground and loining engines. We're doing about 250 flywheel horsepower. So these were all engine dyno and, like you say, about 10,000, 10,500 RPM was the top RPM on those engines.

Speaker 1: 27:29

When I was a little bit younger and sort of forming a bit of a passion for cars, I think my background sort of sounded a little similar to you in terms of the cars you're involved with. I had a K7E of my own and that ended up running a variety of engine combinations, but I settled on a 4A GZE, the supercharged bottom end with a silver top 20 valve head and actually had a hand-me-down turbo from my old drag car, my Evo. So that was my daily driver for a number of years and it was a huge amount of fun. We ended up with about 500 wheel horsepower out of that car, which is insane considering it was, for all intents and purposes, all stock internal components on the engine. But like a lot of people, I sort of looked to that former Atlantic holy grail and kind of aspired to build something of that nature. What is the recipe for getting 240, 250 horsepower naturally aspirated out of a 4A?

Speaker 2: 28:26

So realistically it comes down to a few aspects. One of them is compression ratio, camshaft profile duration and lift and port design and valve design. Pretty much, if you get that combination right. Obviously, intake run a length and diameter and exhaust run a length and diameter. So everything, pretty much everything, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: 28:48

Yeah, I mean you say all of those things individually sounds pretty easy, but I mean there's levels to each of those elements and I mean this is kind of the thing. I find building a high powered turbocharged engine super satisfying because it is easy to make really big numbers. I mean there's a lot that goes into it. But for intents and purposes, if we want more power, while we choose the right sized turbocharger and run sufficient boost and if the engine mechanically can hold together, we're gonna end up with some big numbers Naturally aspirated engines. You can't really hit them with that sledge hammer approach. They are complex and they're sort of very finely tuned and every element has to work together and if you don't get that combination right you can end up with a bunch of expensive parts that just don't work together correct.

Speaker 2: 29:38

So luckily, I guess for us, the road map is already in place to build these engines. So if you look at, say, what Hasselgren or you know the loynings are doing, the exhaust run a length, it's all there diameters, tubes, the intakes so the TRD intakes, like the intake manifolds and throttle bodies, that's all there. Obviously, some of the things you have to do yourself for like, say, your port design, and the difference between loynings and Hasselgren will vary very, very slightly. But realistically these guys are running big port heads ported out, cnc ported out. They've got quite a funny shape design actually and you know then obviously fitting the biggest valves they can in them. So the engine that I just had here recently, a Formula Atlantic engine which we turbocharged, that had 4 mil oversize valves in it from standard, so absolutely massive. So, mind you, the factory valve seats can't cope. So it had brilliant oversize seats, but yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:35

So I mean obviously for a lot of the popular engines we can generally buy from a few suppliers maybe Farea, supertech et cetera off the shelf 1 mil ome oversize valves and within reason not maybe every engine you can usually machine the existing valve seats to take that 1 mil ome oversize. But what you're saying there, if we go for that's massive. So then that's a really big operation. Machine out the existing valve seats and fit in new custom valve seats into the head and then machine those correct, correct, yeah, OK, in terms of the other bits, you sort of just insinuated that for an Atlantic build a lot of this stuff is off the shelf. In terms of you mentioned the inlet manifold, I assume back in the day that that was potentially maybe a control part. What about aspects such as the camshafts, the pistons, the rods et cetera? Are these all sort of a control part or is each of the engine builders kind of using their own combination and having custom parts built?

Speaker 2: 31:31

So I believe that the I mean my experience with what I know the TRD crankshafts were actually made by Marine crankshafts in the United States. So they're a custom crankshaft manufacturer and TRD USA basically got them to make the crankshafts for them. The camshafts were actually a TRD unit. I don't know if they were made in-house by Toyota, but a TRD crankshafts for the former Atlantic, I'm assuming and I can't say this for certain were made in the US and these guys were over 300 degrees of duration and like 14 mils plus of left, like they were absolute monsters.

Speaker 1: 32:07

I guess where I'm going with that specific question was the freedom to try different cam profiles and tweak that. Or is this like everyone is running essentially that same TRD cam?

Speaker 2: 32:20

I'm assuming that everyone ran the same camshaft, because they were running them to about 10,000, 10,500 and to achieve that sort of power level, to that RPM, you sort of need that sort of duration. In my opinion, you probably could have pulled a little bit of cam out of them and then probably pulled a little bit of valve spring out of them too, to try and make more power and not have the engines fail as soon. But I guess back in the day when they were running that series, they didn't have spin trons, and spin tron is a pretty good tool.

Speaker 1: 32:48

Yeah, we're talking about quite a long time ago and the fact that people still talk about the Formula Atlantic engine. It really was quite an achievement. You've just mentioned spin tron, so let's dive into that. What is a spin tron and how does that help when you're designing engine components or valve tron components?

Speaker 2: 33:05

So a spin tron's a machine which is basically a big DC engine that bolts to the back of the engine. You basically run no spark plugs and no cam covers on the engine or clear cam covers. Then using lasers it actually measures your valve deflection. So the DC engine will spin the engine over and run it up through the RPM and lasers will actually measure the actuation of your valves and then basically the spin tron is then measuring to see if you get valve float through the RPM range.

Speaker 2: 33:32

So realistically, if you had a spin tron you could develop like camshaft profiles and you could start dropping spring pressure out of these engines. Because you've got to understand that if you're running such high spring pressures the engine physically has to operate that so you're losing torque from the engine to operate your valve train. So you want to try and run as minimal spring pressure as possible but at the same time have enough to keep the engine in operation. So spin tron's a really, really good tool to measure that and pull valve spring out of it. So if they had that back in the day, I mean one team could honestly dominate because they could start pulling spring out of it, pulling cam out of it, if it was unnecessary to make the same power because you'd just move between the spin tron and then the engine on it and just keep testing.

Speaker 1: 34:12

Yeah, absolutely In terms of the cam profile as well and just saying we've got x degrees of duration and so many millimetres of lift at least my understanding. I mean I don't grind cam profiles, but I've talked to a few people who are deep in that sort of area. There's sort of you could have two cam profiles that on paper basically deliver the same net result lift and duration. That's it. You could have one, the design maybe. I guess it might be the way the valve is ramped up off its seat and then at the other side, as it's closed, back down onto its seat, that tends to beat up on the valve train much more harshly than another cam profile. Is that an issue as well? Is that again an area where the spin tron can be used to sort of help with that development, or does that go a little bit deeper?

Speaker 2: 35:01

Yeah, definitely so. I've been looking into Billy Godbolt I think his name is at Comp Cams. He's been doing some really cool stuff with the spin tron at Comp Cams. Although they're dealing with like LSs and V8s and things, it's really good to know what's going on in the industry outside of my small world of Toyota 4A's. So looking at the spin tron and what they're doing with cam profiles and what they're able to actually achieve, I still think there's so much more that we can do in development when it comes to the cam profiles that we're working with. I mean also you've got other aspects like the weight of the valve train and a brilliant copper seats which act like a sponge. They sort of absorb the impact of the valve returning to the seat, so you can have these more aggressive profiles. But is it necessary to have that profile with a better shaped lobe? I mean, if you can optimize out of the shape of the lobe, then you can drop spring pressure out and make more power and torque.

Speaker 1: 35:52

Now, another element that's really critical to developing power in a naturally aspirated engine is the compression ratio, and to a degree more is better. This comes down to the octane of the fuel available as well, because if we can't achieve MBT timing, we're not limited. Well, chances are we're the need of better fuel, that we've gone too far with the compression ratio, but we sort of also can get to a point where, to get what could be theoretically the ideal compression ratio, we end up with this massive dome on the piston, which actually is a negative for the flame front propagation. It's kind of sitting in the way. So can you give us any feedback on balancing those two elements, getting the ideal compression ratio without actually negatively impacting the combustion process?

Speaker 2: 36:43

So you're exactly right. When people talk about compression ratio and this is one of the things that I've always found really interesting is they consider their static compression ratio but not their dynamic compression ratio and I don't know if you've used that term before or like, when you start increasing the cam duration and profile, when you start reaching overlap, you've got this sort of you start to bleed off compression, as it's sort of on overlap through the passage between the inlet and exhaust valves as it's cranking over. This is really really good for scavenge, but, like you say. Then, coming back to static compression ratio, yeah, definitely a more flat style piston with no sharp edges on it and then trying to maybe machine the head down as far as possible to try and get that compression ratio up without actually having the piston doing the work for you, so you want less combustion chamber capacity or volume, as opposed to increasing the dome capacity.

Speaker 2: 37:39

That's one of the things I've found. But then also you start to destroy cam and crank timing because you're moving the cylinder head so much further down by machining it. So you then obviously it starts to become a thing where you might have to slip teeth on the cam gears, degree those in, dial those in, and then obviously your cam profile, your cam cards that come with your cam shafts. They generally get you in the ballpark. But you'll find once you hit the dyno that every single engine is different and it's going to require something else to make MBT or maximum power at all.

Speaker 1: 38:11

Now I mean, you've just really highlighted the fact that there's a lot of factors that go into this, but could you give us a bit of a guide for a naturally aspirated 4A that you're building and I'm not talking here Atlantic spec a good, solid performer that's going to run on just a pump fuel, like a good octane pump fuel, so nothing exotic. What sort of compression ratio range would you say is sort of feasible for that kind of engine combination?

Speaker 2: 38:40

I'd be doing at least 11.5 to 1 compression static and I'd be doing at least a 272 degree cam shaft and just a bit of a plug there for Kelford. You New Zealand guys, kill it. Kelford's a really really good. Always got some really cool shit.

Speaker 1: 38:54

They do produce a good quality cam. I can attest to that. We've run those in just about everything we've ever built and it's nice to have a New Zealand company that's actually crushing it on the world stage with their cams as well. So another free plug for Kelford. There we go Now. Coming back to the Atlantic engines again. Like, as I mentioned, the Holy Grail and everyone who was into those 4AGE engines kind of aspired to build something like that. And this kind of comes back to the whole getting your expectations aligned correctly. When you're taking these little capacity engines and spinning them to 10.5,000 RPM making 240,250 horsepower, what's the sort of lifespan on one of those engines between overhauls or reboots, fresh and ups?

Speaker 1: 39:38

10 hours 10 hours, okay, yeah, that's not a lot, it's not a lot.

Speaker 2: 39:44

This is the kick of it 10 hours wide open throttle. So generally these engines were running the Cosworth Pectel ECUs. You couldn't put any other ECU on it, but basically 10 hours at wide open throttle. So because they're in a formula car, generally they are at wide open throttle all the time. That's out of the corner, wide open throttle. They're off the throttle only for cornering. So in an event you might only get an hour or something out of it in a full event. So basically you get about 12 months of racing out of these because, depending on how many races you've got in the season.

Speaker 2: 40:14

But 10 hours is basically where you start houring out and that's a term where the components hours life in hours hour out. You just throw them in the bin and replace them. So you would hour out your valves, springs like buckets. Most of the components really just get houred out very quickly. And then obviously you can crack test rods, crack test the rod bolts, replace pistons. If there's damage to the pistons, change those. If they're still measuring, okay, we'll put them back in, send them around again.

Speaker 1: 40:42

So this kind of comes down to a bit more of a subjective look at the component and sort of inspecting them for any potential downsides. And if they check out fine, at least the rotating assembly at the bottom end could go another turn, for sure, for sure, a little bit harder with the valve train, though there's not sort of so many tests we can do that are going to definitively say if this valve spring or valve is on its last legs.

Speaker 2: 41:06

One of the things that I do with the valve train is I record every single one of my lash settings and I monitor that even more. My customer engines every single customer engine that I do has a serial number on it and that goes into a book of mine. It'll let the back book. And what happens is I measure those and if there's any variation for those over time and they start to lose valve lash, what's happening is the valve is actually starting to cup, so the face is actually starting to buckle and the valve stem is actually starting to protrude back into the cylinder head and you start losing valve lash.

Speaker 2: 41:36

So if I ever start to see valve lash loss, I'll record that and then monitor it and if it starts getting below a tolerance threshold that I say is acceptable, then we've got an issue. So then let's just say I've got a solid bucket conversion on a 4A so it has no shim, completely shimless. I will change out to give extra clearance, but if I see that move any further, pull the head off. We've got to start looking for an issue here, whether it be the lobe is running dry and it's slamming the valve against the seat, it could be tension between the valve and the valve guide. So if the valve, when you pull it out of the cylinder head you might see like scoring on it from the actual bronze guide, if you're running a bronze guide, from it being too tight and basically as the valves returning to the seat, it can get jammed momentarily and then slam shut and then that can start cupping the valve over, especially if you're running high spring pressure.

Speaker 1: 42:24

Yeah, okay, I mean, it's these things. Monitoring them and getting on top of them before they cause an issue is really the key here, because you have a valve let go and you're not going to have a lot that's going to be recoverable from that engine.

Speaker 2: 42:40

Yeah, it's catastrophic If you're running a turbocharged car. You even lose your turbocharger because when the valve head pops off it goes out the exhaust port, straight in through the turbine wheel and it's all over and it just destroys everything. So monitoring valve train is probably the biggest thing for me because generally bottom ends hold together pretty well. I mean, if you know the limits of what crankshaft rod and a piston and gudgeon pin can cope with and you keep it under the threshold of where you know that there's a failure point, then monitor your valve train a lot more closely than the bottom end because realistically it's harder to test the bottom end for failures. I mean you can test N float on crankshafts and yeah, all sorts of things, but yeah.

Speaker 1: 43:20

So interestingly, in my drag racing engines we went through with my own 4G63, we went through a range of different crankshafts and at the time we were probably punching around a 1000 wheel horsepower there or thereabouts and revving the thing to 10,500 RPM pretty regularly and I'd sort of every time the engine got pulled down you'd get the crankshaft crack tested and we started with back in the day what would have probably been a $4,000 billet crankshaft, and the best time we had that crack tested I can't remember how many meetings that had done it's cracked the fillet radius on a bunch of the journals. So you sort of cry a little bit and throw it in the bin and put in another one, which is obviously an expensive way of going. And at one point I couldn't get the billet crankshaft so the only thing we could resort to was a factory 4G63 crankshaft from Mitsubishi and I mean they're a good item but they're not made for 1000 wheel horsepower and 10,500 RPM. And interestingly I kind of worked out over the about two or three seasons of racing that the 4G63 Mitsubishi factory crankshaft actually lived just as long and just as healthy as these mega dollar billet crankshafts. It still cracked and I'd throw it away, but I felt a lot happier about throwing away something that I think at the time I was paying maybe $1200 bucks for instead of $4,000 or $5,000.

Speaker 1: 44:42

But the other thing that came from that is because you don't really know. Maybe you pulled the engine down at the end of a season of racing and it's done 50 or 80 passes and it's cracked, but did it crack after the 10th pass or did it crack at the end? I mean, when you see a crack, obviously a kind of good conscience put the thing back in. But that was always something that was on the back of my mind. How long has this been cracked for and at what point is it actually going to break into two pieces? Unfortunately, never found that out. But yeah, sometimes what you don't know doesn't hurt you.

Speaker 2: 45:16

Yeah, that story that you just said was very funny. I'm very close friends with Mick Bagdaddy at Mix Motor Sports in Sydney and I remember being in his workshop one night and looking into an SR20 that he had dart and sleeve full to the deck of concrete and the block billet caps with a factory girdle and I've looked at it, cast block. And then I've looked at it and inside it had like alloy rods, pistons in it and a stock crank. And I looked at it and I said Mick, are you kidding? I said you're putting a stock crank in this engine and he goes, trebs, he goes. You know the only engines, like all the manufacturers tell you there's a horsepower rating on this billet shaft. He goes. The only manufacturer that doesn't give a horsepower rating is Nissan OEM. And I was just like, are you serious? And he goes, mate, he goes.

Speaker 2: 46:01

The billet shafts crack all the time he goes. I've put these OEM shafts in and they don't crack or blow up as much as anywhere near as much as the billets. And I've sort of come to think that maybe that the cast crank shafts actually have a bit of spring, a bit of give in them and as where the billet shafts are so brittle that they're probably not forgiving when it comes to, say, like tire shake or really heavy, intense shock loads of clutch dropping things like that, where they're copying this load and they're just cracking there, where, versus the cast iron crank shafts are maybe a bit more springy and copying a bit more before they crack. So it's funny because there's a lot of cranks that I've had where I haven't really found the limits to them yet. I'm still pushing factory crankshafts in certain engines and I'm still not finding limits yet.

Speaker 1: 46:48

I think there's a mentality as well that I know I've been guilty of falling into, that I'm building this engine and maybe I'm wanting to double the factory power, so therefore I must change every single element inside of the engine and often that's just simply not the case. I mean, if we roll back sort of 40 or 50 years, the quality of the factory parts wasn't where it is now, the sort of quality control, the materials they had access to, etc. It's just, it's all different. So I think what I'd say is quite often a lot of the factory componentry is actually much, much better than we give it credit for. The flip side of that, I'd say, is, I guess, in the drive to reduce the cost of parts and also reduce the reciprocating weight inside of the engine, retaining weight inside the engine Conrods.

Speaker 1: 47:36

I've seen a lot of factory conrods where you sort of take one, look at it and think if I rev this 500 RPM higher than what it is currently, or we make 20% more power, this thing's going to just bend in half. But that's a pretty simple upgrade path anyway for the conrods. But yeah, I think point of the conversation is don't necessarily think that you have to replace every single component. A little bit more of a thorough analysis and seeing what other people are getting away with is definitely worthwhile. It could end up putting a lot more money back in your pocket as well.

Speaker 2: 48:07

For sure, for sure.

Speaker 1: 48:09

Alright, let's just talk about the different engine combinations with the 4A, and this is kind of it's quite a large family of engines there. There's the 16 valve and big port and small port variants, there's the supercharged 4A GZE, then there's the 20 valve and silver top and black top variants and then there's also the other options where people are using 7A bottom ends which you've kind of alluded to with your earlier boss. So give us a quick tour of that Toyota factory engine combinations and what your sort of go to options are. What do you prefer?

Speaker 2: 48:45

So again when it comes to like selection of the engine for the task. If I was looking to build an aspirated engine, that was. It already comes with a lot of good parts out of the box where I'm not having to purchase external things like the independent throttle bodies and things like that. Aspirated are definitely good for the 20 valve, silver top and black top. Silver top if you would only run, if you can't get your hands on a black top, black top's being the best one.

Speaker 2: 49:09

Bigger exhaust ports, port dividers on the intake, bigger ports all over, bigger throttle bodies from factory, higher compression ratio, lightweight rods all these things make a black top so much better of an engine compared to the silver top. So the silver top is something you get. If you want to do a really hard way to turbocharge an engine, a 4A. If you want a turbocharged one, the small port is probably the best one to do, or the 4A GZE, which I don't think you're probably going to find too many of them around anymore. These days. The 4A GZE's are pretty hard to find, I'd assume.

Speaker 1: 49:40

Yeah, I think a lot of this stuff is now getting pretty hard. I mean it's an old engine as well. I'm interested just to dive into the 20 valve versus the 60 valve for a turbocharged combination. You mentioned that the 20 valve would be a hard way to build a turbo combination. I did that, so I'm interested what you think is harder about that combination.

Speaker 2: 50:02

Okay. So if you were going to turbocharge a 20 valve, the silver top 20 valve's the best one because it has stronger rods. If you look at a black top 20 valve rod versus silver top, you would very quickly laugh at how small the 20 valve black top ones are. You'd be surprised if they don't just break looking at them.

Speaker 1: 50:19

Yeah, they look like a twig. It was actually triggered what I was talking about before with the fact a lot of factory con rods you can tell you don't have to be an engineer or a metallurgist to sort of have an inkling that may be doubling the power. It's not going to be that smart with that particular product.

Speaker 2: 50:34

So going back to silver top and turbocharging, that might be hard, one of the reasons being the injectors that you need to put into the actual engine to make it work are very hard to find. I think there are 373 cc's of injection standard and I think there's not a lot of options to get aftermarket injectors. I think the biggest that they do is like an 800 or 700 cc Sard injector. Now, most guys these days are using E85 based fuels and I don't know how Sards go with ethanol based fuels, but personally that's not a lot of fuel injection for me. If I was going to turbocharge, so with an autobo charge, I'm going for more than 250 horsepower.

Speaker 1: 51:14

Yeah, those are valid points. So a couple of things I'll add to that which we could have gotten to anyway is when I built my Silver Top 20 valve turbo combination, I did start with the AW11 4A GZE bottom end so supercharged factory bottom end and what that gave me over the Silver Top was a much beefier connecting rod. So I had no problems with those rods and, as I mentioned before, I sort of ended up up to 500 wheel horsepower, so it was no slouch. The injector issue I had blocked that from my memory because you're absolutely right, that is a ball ache. The 20 valve manifold basically incorporates these side feed injectors and the fuel rail is part of that. So you sort of you don't have the flexibility of any top feed injector. I think I actually ended up converting it to take a top feed injector and it was a hell of a lot of work. Obviously you can get around anything if you put your mind to it. But yeah, I'd completely forgotten that that was a challenge.

Speaker 2: 52:18

Also you've got independent throttle bodies, which you probably also would know if you're just using the factory intake manifold off that cylinder head. Independent throttle bodies plus tuning for turbo. I find it a lot harder. I find it easier if you've just got a single throttle body with a big planar chamber and then that base tuning very, very easy. So it's interesting.

Speaker 1: 52:38

you say that I know that a lot of people really struggle with individual throttle body turbo setups and I think a lot of that came maybe in the earlier days.

Speaker 1: 52:50

There are a couple of factory combos like that in the Nissan RB26 and the SR20 GTiR are two examples that spring to mind and I think a lot of people most people probably tried to apply what they already knew worked from a conventional engine with a planar and a single throttle body map based tuning, as you mentioned, and we're using that manifold pressure signal as the load axis for our fuel and our ignition tables.

Speaker 1: 53:18

Problem is that you don't really get a good signal when you've got individual throttle bodies, even though they'll have a map balance bar which is basically taking map signal from behind each of the throttle plates and averaging that, it's still not a signal that you can really use as your load input. So I think the game changer there is, as long as you understand that and you run your main fuel table based on throttle position, alpha N, with a background compensation for manifold pressure, that actually works really nicely and I actually find I incorporate that quite often even with a conventional single throttle body setup and it gives really nice control of the fueling under part throttle conditions which most people don't look at, but I'm kind of a bit of a nerd like that, so I do. So yeah, it needs to be treated with care, I guess is what we're trying to say here.

Speaker 2: 54:08

Definitely. That's exactly how I tuned my 20 valve blacktop when it was MoTeC M4. It was the alpha N throttle position and then a manifold compensation table, which was funny because I was running over 32 pounds of boost in the car and my map sensor was a 3 bar. So we actually maxed out the 3 bar and then, rather than just put a cut in, we basically told it to disregard and then added like 20% of fuel trim over the 3 bar map. So we just said, ignore that and just put extra fuel trim in. So that was pretty funny.

Speaker 1: 54:41

Possibly not the nicest and most precise way of getting the results, but sometimes you have to do some odd things to get through.

Speaker 2: 54:48

We were just doing it on the dyno because at the time we actually lifted the cylinder head there where you pulled a thread out of the block and funnily enough, we're actually incorrect in our timing. There's one of the things you have to watch out for in a 4A is if you actually swap between silver top and black top, oil pumps and 16 valve timing front covers a little plastic cover if you mix and match those, sometimes you're going to have a 10 degree difference between your timing gear on the front and the actual where it points to. So what we were timing on the engine was supposed to be 15 degrees before top dead was actually 5. So we were actually 10 degrees low in our timing map and we were putting about 24 degrees of timing in the top end on the laptop and it was making about 400. It was hard to say because it was wheel spinning on the dyno.

Speaker 2: 55:32

This is a long, long time ago. We had about six people in the boot trying to cold this thing down. It was making about 400 horsepower at the tyre at about 28 pounds of boost and from our experience it should have been making more. So years later I ended up sort of going. Why did it do that and I had upgraded to a Haltec Elite at the time I ended up putting a dial gauge on it with a degree wheel and finding out that it was 10 degrees wrong. So once I corrected that and then pulled some timing out of the map and then took it for a drive, I think I was probably making more power just by my butt dyno driving around. It was probably making more power on 22, 23 pounds than it ever did on 32 pounds. So 10 degrees will make a bit of a difference.

Speaker 1: 56:13

Yeah, absolutely. I mean you are at least the safe way. It's always much more dangerous if you're over advanced by 10 degrees and the engine's actually getting more timing than you assume it is. But it is a good point to make is when you are mixing and matching between different parts from the same manufacturer's parts catalog, understand that there can be subtle differences in elements such as the timing marks, and that's a pretty important thing. But if in doubt, you can always make up a true TDC stop and a true TDC marker and actually find top dead center and know exactly where it is.

Speaker 1: 56:46

I've done that a few times as well on various engines and found that even the factory timing marks suited to that engine might be out by a couple of degrees, so they're not always pinpoint accurate. So yeah, there's a lot to learn there. The other element as well, with older engines where they run a factory harmonic damper with just the two piece with a rubber sort of intermediate and you've got the timing marks on that outer ring. I've seen where that is actually rotated relative to where it's key to the crankshaft. So you've got this timing mark that you're trusting your life on and it's out by 5, 10, whatever degrees who knows?

Speaker 2: 57:24

See that too crazy.

Speaker 1: 57:26

Definitely an issue with some of the older engines. I just wanted to take a moment out of our episode here with Matt, and if you are enjoying the episode so far, then I've got a course that I can guarantee you'll also love, which is our engine building fundamentals course. With all of the enthusiasts that we've dealt with over the years, we find that enthusiasts are keen to do just about every part of their project build, but tend to shy away from building the engine, thinking that it's simply a task that's beyond them and that they're going to have to outwork this or outsource this to a performance workshop. The reality is nothing could be further from the truth, and just about any enthusiast who's got a little bit of patience and an eye for detail can build a quality and reliable engine with only a modest selection of tools. Our engine building fundamentals course covers exactly what you need to do, as is a generic course as well.

Speaker 1: 58:18

We've obviously been talking about Toyota's 4AGE within this episode, but the skills that you learn, building a 4AGE, for example, are also completely applicable to any type of engine An LS, pushrod, v8, a quad cam, v12, just about anything in between, it does not matter. You'll learn about the parts of the engine. You'll learn about the clearances and the tolerances inside of the engine and you'll learn how you may need to adjust those clearances from what the factory recommend for an engine that's maybe going to make twice the power and maybe rev another 1000 RPM beyond the factory rev limit. You'll learn the machining operations that get applied to the raw materials or raw parts for your engine, and this is going to allow you to speak the same language as the engine machinist, ensuring that you get the right results and you're not paying for operations that aren't essential. If you are interested in learning more about this course, then we're offering a coupon code, which is MTPerformance50,. You'll find that in the show notes. That'll get you 50% off the purchase of our engine building fundamentals course. I also mentioned here that, even with that coupon code, if you purchase the course and decide it's not quite what you expected, no problem. We offer a 60 day, no questions asked money back guarantee on all of our courses. No exceptions here, so there is zero risk purchasing.

Speaker 1: 59:40

Alright, let's get back to our interview with Matt now. Coming back to the 16 valve versus 20 valve battle, so if we're talking naturally aspirated and this is just my take on a number of them that I've tuned for customers. I always found that in 100% stock form maybe with an intake, headers and exhaust, but nothing else that the 20 valve, and definitely the black top, really smashed it out of the park compared to a 16 valve. But conversely, once you start pouring a bit of money into developing the heads, it seemed to me that the 16 valve was a superior choice if you were sort of going all out. Is there anything in that, or is it very much dependent on the specifics of the engine?

Speaker 2: 1:00:21

Very much specifics. I mean, the 20 valves definitely do have the potential to do really well. The one thing that does let them down is valve spring. So once you start going on a 20 valve up into the higher duration camshafts, around the 300 degree camshafts of 290 degrees, with the lift that you need to do that duration, you end up finding that they start hitting valve float. So another sort of example is my personal 20 valve.

Speaker 2: 1:00:47

I had 292 degree toda cams in it and we're on the dyno putting about 30 pounds of boost in the car and we found that the power would basically just flat line out and we couldn't figure out why. Eventually I changed out to a 272 degree kelford with less lift, a couple of mills less lift and I ended up putting some spring bases under the springs because I was basically maxed out in my max in my spring max lift with the totas. So once I went back to the kelfords I had a few more mills to play with. So I ended up shimmying them up about a mill and a half and when we put it back on the dyno I ended up making substantially more horsepower on less boost with the kelfords. So I believed that I was hitting substantial valve float.

Speaker 2: 1:01:28

When I disassemble an engineer, you can actually find valve float in the retainers and the collets. So if you're on the head disassembly bench and releasing them, a good sign of valve float is the keepers will actually be jammed in the retainer and you actually have to give it a fair bit of pressure to release it. So that's a really, really good indication that you've been sustaining valve float.

Speaker 1: 1:01:50

OK, ok. Has this sort of really come down to just an inability? Obviously we don't have the ability to have an image here on a podcast, but for those who haven't seen a 20 valve head disassembled, I mean the valve springs are very, very small. Is it just a lack of an ability to get something better that's going to fit the space?

Speaker 2: 1:02:10

Yes, that's correct. So with a 16 valve in all cases the 16 valve has the option for a twin spring so you can put up to 110 pounds spring pressure on a base height. So you have the option to do shim under bucket solid conversion no shims. The 20 valve just doesn't have the same options when it comes to getting the parts involved for it.

Speaker 2: 1:02:32

The 16 valve obviously does have its drawbacks where it has its port angles. So it's using a basic port, comes in dead square and has to make quite a sharp turn into the valve. Face is where the 20 valve. The ports are quite raised. So there's differences between both of them in benefits to both. But at the end of the day, if you want to turbo, charge a 4A or make a good aspirated one, it depends to what level. The 16 valves always going to be better to turbo because you can get the spring pressure out of it, because turbo is obviously where you're going to make your horsepower. The motor just has to hold together for the ride and then for the 20 valves, up to a certain point, aspirated, the 20 valves are going to beat it. And then once you start pouring absolute stupid money into it, that's when the 16 valve is going to start beating the 20 valve.

Speaker 1: 1:03:16

Yeah, no, I mean that pretty much matches exactly what I saw. I mean a frustrating thing and it sort of comes back to our earlier conversation about having everything working in harmony with a naturally aspirated engine, if you want the results. I kind of I did a little bit of development work for a customer who had a I think it was a black top 20 valve and we'd started with this thing. It was stock standard and I'd tuned it and it made whatever it made. I can't quite remember that 110 kW or something.

Speaker 1: 1:03:45

So yeah, nothing to write home about just middle of the road where it probably should have been, and he then decided he was going to go wild with this thing. So he pulled it all apart and he got the head ported and new cams and basically all of the things that you'd expect you should do, and 6, 12 months later we got it back on the dyno and I hate to think how much money he had poured into this thing and it made 5 more kW or something like that.

Speaker 1: 1:04:13

And well, the worst part about it was it made 5 more kW peak and it lost like 15 kW down low. So I mean the whole thing really just went backwards in an expensive and soul crushing way. But this, unfortunately, is something that can happen with naturally aspirated engine development. If you haven't sort of gone through scientifically and analysed exactly what needs to be done and each part along that path, coming back to sort of strengths and weaknesses, a few talking 16 valve, what are the parts that need to be upgraded and what order would you be sort of going through those parts? And let's talk here about both an NA build and a turbo build.

Speaker 2: 1:04:57

So naturally aspirated build. I mean up to a certain point of camshaft lift and duration. You can get away with running the shim over bucket. Because I'm an engine builder I tend to just get rid of that straight away and run solid. You can buy solid buckets from the wrecking yard out of other engines other Toyota engines, I think, the 1ZZ. They're completely shimless. So if you just go to a picket part where you can pull the parts off yourself, you can just go to a wrecking yard and start pulling buckets out of cylinder heads and then start mixing them into your 16 valve until you've got all the right clearances.

Speaker 1: 1:05:29

Let's just stop there for a moment and just clarify what we're talking about, because these terms, that sort of second nature to you and me, a lot of people won't have heard. So, shim on bucket, what's that mean and what is a shim?

Speaker 2: 1:05:41

So the shim is like what determines the valve lash in an overhead cam engine. So you've got the lobe that runs against a what looks like an upside down bucket and then essentially the shim will sit on top of it inside a car salated section. So the shim is then determines the clearance and then you can get varying size shims to give you more or less clearance. Then you go to shim under bucket, which is essentially like a lash cap style, which again looks like a smaller bucket turned upside down on the valve, with a bigger bucket on the top side of it.

Speaker 1: 1:06:13

The bucket and the bucket. Yeah, again, I wish we had the benefit of some simple drawings here, but hopefully people are picking up what you're putting down. Now, the interesting thing with the shim on bucket, which is a horrible, horrible design, is that, well, you tell us what happens when you start putting a decent cam in there.

Speaker 2: 1:06:30

Basically, once the lift and the duration gets too high as the lobe starts to come around over the bucket, it will actually spit it out. It will pick the shim up and spit it out into the cylinder head and it's just catastrophic from there. It is just imagine a 50 cent coin flying around in your valve train, or a 20 cent coin rather.

Speaker 1: 1:06:49

Yeah, so it's not going to end well. So the common upgrade there was to, if you wanted to run anything with a reasonable cam profile, you're going to throw the factory shim on bucket system away and go to an under bucket shim oh sorry, shim under bucket. So that gives you the ability. With these little lash caps, the little bucket that essentially sits on the top of the end of the valve, you can get these in different thicknesses and that's how you're setting your valve lash or clearance. And then we go one step further and we've got a shimless arrangement. So tell us about that one.

Speaker 2: 1:07:24

So basically, Toyota has other versions of engines and you can look this up. You just got to jump on Google and have a look. But you'll actually find that Toyota has buckets that have the shim is actually incorporated into the bucket. So the bucket is actually size designated.

Speaker 2: 1:07:39

So if you know what clearance you roughly need to be let's just say you have a shim over bucket design and you have your clearance set you can measure the overall thickness of that bucket with, say, a micrometer which looks like a G clamp for anyone who doesn't know what they're looking at a very accurate G clamp and you can measure the overall thickness and then order or find the buckets that are shimless, where the bucket is, like I said, determined by its thickness, and then just put that straight into the cylinder head and it works and you've got no shim arrangement. It's like 40% lighter, so the valve train is now substantially lighter so you don't need as much spring pressure to operate the valve or return it. So there's benefits all over to that. But again, like you said, the 16 valve, that's the one downside to the 16 valve that the 20 valve has over it.

Speaker 1: 1:08:28

They are a shim under bucket from standard yes, yeah, All right, let's move down a little bit further. What other sort of key parts do we need to consider in terms of strength? I mean these engines that are known for heat gasket integrity problems. Are they known for crankshaft failures or bearing issues? What do we need to know?

Speaker 2: 1:08:51

So when it comes to the 16 valve in general, I mean I've personally done this plenty of times. We've put turbochargers on them disco potatoes would be an old school turbo. That we've done back in the day and cobbled together turbochargers, turbocharged subs with Microtech ECUs back in the day and we were running 220 kilowatts in standard 4AGs like small ports, big ports, three ribs, seven ribs, it didn't matter, we were just running pretty much anything and they would run about 220 kilowatts and we wouldn't really break them. The one thing we would find is you would hurt bearings in them, but that's generally if they have no oil in the sun. So if you keep oil in them they don't break generally at about 220 kilowatts.

Speaker 1: 1:09:32

Yeah, there is a common belief that as long as you keep oil in a Toyota engine of just about any era, it'll live forever, and there's a lot of truth in that, I think.

Speaker 1: 1:09:42

Oh yeah definitely Most engines are going to like oil if they want to survive. Couple more elements that you've just brought up here which I want to dig into Three rib versus seven rib. So this is referring to the blocks, and no miracle. Here we're talking about some vertical ribs that are cast into the block and the seven rib has seven, the three rib has three, and it was always sort of said that the seven rib was way superior in terms of strength to the three rib. So any truth in that or have you found good reliability with either?

Speaker 2: 1:10:11

So when it comes to the three and the seven rib, the only four AGs that were three rib with a very, very early big ports like I'm talking very early Now those particular four is only had a 40 mil crank pin. So their big end journal or the rod journal in the crankshaft was two mil smaller than the later model generation Now. They also had an 18 mil Guggen pin. So not very common for parts to get pistons or rods for those. So the very early three ribs aren't really desirable when it comes to modifying a foray. Then as soon as you move over to the early big ports that were seven rib, they've all got the 42 mil crank journal and the 20 mil Guggen pin and those were more desirable for parts.

Speaker 1: 1:10:54

So what really you're saying? There is the three rib versus the seven rib. It's more a case of understanding that that also means you've got the bigger crank journal and the bigger wrist pin. So it's not really the block strength, it's the internal component strength that's more important there.

Speaker 2: 1:11:08

Yeah, pretty much. And, like you say, I was talking with Merle Swan, the owner of the former Atlantic car that we're taking to Pikes Peak. He was telling me that the earlier blocks, earlier forays, when they were running them in the former Atlantic, the three ribs, they were cracking because they're actually a stress member of the actual chassis of the formula cars. So they said the earlier formula, the Swift, so they're a Swift chassis, swift Engineering and Swift Engineering. Now they didn't have as much integrity in the chassis. So what was happening is the cars on cornering would actually twist and the block would split. So they moved to the seven rib blocks and they were actually putting these little girdle plates between main caps two and four and that was actually tying the main caps into the side of the block to stop the block twisting and cracking.

Speaker 2: 1:11:54

So I don't know how much. I mean I've never pushed a three-rib block to a limit to see what it would actually do if it split. But I haven't really seen four-way blocks blow up, you know, incredibly like throwing the rods out to badly or splitting bores or the actual block splitting on the outside. It's not something that I've actually seen so far and I've pushed some of these engines to four, five, six hundred horsepower.

Speaker 1: 1:12:16

Sure, okay, the other element that I wanted to dive into there is big port versus small port, and I mean, the name probably is pretty indicative of what we're talking about. But what are the differences between these cylinder heads? Which is the superior one to have, and why did Toyota change?

Speaker 2: 1:12:34

Okay, so it started off with the big port 4A GEs and they had. They thought that the bigger ports were going to be a benefit to making power, so they had. Then they have incorporated something called TVIS plate, which was basically a set of tiny little throttle bodies in the intake runners to increase air speed. At low rpm these were shut and then at four and a half thousand these little throttle bodies inside the intake runners would actually open up and then it would increase the air speed.

Speaker 2: 1:13:00

Toyota then quickly realized and I think this is probably when fuel was probably getting better in the industry. So I think that after that what happened is Toyota said oh look, we can just increase the compression ratio and remove the TVIS because it's a value point. I mean, it's more moving parts. For no reason they decreased the the ports to a small port which is just a fraction under the size of the big port ports, but they increased the compression ratio and that ended up netting them more horsepower, because I don't think the big ports needed all that port. They also didn't have the compression ratio or the cam to really drive the power. So small ports were the later generation to the big port.

Speaker 1: 1:13:40

Very similar. There's a lot of parallels there with the 4G63 as well. The early six bolt blocks had a very big port head. With that same, essentially, mitsubishi take on the butterfly arrangement in the inlet runners and then once they got into the Evo's they went to a way way smaller port in the head got rid of that butterfly arrangement. Now if you're looking at a candidate for a build and you're going to go all out here, is the big port the one to have or the small port's more than adequate.

Speaker 2: 1:14:14

The next question I'll ask you what's your budget? So, realistically, look, that is literally the question I have to ask customers. It's what is your budget? What is the horsepower target? What fuel are you going to be using? And then we can start to create a plan from there for your horsepower goals. Because, realistically, again, expectation versus reality, we have to be real.

Speaker 2: 1:14:38

If you come to me and say, hey, I want to make a 250 horsepower 4AGE, I'm going to say you understand that that's going to be really rough to drive on the street. You're going to need something with a dog engagement gearbox, because the thing needs to rev to 10,000 RPM to be efficient in its power creation. So a Syncro box will not shift to 10,000 RPM. I can tell you that right now. So you need a dogbox, gear engagement, you need a fuel that can cope. So E85 is such a thing nowadays, that's not a problem. But you need the gearbox. The car's not going to drive very nice under that. So their expectations are like, oh, I'm going to make 250 horsepower and it's just going to be weapon to drive. But that's not really the case, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:15:18

Yeah, I think until you've actually experienced living with something that is that aggressive on the street, you don't actually know what you're getting yourself in for. I'm glad to actually mention that point about the dog engagement gearbox, because I don't think too many people appreciate that a Syncro Mesh gearbox, a stock OE style production gearbox, often won't shift at these sort of RPM ranges and people just don't appreciate that that's an issue. So obviously there's a variety of other benefits that come with a dog engagement gearbox, including the selection of closer ratios that work with what will be an incredibly narrow power band. But yeah, I mean having the gearbox be able to actually shift gears at 10,500 RPM. Obviously that's kind of a benefit as well.

Speaker 1: 1:16:01

Alright, so in terms of that, obviously no clear winner, but there's a lot more that goes into deciding which way to go to, and obviously that's something you can have the conversation with the customer at the time. Capacity, though let's talk about that, because the 4AGE being only 1.6 litres in capacity the old story there's no replacement for displacement. I'd argue turbochargers do a pretty good job of that, but if we're staying naturally aspirated, there's definitely some truth there. What are our options for getting our capacity into these little engines?

Speaker 2: 1:16:35

So now we're talking. So when you asked me before I want this sort of horsepower out of a 4A, I would basically turn around and say, hey look, two easy factors. One 4A is getting harder to find and if you find one, generally they're going to have damage to the bottom end, like a big end bearing damage or some sort of bottom end damage. If the cylinder head's savable, go do yourself a favour and buy yourself a 7AFE, because now we're talking 1.8 litre capacity and the opportunity to go even bigger again, up to two litres, the 4AGE cylinder head flows pretty well. So with a set of camshafts and a set of springs, rods and pistons in a 7AFE bottom end and generally the 7AFE bottom ends were owned by grandmas who just go down to the shops once a week, and there's so many of them.

Speaker 2: 1:17:21

So go do yourself a favour. Go buy a 7AFE bottom end for about $400 from the wrecker. Go get a 4AGE head from somewhere and put it together and you'll have a good time. I've got a customer's AE86, it does about 180 horsepower at the rear tyre and it does that. It's all in. It's all in at 180 horsepower by like 8400 RPM. So his SynchroMesh gearbox manages to change gears and it wasn't too much of an expense to get it to that level, okay when you're looking at one of these 7A combinations.

Speaker 1: 1:17:51

What are the parts that need to be changed out in that bottom end? Are you straight away? You're just basically retaining the crankshaft for the stroke and the block, obviously, itself. Am I right in assuming that a set of aftermarket pistons and rods is going to be inessential, if for no other reason, to get the compression ratio where we want it for that combination?

Speaker 2: 1:18:11

Yeah, so with the rods and pistons in them, the rods come out of them again very comically weak looking. I've seen guys actually run them before and they have had good success with them. But by the time you spend the money taking them to a machinist and getting them removed, getting a floating pin conversion done on them, so bushing the little end so you can put a late model, you need to put a 4A GE piston in it because obviously the valve reliefs are different, the compression ratio is wrong. So you can literally, if you're running a small port cylinder head, you can go buy a small port pistons, put those on a 7A rod into a 7A FE bottom end and it will bolt together and be fine.

Speaker 1: 1:18:47

Okay, the reality is converting those factory rods to suit. It's almost a coin toss. You might as well just buy an aftermarket component that's going to be stronger, for just a little bit more money.

Speaker 2: 1:18:58

Yep, the forged rod. By the time you spend the money on a forged rod, you've got ARP bolts, they've got the floating conversion done, they're already a forged rod and you're probably only 20% extra in money to get them from the factory ones converted over to a floating pin, put ARP bolts in them and then re-enclose and hone the rods To prep the rods. Essentially, you spend 20% more. You can forge rods.

Speaker 1: 1:19:21

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense, and I mean I'd sort of put that almost down to cheap insurance as well. Having a known rod that you're just within reason not going to be able to brake, it makes a lot of sense. When one goes out the side of a block, it's kind of like the same situation when you drop a valve not a lot of usable parts are going to be left from that engine. What about the integrity, reliability, strength of the factory Toyota 7A crankshaft? Does this sort of fall back into that conversation we were having previously, where factory components often are a lot stronger than people give credit for, or is there a limit to those?

Speaker 2: 1:19:57

So one of the things that I've found with the 7A's is harmonics, the weight of the conrod obviously the weight of the conrod and the piston in its reciprocating mass wasn't designed to work with a forged rod and piston. So once you go from a factory 7A conrod and piston the mass is so much heavier going to a forge component, a forged rod and piston. So what I find is the center of the crankshaft actually does this over exaggerated. What I'm doing my hands is basically saying that it moves up and down. So what I find is the center main bearing actually gets flogged out very early on with sustained high RPM. If you cap the RPM at, say, 8000, they don't seem to have an issue. But if you start revving them over 8000, the center main journal bearing starts to get flogged out.

Speaker 1: 1:20:37

Okay, interesting, Definitely something to look at. We'll keep an eye on there. Lastly, with the block I mean any reliability concerns there. Another point that we haven't talked about is underpiston oil squirters Quite common on a performance oriented engine, less so on a garden variety engine. Everyone's got their own sort of ideas as to whether it's worth machining a non oil square block to take oil squirters. Yeah, what's your take on all of this?

Speaker 2: 1:21:06

So oil squirters I've had going away from the 4AG and just looking at, say, a 2JZ. I've had a 2JZ that was turbocharged, making 800 horsepower in a drift car, had a oil pump failure. The harmonic damper hadn't been serviced in a long time. The harmonic damper failed. Pump gears locked up, locked up the motor when the crank with the oil pump exploded. We pulled that engine apart and it had oil squirters. We damaged the crank and the block. Everything was damaged. So we ended up getting an aspirated short motor. Now we converted that over to a turbo pump and things like that. Now the aspirator didn't have oil squirters.

Speaker 2: 1:21:39

We've done the same setup with forged rods and we put it together with, as an engine, 800 horsepower, again Running E85, we found no substantial difference in the tear down of the components like pistons and rods and ball clearance and wear without oil squirters. And I think the oil squirters are a good idea. But realistically I'd rather, personally I'd rather have oil pressure up at my big end bearings and let the oil spraying from between the big end, the rod up into the bores lubricate everything. I believe underpiston crown cooling isn't really necessary on an alcohol based fuel engine. That's just not the heat, the same heat there.

Speaker 1: 1:22:16

Yeah, 100% agree with that. As I kind of mentioned, everyone's got their own take on this. There'll be as many people advocating that there are an absolute must and never build an engine without them, as people have successfully been building engines without them. So very much the jury's out on it. But I do take what you're saying there. If you're using underpiston oil squirters, some of the volume of the oil pump is moving, is obviously no longer making it to the bearings, and that's really where we want to make sure we've got a good supply of oil. So obviously there's a lot of aspects that go into that as well.

Speaker 2: 1:22:50

Exactly. It's too hard to say what's best in whatever scenario. I mean, there's two places I like my oil. One is at my bearings and the other one's in the sump. So one of the things that I also see with people that do forays and even other engines is they overpressure the pump so they put shims under the oil relief pressure relief valve. And if you can consider the fact that if you overpressurize the pump, what's happening is the oil isn't actually going into the block, so it's going into the oiling system rather than being dumped back down into the sump. So although you're lifting your pressure, you're also lifting your volume. So if you can consider the fact that your oil is now hung up inside the engine and there's nothing in the sump, you're more likely to cavitate and suck up air from the base of the sump if it's hung up.

Speaker 2: 1:23:35

My theory is and I've done this with pretty much every engine I build is that everyone else's standards. I might underpressure my oil systems, but I've never had a bearing failure. So the rules of thumb that you use are the same rules of thumb that I use spring pressure per diameter of head. Oil pressure, how many pounds of pressure per RPM? That's all definitely valid. I can concur to that.

Speaker 1: 1:23:57

Yeah, I mean, I think 10 psi per thousand RPM has always been a good guide, but it's obviously much more important that you're controlling the oil around the oil pickup and it's never going to be sucking up air, because if it does that, it's going to very quickly destroy your engine, no matter what quality oil you're running. I'm just interested as well. Just coming back to the 7A combination, so that's going to get you out to 1.8 litres, as you already mentioned, what's involved in the 2 litre sort of A series combo? What would you have to do to get out to 2 litres?

Speaker 2: 1:24:33

So generally an offset ground crankshaft so you can offset, grind the 7A crankshaft down to a 4A journal size, which is the 42mm big end journal size, which gives you another few millimetres of stroke. And then obviously, if you move the piston out to 81.5 or 82mm, that can basically get you at about 1.9, 30cc, 1.9, 50cc. There is also billet crankshaft options from a company in New Zealand as well. He offers billet crankshafts and forge rods and pistons to make the 2 litre combinations.

Speaker 1: 1:25:05

With the offset grinding of the crankshafts again, no images to go along with this, but basically what we're doing is offsetting the centre of the conrod journal and making it smaller in diameter so that we're getting a net gain in our stroke. It's a terrible way of explaining it, but hopefully people are picking up what we're putting down here.

Speaker 2: 1:25:25

It's a difficult one without drawings, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:25:27

Yeah, the angle I'm going with here. I've never actually gone down that path myself, but I'm just wondering what you've sort of seen in terms of reliability. One of the sort of generally these factory crankshafts are induction hardened, so they've got a hardened surface that might only be I don't know maybe 5 or 10th hour deep or something of that nature. So obviously as soon as you offset, grind the journal you've ground through that, Is it essential to re-harden the crankshaft, unite triding it after that process to reintroduce that hardened surface or what's essential?

Speaker 2: 1:25:59

So the Toyota 4AG and 7A FE, their crankshafts aren't hardened, they're soft. So essentially the 7A offset grinding of the crankshaft, yeah, you can do it with no failure issues. Back in the day my old mentor, adam Moore he was running offset ground crankshafts with an Argo rod combination Argo's a company here in Australia and a Wysico piston option and they were doing that like 20 something years ago offset grinding crankshafts with a custom rod and piston combo and they were running. You have 240, 250 horsepower with 8600 RPM on these 2.0L 4A strokeers. They were 1.999cc, so literally 2.0L. These were in like PRB clubments, yeah sure alright, interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:26:42

Let's move on, and I'm interested if you could give us a bit of a rundown. This is sort of a question we get asked about and it's also, I think, an assumption that home enthusiasts who want to get into building their own engines are worried about, and what I'm talking about here is the investment in tools that we're going to need to make. I think the misconception is that in order to build your own engines at home, you need $50 or $100,000 invested in tools, and clearly, if we're talking about machining our own components as well, then that's very light. But when we're dealing with an engine machinist, that straight away takes out of the requirements of all of the expensive machining equipment. So, assuming also for the average enthusiast who's already working on their car and already has your average mechanics tool set so I'm talking here pry, bars, sockets, spanners, all of that sort of stuff. What, over and above that, do we need? To start building engines?

Speaker 2: 1:27:38

I've got one draw in my toolbox. I reckon one draw is enough. So micrometers, you talk O to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, a couple of set of field of gauges with a 1 with a 45 degree curl on it and the straight set of field of gauges, dial gauge and a magnetic post, a ring file like there's inside micrometer. I use a pen style inside micrometer Now I've done some YouTube videos on this but when I use the inside micrometer I don't use that as reference to size. I actually always use an outside micrometer over the inside micrometer to reference for size. But in saying that, literally one draw of my toolbox is basically dedicated to the measurement process of an engine and it's enough to get away with that. I can build some pretty impressive engines.

Speaker 1: 1:28:27

Yeah, and I think that that's pretty much matches what I've got access to as well, and really there's not a lot of specialist equipment necessary, except when it gets into precision measurement. Dial mortgage as well would probably be another one that I rely on pretty heavily. And then, of course, the ring file, and I think that's a place that you do want to spend money and get a good product. I've used some pretty average ring files in the past and the manual ring file which you're sending advice, and you can probably put them up for $30 or $40 USD like, yeah, they're cheap and they'll get you through. I mean, if you want to build one engine, then have at it, but you're thinking that you might build a few. You'll be thankful that you bought a proper electric ring file pretty quickly after you've filed your second ring, I think.

Speaker 2: 1:29:18

You're going to hate me because I have that $30 ring file in my hand.

Speaker 1: 1:29:23

Well, I mean case in point, it does absolutely work. But yeah, I must admit I moved on from that a few years ago and every time I use an electric ring file I feel pretty chuffed by myself. And I think the other thing about it is you can absolutely do a great job with the manual ring file, but the time it takes and the skill to get the consistency and repeatability across a full set of rings, it's up a notch. So all power to you if you're still using one of those. You're talking my language.

Speaker 2: 1:29:53

It's one of my most hated tasks of building an engine. There's filing rings. I hate doing it but I have to do it. So it's something I have to do, but I really don't like doing it.

Speaker 1: 1:30:04

Alright. So hopefully, what we got across there is you're not going to have to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars for this equipment. The other thing I'd say, with the micrometer or precision measuring equipment in general and yeah, I mean, if you want to get deep into engine building, it's a non-negotiable you definitely need to have that sort of equipment on hand. There is a risk as well, though, that to the uninitiated there is a technique that goes into using a micrometer and getting an accurate reading. So if you don't know what you're doing with this precision measuring equipment, you're going to be kind of garbage in, garbage out. And I actually still use PlastiGauge as well for checking my clearances, and I know this is a product that a lot of people just do not feel that you can get decent results with, but I've backed to back between PlastiGauge and using a dial ball gauge and a micrometer, and I still find it to be an absolutely valid technique. What's your take on PlastiGauge?

Speaker 2: 1:31:07

Yeah, definitely. I've had the same results. So I can measure a crankshaft diameter, bolt down a rod onto a crankshaft journal with PlastiGauge and confirm my measurements back to back. And it's within tenths, it's within hundreds, you know, of thousands. So it is accurate. I mean realistically, and you've probably seen this yourself, mate. I've seen some absolute engines being slapped together and run and work like that RB that you were talking about before that had the different rod in it. I was really holding my breath before, but I've done it myself. We put together this RB. It tooks one year and it had three different brands of rods in it and four different brands of pistons and, mate, it ran 880 horsepower and it ended up running 8.8 on the quarter mile and someone wanted to buy the car and Anthony said we're not selling it with that engine and I pulled it out and built it properly. It was literally spare parts from around the workshop.

Speaker 1: 1:32:00

And I mean what you can do for your own project car with full knowledge of that is one thing. What you are going to do for a customer and credit to Anthony for pulling the pin on selling it like that. You know it's two very different things.

Speaker 2: 1:32:15

Oh yeah. But yeah, it was absurd how well this car ran with junk, like I was pulling bearings out of the bend from other engines that have blown up and piecing together the best bearings out of the worst blow-ups and going oh yeah, that'll work. Okay, we'll try that. And unbelievable that I think that engine cost us a total of three and a half thousand dollars. To put together including the turbo, single kmrb 30 made 880 horsepower. You wouldn't believe it. Eh, unbelievable, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:32:42

I'm not that lucky, though. If I ever tried to do that thing, it probably blow up on the way to the dyno.

Speaker 2: 1:32:46

So oh, it would be my experience too, but it wasn't my car, so that's why it probably worked. It was Anthony's car. He just seems to get away with a lot of stuff with that.

Speaker 1: 1:32:54

Alright, matthew, I think we'll move towards wrapping this up, and I want to respect your time here. We do appreciate how deep we've already gone into the world of forays. We've got the same three questions we like to ask all of our guests at the end, and the first of those is what's next in the future for you? And let's actually dive into this as part of this question, because we haven't really talked about the fact that MT Performance engines your business at the moment is sort of a side hustle as well, isn't it? So what's the development path? Are you looking at making this business a full time gig, or are you quite happy with continuing to develop it as a side hustle?

Speaker 2: 1:33:34

It depends. I'm flying by the seat of my pants here, I don't know what I'm doing, I'm just literally out here doing my thing. And put it this way if the opportunity comes around that I can expand, I will. If it doesn't, I mean it's like you say it is a side hustle. It's not my day job. I just enjoy building engines, I enjoy tuning, I enjoy racing, I love it all. So I'm just going to keep going with the flow. I guess there's no real plan that I have with targets and it's sort of just. If the right opportunity comes along, I'll go with it and just keep moving forwards Fair On that note.

Speaker 1: 1:34:09

what's the main hustle? Is that in the car industry as well.

Speaker 2: 1:34:12

No, I'm a marine engineer, so I actually work on ships as an engineer in Sydney Harbour. Quite different, yeah, yeah different. You basically look at gauges all day and drink coffee. Could be worse?

Speaker 1: 1:34:23

Alright. Next question, Matt is there any advice you'd give to a younger version of yourself, or maybe one of our listeners, to help fast track the career path you've gone down, maybe avoid some pitfalls that you've come across?

Speaker 2: 1:34:36

I can give them some advice on what I'd done when I was younger Go to wrecking yards and strip engines, figure out how they work, because that's what I'd done when I was about 17 and I got my licence. I drove out to the pick apart wrecking yards and actually pull your own parts off, and I would spend a whole day there stripping engines and I wouldn't take anything, I would just walk out of there and they'd go.

Speaker 1: 1:34:56

Free education.

Speaker 2: 1:34:57

Mate, and the things that you would learn. You would learn all sorts of things. How does this engine do this? Why do they have this? And you would just. I was just curious kids, so stripping engines all day long and then going home black and exhausted and just going. I'll learn a bit there, and the first engine I ever built was a success because of what I'd learnt. Tear another engine apart.

Speaker 1: 1:35:16

Next thing, just sort of to cycle back to our conversation about tuning I didn't quite touch on this and the conversation about the fact that you don't have to break a bunch of engines to learn how to tune, which I absolutely stand by and, I think, advice to anyone who wants to get involved in that and start developing the skills of tuning.

Speaker 1: 1:35:39

These days it's very easy to. It's probably more turbocharged engines that people are interested in developing and obviously, as we've touched on, you can make great power out of a turbocharged engine. It is absolutely possible to start learning how to tune on an 800 horsepower turbocharged engine, but your sort of operating envelope and your room for error is very different. So something naturally aspirated 4AGE or something of that nature. It's still possible to break them, but your operating envelope is much, much wider and it's definitely a safer place to get started, get stuck in and learn those skills and once you're comfortable with that, it becomes easier to step up the power levels and add a turbocharger and still feel confident in tuning. So I just wanted to add that in there as well.

Speaker 2: 1:36:26

Definitely Understanding the fundamentals of how an engine actually operates is probably the key thing. A lot of tuners these days are just kids with laptops, but they're tuning and they're getting a result from numbers they're inputting into an ECU, but they're not understanding what the engine is actually doing, and that's one of the things that I've seen. If I change a number, my AFR target does this. That's what I want it to do, but what is it actually? What do those numbers mean? That's the question, and a lot of these guys won't know that. What do these ignition figures actually mean? I've talked to tuners who don't even understand what the duration of a camshaft means, and I've just gone. How do you tune engines and not know what the numbers?

Speaker 1: 1:37:04

mean on a camshaft, unfortunately all too common. But yes, having that deeper, fundamental understanding, irrespective of whether we're building engines, whether we're a mechanic, whether we're tuning, I think that always allows you to do a better job, rather than just I get this car in, I put these numbers into the fuel map and these numbers into the ignition map. I don't understand what they mean or why I'm doing it, but this is what I have to do to get the result I want on the dyno and onto the next car Not a tuner, at least in my opinion, anyway. Alright, last question for today, matt if people want to follow you and see what you're up to, how are they best to do so?

Speaker 2: 1:37:42

Look on the Facebook empty performance engines, instagram same thing, mainly more on Instagram If they want to follow videos that I've done on YouTube. I work with a YouTuber called Nico. His YouTube channel is 199, niconiko199, and you can follow along with the builds that I've done on there. His personal Sprinter, the Formula Atlantic engine I've got my own personal race car on there and we've got heaps more content coming up, including me and him will be going over to Colorado this year for the Pike's Peak Hillclimb event for the Formula Atlantic turbo car that we've just done. Yeah, so follow along for that if you want to see what we can do.

Speaker 1: 1:38:16

Alright, we'll put links to all of those accounts in the show notes to make it nice and easy for people to find, alright. Well, it's been great chatting Matt, and I'm pretty sure I can say I've learned a bunch more about 4AGEs that I didn't know before we started, so hopefully everyone else has too. Thanks again for your time and thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 1:38:36

Thank you very much, andre, it's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1: 1:38:38

If you have enjoyed this episode of Tune In with Matt, we'd love it if you could drop a review on your chosen podcasting platform. These reviews really help us to grow our audience and that in turn, helps us to continue to get more high quality guests To say thanks. Each week, we'll be picking a random reviewer and sending them out an HPA T-shirt free of charge, anywhere in the world. This is also a great place to ask any questions you might have too, and I'll do my best to answer them if your review gets picked. So this week, a big shout out to Stuart Emmett from the United Kingdom, who has said great podcast. Thoroughly enjoyed the 1.5 hours with Micah from Red Bull Powertrains this week another and a long line of brilliant guests. Every week there's something that I could take away from the pod, whether it be validating something that I already do or introducing a new view or topic. Andre's a great host and you can sense his enjoyment throughout the interview. Great work, keep it up. Thanks for your kind words there, stuart. Great that you are enjoying the podcast, and if you get in touch with your T-shirt size and shipping details, we'll get a fresh tea shipped straight out to you. That concludes our interview and before we sign off, I just wanted to mention for anyone who's been perhaps hiding under a rock and hasn't heard of High Performance Academy before.

Speaker 1: 1:39:50

We are an online training school and we specialise in teaching a range of performance automotive topics, everything from engine tuning and engine building through to wiring, car suspension and wheel alignment, data analysis and race driver education. Now remember, you've got that coupon code. You can use podcast75 at the checkout to get $75 off the purchase of your first course. You'll find our full course list at hpacademycom forward slash courses. Important to mention that when you purchase a course from us, that course is yours for life as well. It never expires. You can rewatch the course as many times as you like, whenever you like.

Speaker 1: 1:40:28

The purchase of a course will also give you three months of access to our Gold membership. That gives you access to our private members only forum, which is the perfect place to get answers to your specific questions. You'll also get access to our regular weekly members webinars, which is where we touch on a particular topic in the performance automotive realm. We dive into that topic for about an hour. If you can watch live, you can ask questions and get answers in real time. If the time zones don't work for you, that's fine too. You're going to get access as a Gold member to our previous webinar archive. We've got close to 300 hours of existing content in that archive. It is an absolute gold mine. So remember that coupon code, podcast75,. Check out our course list at hpacademycom for its slash courses.