Third engine wrecked.

[Mike Cook]

Man, wrecked three f4is in 3 months. Not off to a great start.

[Mike Cook]

Man, wrecked three f4is in 3 months. Not off to a great start.

[Jersey Tom]

Pls use the search function to find a thread on properly running an engine.

[oz_olly]

How did you break them?

We have gone through three gsx-rs in about a month. The good thing is that only one of them is a write off. Its actually convenient because now noone will be upset when I do my thesis to it next year. The first one happened when we were driver training. We have run our car almost once a fortnight since the aussie comp last year and the its the first time we have had to do any engine work. The only other work we had to do on the car was after one of our guys went for an off road adventure and hit a big ditch at the local hill climb. The engine we wrote off was a second hand one that we hadn't done to much work on apart from changing some oil seals. After we finished the engine change we discovered that it had the new self machining feature. Something caused the idler gear in the starter mechanism to jam which in turn snapped the part of the block out that hold the idler gear shaft. We're not really sure why it happened which really sucks. Has anyone else suffered problems with their starting mechanisms?

Cheers

Olly

[Conor]

The starter on our GSXR kept us from running all dynamic events except for endurance at competition. It was a complete nightmare. I'm not sure of the exact details, but I'm pretty sure it had to do something with the clutch like mechanism that makes the starter engage. It was a disaster that took us days to figure out.

[Mike Cook]

Tom, your a funny guy.

Engine one - dropped a valve, broke piston, rod through the block.

Engine two - we made a mistake and had a self machining feature going on

Engine three - who knows yet, looks like the place we got it from sold us a cracked block or had a blown head gasket. Water in the oil....

[Biggy72]

Number 3 doesn't sound so bad

[The Bunker]

Dropped valve??.....sounds all to familiar. We have two heads that speak for themselves that had the same problem. Luckily we didnt destroy a block though man. Really sucks.

[oz_olly]

One of our gsxrs had a very similar problem in the starter mech. I think it's called a rag clutch, anyway when you tried to start the engine it would crank and then make this really nasty sound. We pulled it all apart and there didn't seem to be anything visually wrong, so we have swapped the rag cltuches over but thats when the self machining feature was developed. Ours broke the night before we were doing a high climb and our team patron, a general was coming to watch so we didn't want to let him down. We tried to start the engine for ages but had no luck. One of the guys also filled the oil through the catch can so some oil must have been getting places it isn't designed to. With the full extraction system on we still filled the thermo lab with smoke. We ended up getting it going by push start. Turned out prettty well because we can 4th outright behind three RX-7s.

Cheers

Olly

[Akos]

Generally starter problems (especially with the clutch), come from inexperienced drivers forgetting to clutch in when they spin.

Since it is on a one way clutch, if the engine is spun backwards, it will try to run the starter at some insane rpm. This will usually end in a either a distroyed clutch or starter.

Cheers,

Akos

[J. Vinella]

Last year we had a run similar to yours.

This year we are eating differentials like a fat man eating Twinkies.

The engine goes ka-boom; the drive train goes ka-chunk.

[Jonathan S]

Yeah, like Jack said, in 2005 we went through 3 engines in a matter of weeks. However, one of those engines should have never been put in the car because the swingarm mount (that we use as a drivetrain mount) was cracked, and failed after about 10 minutes of driving... Those 3 were just before comp, we went through one near the end of the summer as well. Since then we have stopped modifying in the internals of our engines (used to use Weisco pistons. We felt the minimal gains we saw were not worth the increased cost/time of rebuilding engines.

I think we got our engine swap times down to around 45 minutes near the end of that year...

[Brian Evans]

FWIW it's called a sprague clutch. Usually rollers and ramps. Is there a rule to have on-board starting or could you use a kick start or external starter?

Brian

[Duff]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Brian Evans:
FWIW it's called a sprague clutch. Usually rollers and ramps. Is there a rule to have on-board starting or could you use a kick start or external starter?

Brian </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

i wanted to save some weight by having a pull start in the driver bay.
the drivers thought it was too much work. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_rolleyes.gif