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After a few sleepless nights of pondering and almost abandoning the project several times, I called Joe Castillo of Castillo’s Crankshaft Specialists to get a price on reworking the radius and second, to see if the potential solution had any ounce of sanity. I guess Joe’s heard crazier because he didn’t even flinch at the idea of reworking the radius and it turned out the price wouldn’t set me back any more than a dinner with an e-Harmony floozy would. After reviewing the idea with a few fellow nerds, I mean a few people of an engineering mind and experience, we decided to pull the trigger.
By adjusting our SolidWorks assembly model, we determined that a crank radius of .060″ would leave us a comfortable amount of clearance between the connecting rod, bearing and the journal radius. After Castillo’s Crankshaft Specialists ground down the journal radius to .060″, they polished the journals, and chamfered the oil holes. Chamfering the oil delivery holes of the crankshaft helps prevent shearing of the oil against a sharp edge of an oil passageway and promotes the creation and preservation of the hydrodynamic film of oil aft of the hole.
With the crankshaft journal radius clearance issue resolved, we turned our attention to making the big end width of the K1 connecting rod fit inbetween the counterweights of the B18C1 crankshaft. This was simply done by measuring the B18C1’s connecting rod big end width with a micrometer. Our measurements revealed that we had to reduce the K1 connecting rod big end width by .039″ or in other words, .0195″ per side.
