That would be awesome. Back to the regular scheduled programming.

Block pictures first. Once the oil pan is removed, we see a generous oil pickup screen (about 6" diameter) without anything stuck to it. A pretty interesting baffle is wedged between the screen and the cradle.


The main bearing caps are sandwiched between the cradle and the block. The whole works is held together with 8 beefy M14 studs, and the cradle is bolted to the block around the perimeter with 12 M8 and 2 M6 bolts. It's rigid.


The driver's side bank of ... well, they're not exactly cylinders anymore.


The driver's side of the block. Notice the head bolt holes are through holes, but exit outside of the block. Same goes for the top row, which exit in the valley. These last two shots are after 2 1/2 cans of engine cleaner spray and 15 bucks at the car wash.


The cradle, topside rear. At the right rear you can see a little dam, which protects the right side head oil return drain from splashing towards the crankshaft, which is coming up on that side. I guess the left side oil drain isn't as much of a problem since the crank is spinning downwards at that point?


Oil pan's eye view of the cradle. Lots of webbing, lots and LOTS of machining in this piece. The whole engine, actually: #2 & #3 main caps are cross-bolted, and all four caps fit pretty solidly in the cap register. The main caps have to be the right height to meet the cradle, which also relies on the block skirt to be the right depth, the cradle gets sandwiched at the oil pump pickup tube so IT has to line up, the oil pan, block, and heads all have to be in the right position so that the faces line up for the timing chain cover, which has to be the right length to match the cylinder heads and block so that the whole mess is flush at the valve cover gasket. A bit of a jigsaw puzzle, really...


Some sediment collected around #6 (front right) cylinder. None of the others had any. This is where the more accessible coolant block drain is located - I wonder if that has anything to do with it? All three PRV-6 engines I've been inside have had sediment on the bottom of the cylinders.


200,000 mile main bearings. Hell yeah, I'm re-using these!


Thanks to the huge oil pump and the stability of the cross-bolted mains & the beefy cradle.


Here's the crank. Makes the B21/B23 standing next to it look rather spindly. Like the B21/B23, the B280 crankshaft is forged.


All the bearings are narrower on the B280, but they're also all larger in diameter. Rods are 2 3/8" diameter, 1/4" bigger than the already big B21/B23 Mains are bigger yet. Obvious are the split crankpins, which is how you get even firing out of a 90 degree V6.


Big ol' counterweights, necessary to make the Vee engine internally balanced.


Piston skirt from #6. So far I've only had a look at #5 and #6, and they are all pretty much scratch-free.


Ohh... Rod bearings. This is the side of the rod that is back to back with the other rod, so it's the side that's uncovered by the cheek of the crankshaft at TDC. Not sure if that has anything to do with it. All three rods on the passenger side have the same wear in the same place, driver's side all look better. One would think "bent rod" but I'm not so sure. I'll be ordering new rod bearings, I think.


Rods next to a B23. Both rods are forged, the V6 is much wider than the B23 rod. You can see how much narrower the big end and small end of the B280 is compared to the B23. The pin of the B280 is actually bigger than the B23: 25mm compared to 24mm.


The V6 rod doesn't quite have as beefy a shape as the B23 rod around the big end (or the small end) but the small end is much smaller and lighter than the overweight B23 rod. Sure is nice to see "normal" inside snap rings, though - so much easier to assemble and disassemble than the wires on the B23 (not to mention the Spiroloks I used on my V8)


A massive difference in the design of the piston too - the B23 piston is tall like a tractor piston, and the B280 is more modern and shorter. The top ring land is still generously thick, but the B280 uses 3-piece oil scraper rings instead of the Mahle-style 1 piece ring. There are NO holes through the skirt for the oil ring, though! All the oil has to drain through a couple notches through the bottom ring land right above the pin. Big fat rings too - no, they are not in spec for new parts, but the top ring is only about .006" above the maximum gap allowed for new parts, and the other two are still in spec, so I'll be keeping them (especially since they're so difficult to find, as the piston/ring/cylinder are normally all sold as a matched set)


This had me puzzled for a few minutes: notice the notch in the rod bearing that lines up with a groove in the rod, and a little clearance around the rod bolt? It's surely going to leak oil, isn't it? Oh, wait - that's pointing upwards, towards the opposite cylinder! Piston squirters!


#6 cylinder - you can't feel even the slightest ridge. If you squint, you can just make out where the rings leave their marks at TDC, though.


You can more clearly see the ring parking marks after a quick hone, though you can not feel anything. 200,000 miles.


A bit of corrosion at the lower sealing surface of #6, where all the sediment was. I don't know if this will be a problem or not, but I'll apply a thin skim of silicone between the cylinder and the shim just to be safe. I'll also be lapping the cylinders to the block for added sealing.


A busted sealing shim, not sure if it happened as I was pulling the cylinder or if it was broken beforehand. This gets sandwiched between the block and the cylinder, and sets the cylinder protrusion to squarsh the head gasket fire ring. As per John Lane's instructions, I'll be selecting shims that give a little extra squarsh. Might need to stack them. This one is about .006" and is razor sharp and serrated with corrosion along the outside. One sliced deeply under my middle fingernail as I was trying to pick it off the cylinder. Ouch!

Not much to report, other than all the pistons & rods are cleaned up, cylinders are lightly honed and lapped to the block, "new" rod bearings have been sourced, and several hundred dollars worth of parts have been ordered. In light of that last part, I had a closer look at the heads and I can't measure any warp to either of them, and all the valves lapped in nicely, so I've decided to do without any machining there. Besides, I'd have to cut .080" from the heads to get the compression up to where I want it, and the cams retarded to where I want them, and that seems a bit excessive.

Oh, and here are pictures of the oil pump idler gear next to one from a B230:

Awesome to see all this Matt! That engine looks way tougher than I thought it would be. Sweet!

Mocked up the heads and intake on the block to check for misalignment - there was some, but not bad. I ended up opening the intake port entries to mitigate the problem.


Disassembled the B280F heads to check 'em out. This is the "Swirl" intake port


Compared to the EP and B280E intake port


Close up:


Interesting: check out the position of the spark plug. It's deeper inside the combustion chamber in the B280 (shown here)


Compared to the EP head. I don't know what the B280E head looks like.


Then I cleaned up the rocker assemblies. Before:


After. I blasted the stanchions but only cleaned up the shaft and rockers with scotchbrite and brakleen.


Nice shaft! Again, 200,000 miles.


This little oiling hole is the cause of the B27/B28 failures... or one of them. Extended oil change intervals would create sludge which would clog these little jets, and these little jets were the only lubrication of the camshafts. In the B280, OCIs were reduced, oils were improved, these jets were enlarged (I believe) and there was a dam added to keep the camshaft sitting in a puddle of lube, much like in the B21/B23/B230.


Here's one I prepared earlier:

Not much in the way of pictures today, but I did a little measuring of camshafts after cleaning up the heads one more time.

B27 engines had two different profiles, left to right, to try and even out the pulses from the odd-fire engines. I think the B28 may have had the same oddity. The B280 was given an even-fire crankshaft, which allowed for a single plenum intake and the same camshaft profiles left & right. I wanted to check them both to make sure, and yes, they're the same.

The rear of the passenger side shows a bit of wear, but it's probably no more than .005" off the total lift, so I'd hardly consider it "flat". I'd love to get some more aggressive cams, but the only guy who sells them won't return my emails because I made the mistake of telling him that LH2.2 will in fact be just as suitable with bigger cams as it is with the factory stuff, when he tried to tell me that I would need a complete remap.

The cams are pretty meek, alright - even the B230 "M" cam is wilder!!! The M cam (pretty much the tamest redblock cam) I measured to be 244/268 degrees seat-to-seat, 194/212 at .050", and .374/.413" lift. The B280 cams are 284/266 seat to seat, 200/208 at .050", and .346/.375" lift. The only thing about the B280 cams that's "better" performance-wise is the 108 degree LSA compared to the 112 of the M cam.

A note about the seat-to-seat numbers of the B280 cam: the factory recommends .004-.006" valve lash on the intake and .010-.012" on the exhaust. The seat-to-seat measurements I took were with the wider limit of both, but in measuring the opening and closing ramps, I found that the intake cam stays at the .0005"/degree rate until well past .016" lift, which is pretty evident when you look at the massive 82 degree difference between seat measurements and .050" lift. By making the intake lash .012" like the exhaust, I lose 4 degrees of .050" duration but I lose almost 30 degrees of duration where the valve is only barely cracked (below .010" lift). New numbers are 254/266 seat to seat and 196/208 at .050", and I will gain lots of compression and lose a bunch of overlap without sacrificing much of anything else.

A couple of other interesting notes about the cams: Left and right have the same lobes, but they're not in the same position! This caused me a few moments of head scratching, but I hadn't noticed or hadn't thought about it before then that the two cams would have to be different. From the back to the front of the left bank, they go E-I-E-I-E-I, but from the back to the front of the right bank they go I-E-I-E-I-E. Install the cams backwards and the intakes open when the exhausts are supposed to, and vice-versa. Rearrange the oil pump and water pump, and the engine would run backwards.

Also, the difference in lift is done in the base circle, which is opposite to the way it is in redblock cams, where the base circle is one of the constants in the universe. Makes sense, I suppose, since there are no cam bearing caps in the B280 engine, and the lobe has to fit through the bearing holes, so it can only be so high. Good news for anyone who wants to do a regrind, I guess... I found this out because when I was measuring them and I installed the wrong cam in my test head, the valve clearances I'd set were totally out of whack.

Lastly, I'd read somewhere that the B280F had it's cams advanced 4 degrees, which is verified in what I measured and what I calculated from the factory manual and their installation test procedures. It would require that I cut about .095" from the heads to get this out, so I might do something else to change this. Of course everyone knows that 4 degrees of advance will fatten up the bottom end of the powerband while sacrificing some from the top end, and with the improved breathing this engine should have over stock, it can take advantage of a bit more top end power. We'll see if I do anything about this.

So not much new, but I'm pretty stoked about my find WRT duration figures. Reducing the seat-to-seat duration of the intakes will close the valve about 14 degrees earlier and will give me that much more dynamic compression. Granted this will only really improve the bottom end power but it could give a boost of efficiency too, which would be nice.

Happy new year, y'all!

I guess if you open up that intake clearance you're going to get more noise, but the benefit sounds like a step in the right direction. That lift is just silly...why open the valves so little? One can only wonder what a more aggressive lift would run like. Who has the better cams? What would the issue with LH 2.2 be (I thought it was all smarty pants and learned things)?

There shouldn't be any more noise, because the ramp opening rate is the same at .006" lash and at .012" lash: around a half-thou per crank degree. The rocker doesn't hit the valve, or the valve hit the seat, any faster at the bigger lash.

How do the rockers affect how the cam profile relates to the actual valve opening? (I have no specific idea, but a general one).

Not sure what you're asking, James.

I'm not sure what the rocker ratio is, if that's where you're going.

You might also be asking why the left and right cams are different, and that's because from the combustion chamber / valve arrangement is the same on both heads, but one head is effectively spun 180 degrees from the other. Starting from the timing chain and moving back, the valves are E-I-E-I-E-I on one head and I-E-I-E-I-E on the other.

The rockers touch the camshaft at approximately 60 degrees from the vertical, but the intake and exhaust rockers are at opposite sides from one another, so on one cam the two lobes for each cylinder are really close together and on the other cam they're really far apart. Again this is due to the different valve order from the cam's point of view.

I posted an drawing of the head on page 9...you can see the relationship there. I also think of them as more followers than rockers - but that is mostly semantics. Given the difference in the lengths - there is some multiplication going on there.

I forgot to address some of the rest of these...

I imagine it would run pretty well, though the springs aren't that long or that stiff, so not TOO much could be added. Same goes with the camshafts - the maximum lift is limited by how small the base circle can be made, because the nose of the lobes are limited by the second smallest bearing diameter. With the spotty history of cam/rocker wear in these engines, I doubt anyone is too aggressive with their camshafts. All the big power engines have turbos, so not a lot of lift, duration, or revs are needed.

That being said, because they're base-circle insensitive, I believe that .400" lift could be achieved fairly easily and cheaply, with a sizeable increase in duration, and it probably wouldn't stress the springs too hard. I'd have to do more measurements - I know the B280E cam is supposed to be an improvement, but as I posted earlier, it wouldn't be much of one in stock form.

DMCUK (the UK Delorean guys) have some wilder cams, and DMCH (Houston) sells a complete engine that might feature some of these cams. Apparently they're $1100/pair, but I couldn't even get the guy in the UK to give me a price, since I was so out of my tree to think that his magic bullet camshafts would work with factory fuel injection.

LH2.2 is pretty dumb. It's the most basic of fuel injections - AMM fed and O2 feedback, but no learning capability. However, it's not SO limited that it goes completely out to lunch when you try to feed it more air (like D-jet does). Athal made 208 WHP and I made 185 WHP on LH2.2 without any mods to the FI or ignition, as equipped on engines that made ~160 BHP stock. Other people have made over 300 on LH2.2...

So LH 2.4 is the smarty pants one...sounds like there is a little feedback with 2.2 and as you're just improving the efficiency of the engine (you're just using the EP heads right) - it should be fine...heck look what I did to K-Jet and it's fine. Was the objection that LH couldn't handle the extra power? Makes no sense.

I was finally able to review the thread on a big screen and have to say that I'm floored by the complete lack of wear. 200K MILES right! Holly cow that's excellent - no ridge and the lack of scuffing on the pistons is amazing. I'm guessing it didn't see any rough service ever. The lack of power has got to have something to do with it as well.

Wellll, not quite... it's at 195,819 miles and change. Understressed, sure, but only about as much as a B230F. I blame the giant oil pump, piston squirters, and block stability. Certainly not due to quality oil and regular oil changes, judging by the black crusty filth inside.

Volvo no longer can provide the cylinder shims, so I'll be getting a local shop to blast some out of 31 gauge stainless. At $19.50/cyl from Volvo, it can't be much more expensive to have them built than buy them.

I'm tempted to give my redblock away to the next person who brings me a good running V6. It would be damn fun to emulate John Lane with a street version of his car.

I'm using the ported EP heads and I just ordered the tubes for some headers. Still, LH should have no problems keeping up. The guy from DMCUK said that with any cam but the B280E I would need to run aftermarket engine management. I don't know how wild this guy's cams are, and he wouldn't respond to my emails after I told him that I'm confident LH can keep up. The stock injectors can feed 200+ hp and the AMM can be dialed down to allow larger injectors. The 6200 RPM redline is an absolute, though. I did assure him that I had a couple of Megasquirts at my disposal and I knew how to use them.

Edited for crappy iPhone keyboard action.

Yes yes yes!!!