Lotus Europa Bastard from Germany

[ralf]

The inlet port was slightly ported ond the compression was equalised.

[ralf]

Noname 272° camshafts with 8.1mm lift from Malasya were installed. because I want to use the original valve springs I reduced the weight of the cam followers by installing some without shims. These cam follower you can buy in diferenrt thickness. The weight of one cam follower is only 24grams.

[ralf]

The position of the camshaft where adjusted to the specification of the supplier of the camshafts.

[ralf]

Because of the camshafts and the ITB i want to use I decited to use a programable ECU. This ECU needs a signal which will give it the position of the crank-/camshaft. One easy solusion is to cut out 5mm of one teeth of the timingbelt sprocket.

[ralf]

To get the signal by the 'missing tooth', a pickup of a 50ccm Honda bike was fixed to the toothbelt cover.

[ralf]

First I want to use modified Weber carburators as ITB. But I get only 40mm Webers in stock. So I decited to buy cheap 45mm Weber style ITBs in England. They were mounted with a Weber to 4AGE Smallport manifold from Redline. For testing the PLA trumpet were made with a 3D printer.

[TurboFource]

Impressive!

[BDA]

Are you using racing followers and shims? I think street followers have a recess on the face of the followers for the adjustment shims but the followers in your photo don’t appear to have that recess. If so, I think that means your valve adjustment procedure will be similar to a TC motor but you won’t have to worry about your cam spitting out a valve shim at high revs.

If I’m right about all this, it appears you might have interesting plans for your car when you’re done and you might want want to consider a stronger stub axle/rear bearing arrangement.

[ralf]

Hello BDA,
the followers are shimless. For the BDA engine you can buy followers with different hight. I get followers from 5.18mm to 5.58mm in 0.02mm steps. I bought the followers for Austrailian Dollar 10.- each which is less than I pay for one shim for the TC in Germany.

I get a spyder rear susspension with a modified driveshaft. The only thing I don't like at the rear axle is the conecting of the driveshaft to the hub.
My plan is to get about 160hp out of the engine. With higher lift and longer duration of the camshaft I guess this engine could be easy a much higher output. Cams up to 320° and a lift with more than 10mm are available. In the Formula Atlantic where they use the 4AGE for 15years the original output was 240hp.
With a Turbo modification some people claimed to get 800hp out of the 1600ccm 4AGE with the original crankshaft.
But I want to make it stressless to drive if I go to the city, so I chose a milder cam.

[GavinT]

G'day, ralf,

What does it look like if you place a Renault head gasket on the 4AGE head.
Obviously I'm wondering if a 4AGE head could marry up to the Renault block.

[ralf]

Hello GavinT,
I don't know, I dont have any Renault engineparts any more.
But I guess an engine swap is more easy than a cyliderhead swap.
And the 4AGE has a realy good engine block. The original crankshaft is good for 10.000+rpm.

[RoddyMac]

This brings back memories of building up a 3 rib 4AG with a small port head that I put in a Lotus Seven replica.  I ended up running 40 DCOE's, 290ish duration cams, and a Megajolt ignition.  It was great above 4500 rpm, but was a little flat below that.  I think at the time guys were using, I think, Yaris cam followers as they were the same as what you're using, various thickness without shims. 

[ralf]

Hello RoddyMac,
I like the charactersitic of the 4AGE too.

[ralf]

First I used a KDFI1.3 ECU but when it made trouble I changed to EFIgnition46 which is like the KDFI a low budget one.
In Germany it cost include shipping from the Netherlands less than €400.-.
Both are MegaSquird based ECU which are not to difficult to setup if you use the free Tunerstudio software.
To use this ECU I needed a manifold presure sensor, an air- and water temperature sensor, the pickup sensor at the sprocket,
a position sensor for the throttle and a lambdacontroller. I don't use the distributer anymore, therefor I use a coil with four outlets.
A new wiring loom for the was made.

[ralf]

To setup/adjust the engine I build it into the Celica. The Celica has a weight of 1100kg, which make the setup more easy,
because its accelaration is much slower than that of the 650kg Europa. The exhaust was, exept of 'cleaning' the catalytic converter,
 standard which might reduce the output.