1958 Plymouth 318 Poly Head 3D printed engine-------Finished! 7/13/17

[MrObsessive]

First, I want to give many thanks to Doug Craig who asked me to build up the test shot of this engine! I feel flattered that he asked, and I've been eager to get something that's much better in appearance than what the AMT kit gives you. There will be some changes made to the final product before Doug lets this loose for you guys to gobble up!  Please keep in mind that I'm no Mopar expert, and what I'll build here won't be absolutely spic and and span perfect. 

Of course, like I do with anything I build, I'm treating this just as if it were a kit in itself which it certainly is! So follow along with me, as you'll see what I've got done so far.

The following are a few of the parts that'll be in the kit. These are the poly heads which were unique to this particular engine. The heads in the AMT '58 Belvedere kit don't even come close to having the right shape.

Engine block.............

Oil pan and intake manifold. The oil pan I'd eventually strip the silver paint off and clean up the "graininess" of the surface a bit.

The heads didn't quite lay flat on the block, so some filing is in order.........

OK, that's much better! I'm using 5 min. epoxy to set everything together.

Here's the water pump........

I drilled a hole in the top of the water pump for the coolant inlet in the intake manifold.

A preliminary fit of the inlet..........not quite right in position on the manifold.......I've since re-drilled a new location for the inlet.

The water pump now epoxied on.

Oil pan now stripped and cleaned up, and now epoxied on the block. While I was at it, I drilled a couple holes in the fuel pump for the gas lines. 

My engine when it eventually goes into the '58 Plymouth Fury I have planned, I want to be fully wired and plumbed. Here I drilled a provision for the distributor. 

This is Norm Veber's offering and it's worth the trouble to me to wire it accordingly...........proper firing order and all!

OK, I went ahead and primered the whole works with Plastikote T-235 Gray. 

One thing I forgot to do is to make a provision for the generator bracket. I can always add this later as I'll need to see exactly where it'll place on the engine once I get the pulleys and whatnot attached.

That's all I have for now. I'm going to next paint the block silver, then set it aside. While that's fully curing, I'll get started on cleaning up the valve covers, carbs and air cleaner. The valve covers and air cleaner will be painted gold for my example per the 1:1 '58 Plymouth Fury. 

One question I do have is this.........the transmission in the '58 Belvedere kit-----is that at least a reasonable facsimile of what it should be? Or do I have to look elsewhere for a proper tranny for that too?

Thanks for following along guys......hopefully I'll have more to add tomorrow and certainly during the upcoming week!

Edited July 13, 2017 by MrObsessive

[my66s55]

Bill, the 58 Plymouth trans is a representative of the torque flight A488. The 57 Chrysler is a better one, but it's more a situation of what's at hand.

Edited June 26, 2017 by my66s55

[Slotto]

Amazing detail! Love it

[superbike-shaun]

Wow,Bill, every time I hear the statement treat every part as a model in itself. I get building and trying to get every thing done,without regard about the finished product! Thank you! Also,thank you for sharing this collaboration i feel as though this is going to be somthing that will appeal to Alot of older builderss in search of authenticity!

[1972coronet]

Bill, the 58 Plymouth trans is a representative of the torque flight A488. The 57 Chrysler is a better one, but it's more a situation of what's at hand.

I second this ! The A-488 (and its 2-speed relative , the A-466 PowerFlite) is cast iron ; aluminimum didn't come along until 1962 (when the trans was assigned a new number , A-727 ; the A-904 was aluminimum from 1960-on) . 

Quite looking forward to watching this A-engine come together , Bill !

[MrObsessive]

I went ahead and painted the engine block silver, and while that was drying and set aside, I decided to get started on the carburetors. As you all know I can't leave well enough alone and like to add my own small little details to bring things more to "life".

In this case, I want to add linkage detail,  and as you can see here, I added a very tiny PE piece for the linkage actuator for the secondary carb. There's a tiny plastic spacer behind the PE piece so that it'll be a bit more lined up with the other linkage.

That's a 0.8mm rivet holding things in place..............

I covered the bottom portion the block with Parafilm. This will be handled many, many times before it's all done, and I don't want paint wearing away particularly in visible areas........drives me crazy! With the work on the carbs and other things, handling of the block will be a constant throughout the build.

I did the same to the primary carb (the rearmost one) and added the same linkage as the secondary. The carbs for the time being are in mockup position........some shaving and sanding will be needed to get them to be a bit more even and parallel to each other.

Here in this pic the carbs are a bit more even as I did sand the bottoms a bit. 

BTW, Doug printed the carbs in three sections just like the 1:1! There's lower middle and upper sections which gives the carbs a more 3D appearance as you can look down inside and see the throats of 'em.

After some fussing with various types of gold paint, I settled on some old Floquil Bright Gold for the valve covers and air cleaners. After I let them sit in the dehydrator overnight, I clearcoated them with Tamiya clear acrylic and once again set them in the dehydrator to sit overnight to COMPLETELY dry.

The insides of the air cleaners needed hogged out a bit so they sit on the carbs a bit better. I just used my variable speed Dremel Moto-Tool to do this.

OK, a mockup of what you see here. I'm using white glue for the time being to get a sense of clearances for the eventual placement in the '58 Fury.

Just to be nosy, I got out the '58 Plymouth body just to see how it's going to look so far. I have to say, it's looking like I hoped it  would and much better than the lump RC2 gives you!

I can tell you that I'm going to have to play around with the motor mounts and certainly make sure the air cleaners fall below the hood/fender line so there's no problem with the hood opening and closing.

What's next on the agenda? I'll airbrush the carbs in somewhat of a platinum color, make a fuel filter, get the fuel lines in place, among other things. I don't go back to work till the 10th so hopefully I can even get this all done this week certainly before I go back to work next Monday!

Thanks for following along!

Edited July 3, 2017 by MrObsessive

[MrObsessive]

OK, I noticed that I have the valve covers on the wrong sides!  

No worries though.............they're only attached with Elmer's White Glue so when the time comes, rest assured they'll be where they're supposed to be.

[blunc]

the carbs seem just a little bit too large.

maybe request they get scaled down one or two points and reprinted.

I'm guessing they are direct "scale" prints but fudging a bit may help the appearance and remove/reduce the need to change engine mounts.

[MrObsessive]

Time to start working on the carburetor linkage. I wanted to make the arm that connects the primary carb to the secondary one. As you can see by the quarter, this is a tiny, tiny piece! The slider part on the one end, is actually part of a PE seat belt buckle that was CA glued into the end of some wire insulation. 

The other end is the PE bullet loop from a coil set...........the wire that hooks onto that.

Here it is attached to the carbs...........it could have stood to be a little bit lower, but I didn't want to run the risk of separating the carbs (again!) by drilling in the wrong place, so I had to settle for this.

Also, it gives me some clearance for when I want to install a return spring as you'll see in a bit.  BTW, I painted the carbs Alclad Steel, and they came out a bit darker than I wanted. On the other hand, to my eyes it's a better contrast than having them nearly match the color of the block. Not so monochromatic looking!

Making a return spring. One of the things I can remember about judging is that if there were items that were just woefully out of scale, to me that takes away from the appearance of the part as a whole, and sometimes it might be better to leave things off if an in scale appearance can't be done. It's one of the reasons I don't wanna be a judge any longer..............people get mad.

As you see can here, I've taken shielding that can be found in coax cable and simply wrap a single strand of it around a #77 drill, but I also tried to hook the ends as this is a tension spring that's found on most carburetors of the era.

The retainer that holds the spring on the manifold I made out of a tiny piece of stainless steel sheet, and was drilled with the appropriate size drill bit. I think I used a #76 bit for this.

Here's the spring installed...........the throttle link on the primary carb is from an old Detail Master set I had laying around.

Now it's on to the distributor. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment as I'm one that would rather make my own distributor, or use one of Norm Veber's 8 cyl. distributor caps. I super glued this onto its base, and started to insert the wires one at a time with CA glue.

I wanted to make distributor boots for them..........I did this by cutting tiny pieces of wire insulation that would fit over the 30 gauge kynar wire. These were cut about 1/32" each.

Here they are all inserted in............

Next, spark plug end boots I wanted to make. These were cut roughly 1/8".

Here's the results of all the wires in now. I'll eventually make a coil which from pics I have of '58 318 Poly head engines, looks to mount on the intake manifold.

Now I can move on to making the fuel lines for the carbs and its fittings, and making the "clear bowl" type fuel filter which I'll make out of clear sprue.

Hopefully all done by this weekend-----------Thanks for tuning in!

[Slotto]

Simply killer! You make me want to quit building.

[Lowlife ! !]

Looks great Bill, some very nice detail on those carbs. Looking forward to seeing it resting in your 58 build, when you get started on it !

[John Goschke]

Kudos to you, Bill, and to Doug for bringing this cool engine to life!  Maybe I'll need to think about full detail for my Jo-han '59 Plymouth-to-'57-conversion project (Yikes!)

[MrObsessive]

Kudos to you, Bill, and to Doug for bringing this cool engine to life!  Maybe I'll need to think about full detail for my Jo-han '59 Plymouth-to-'57-conversion project (Yikes!)

Thanks John! Wow! I've GOT to see that!!

You're planning on the upper half of the '59 to the lower half of the '58 with '57 bumpers and taillights?? That sounds as ambitious as what I have planned for my '58, 'cept mine will be pretty much a plastic makeover from nose to tail.

Thanks everyone for all the nice words as well! As of now I'm working on the fuel filter, and getting the fuel lines put in once I'm satisfied the epoxy has fully cured with how I made the filter.

If not today, certainly tomorrow I'll post pics as it should be put in by then.

[MrObsessive]

My time off is winding down (back to work on Monday) so I'm trying to move along on this one. Just a small update here for now......

I went ahead and made the tiny "glass" bowl fuel filter that is seen on most engines of this era. If I'm not mistaken, I think that in some areas (my own state of PA might be one of them), this type of filter is no longer allowed in street use for a regularly driven passenger car.

However I've seen cars with this that are driven, but if memory serves me the car had antique plates so it's not subject to the yearly vehicle inspections that we have here.

I made this by first turning some clear plastic sprue into a cone shape in my Dremel Moto-Tool, and then scored a slight groove in it with my Exacto blade.

I then rolled the sprue back and forth with the blade on the cutting mat, so as to have a clean straight edge on the flat side of it for mounting the cap later on. The cap is just some scrap plastic I had laying around with some .30" tubing on the top of that. I drilled through that tubing with a #76 drill bit and then was able to run .015" silver bead wire through it to represent the fuel lines. 

To represent tiny fittings on the ends of the lines, I sliced some 1/64" I.D. brass tubing (Special Shapes) so that the lines didn't look like they just run into the carbs without some kind of fitting. I wanted to use the brass hex nuts I have, but I'm short on those as I used a lot of them on my Shelby Green Hornet engine............something that I'll be getting back to after I finish this.

The bowl was very lightly painted with some Tamiya clear orange to represent the orange like appearance I notice whenever I see one of these. More than likely, that's the filter inside the bowl and there's no way I could duplicate that!

I hate the sepia look that my camera gives sometimes, but I can't complain. It is 13 years old and it still takes decent pictures most of the time. Nevertheless, I'm due for an upgrade, and down the road I'm going to bite the bullet and get a new digicam.

Now it's on to the exhaust manifolds.........from there I'll be able to mount the pulleys and then the generator which sits on the passenger side manifold and has a molded in bracket. Some small details after that, and she's all done!

Thanks for lookin'!

[Ron Hamilton]

Bill.

You can make a Palmer Kit look good. This engine is coming along nicely. I love to see the car you put this jewel in.

[MrObsessive]

Bill.

You can make a Palmer Kit look good. This engine is coming along nicely. I love to see the car you put this jewel in.

Hmmm Ron, I dunno about that but I'll take the compliment!

Not after the Shelby (I'm gonna attempt another "box stock" build) but the model following that one I'm gonna do an all out assault on the '58 Plymouth kit. Namely, try to correct as much of the body on that as possible from nose to tail, and from road to roof.

I've collected many, many pics of '58 Furys over the years, so I've got plenty of reference to go by. Over the weekend, particularly by Sunday, I'll probably be done with this engine as far as I can go with it. It'll be back to the Shelby at that point which there's engine work to be finished with that.

Certainly enough I have to keep busy through the end of the year!

[John Goschke]

Thanks John! Wow! I've GOT to see that!!

You're planning on the upper half of the '59 to the lower half of the '58 with '57 bumpers and taillights?? That sounds as ambitious as what I have planned for my '58, 'cept mine will be pretty much a plastic makeover from nose to tail.

Thanks everyone for all the nice words as well! As of now I'm working on the fuel filter, and getting the fuel lines put in once I'm satisfied the epoxy has fully cured with how I made the filter.

If not today, certainly tomorrow I'll post pics as it should be put in by then.

Well, Bill, to be honest I haven't gotten much farther than working out the concept in Photoshop, but basically it's the Jo-han '59 with the quarters and decklid from the AMT '58. As we've discussed the basic shapes of Jo-han's Forward Look Mopars are far superior to AMT's '58 Belvedere, so I wanted use as much of the Jo-han car as possible. A critical aspect of the conversion is rotating the '58 quarters up so that the character line above the rear wheel well is horizontal as on the real car. What remains to be seen is how well the vertical curvature of the Jo-han and AMT pieces match. Obviously the windshield header, front fenders and hood would need relatively minor modification to '57 standard. The plan calls for using Jo-han '57 Plymouth front and rear bumpers. My intention was to make a curbside model since it would be finished as an early version of Terry Holloway's mild custom as painted by Larry Watson.

Whether it will ever make it past what you see here, I don't know, so if you or anyone else wants to pick up the ball and run with it, feel free!

 

Edited July 9, 2017 by John Goschke

[MrObsessive]

I'm now on the downside to getting this done. I wanted to give the upper pulley a little more definition in its groove, so I very carefully held the part in my Dremel, and taking some folded up #400 grit sandpaper, defined the groove a scooch more on my Dremel's slowest speed.

This is where I ran into a bit of a roadblock.........The generator in the car sits quite forward in relation to everything else. Naturally, the pulley needs to be lined up with the other pulleys as much as possible, and this is where I had to brainstorm a bit.

Another thing I realized, is that there's going to have to be some kind of mounting point for the generator's upper bracket arm. Here I drilled a #76 drill bit in to the end of some .040" square rod and sliced a tiny piece of it off.

This was then CA glued into the little groove that's on the generator.

Here I'm going to use a brass rivet with a brass bolt on the one end to act as a support for the PE generator arm. I'll have to put one on the other end of it once the arm is in place.

I had to add a bit more material to the molded in lower bracket as I'll want to pin this to the exhaust manifold-----where it mounts on the actual engine. 

Doug had told me he molded the bracket extra long as this would ensure that the generator sits where it should. As you can see here, I CA glued bead wire practically near the edge of the bracket. Once again, I want to make sure things line up.

Here you can see the tiny holes I drilled into the exhaust manifold to make more of  a positive location for the generator.

Test fitting things here before I paint.........so far so good.......

I'm probably going to lean the generator a bit more to the engine's center, so it'll minimize any interference with the kit's engine bay when I get around to building it.

After I get everything painted and mounted, at this point I think this is where I'll stop. I don't want to add the supplied fan as of yet as I'm not sure exactly where the engine's going to sit in the engine bay. I could mount the fan, but then later on if there's interference due to the fan being too far forward, or where the radiator is going to sit----------------I'll just have to rip everything apart anyway. 

The same goes for the starter. I'll need the transmission mounted up before I can do that, and that's something I'll wait until I go full force into the entire build of the kit before getting into all of that.

Sooooo............it's back to work tomorrow, which means off to bed early. So much for wanting to finish this by this weekend, but hey........this is coming along too well to mess it up!

Thanks for lookin'!

[MrObsessive]

John, my idea for fixing the RC2 body was similar, but my approach was to do something like what I did with the AMT's '68 Road Runner. Pretty much what I'd do is slice the fenders along the lower part of the trim, slice along the top of the rear fenders along the surround for the deck lid (that's also too low and at a wrong angle), and "lift" everything up a scooch to match what you have on your bottom picture. That would preserve that lower crease and leave the lower quarter panels with the correct up-sweep.

The roofline more than likely I'd totally detach (like I did with the '59 Chevy), and reshape that to Johan's profile. Also, I'd have to raise RC2's roof a bit 'cuz of course that's too low.

Your middle picture of the 1:1? I have that EXACT picture which is a dead on perfect side shot of that car!.

This WIP will be as, if not the most intense re-engineering project I think I'll ever take on! This car is too important to me just to sit and build with the body as is.......it's an important design, and not to beat a dead horse, it's a crying shame that even Round 2 won't see fit to redo this car correctly.

[MrObsessive]

Ok, this is as far as I'll go with the engine. I didn't want to put the fan on as I don't wan't any trouble with clearance/interference issues when it comes time to get the body and chassis together.

There are some touch-ups here and there that'll I'll do down the road when it comes to final installation. 

This was pretty neat to do, and it's the first time I've put together something that was 3D printed. I've said all along, this is the coming wave and future for model building. 

As subject matter becomes more esoteric and not something the major kit makers are not willing to spend tooling dollars on, there's always the prospect of us out here in the hinterlands learning what it takes to make a printable file, and literally make our own parts/bodies right on our worktable.

Couldn't resist the Fram Oil filter decal!

Air cleaners just placed on for the time being. I need to find a way to make a more positive location for them.

Ugggh! Don't get me started on this '58 Plymouth body! As we mentioned above there are so many things wrong it would take too long to type out all the problems and fixes.

A while back I did monkey around with the passenger side as far as the C pillar (it was too wide) is concerned, and in pencil drew a line where the upper part of the trim should be.

Also, you can see where I separated the roof from the A pillar. It's too low, and needs to be raised about a scale inch or so.

It'll be quite a while though before I get to fully working on this one!

Thanks for following along everyone! Not everyone will agree with my take on 3D printing, but I'm standing by my thoughts on how it truly can be a real breakthrough in getting parts/bodies made that are either unobtainium, or too esoteric for kit manufacturers to tool up.

Now to put this somewhere to safeguard it from "cat accidents"!

[John Goschke]

Great work, Bill!

The last thing I'll say about the AMT body is that the character line above the rear wheel well that runs to the rear bumper tip should be horizontal, not slanted down toward the back.

[crazyjim]

Holy cow!  Nice work BIll.

[MrObsessive]

Great work, Bill!

The last thing I'll say about the AMT body is that the character line above the rear wheel well that runs to the rear bumper tip should be horizontal, not slanted down toward the back.

Correct John! When it comes time to dig into this, below those character lines is where I want to make my cuts. More than likely I'll get rid of them and redo 'em. The character line should be parallel with the upper part of the rear fender trim. Looking at your side shot of the 1:1, the upper part of the trim is in fact perfectly horizontal from nose to tail. No slant whatsoever.

I would be completely scrubbing the side trim anyway and reconstructing that. I found out that gold cake decorating foil (they make silver too) has the perfect pattern for recreating the anodized aluminum on the sides.

At least that's my take on things........................for now.

[afx]

Great looking engine, Bill.

[slusher]

Awesome work Bill....