Inliners International Forums General Discussion Engines 216 Build: Some Under Hood Details

Greetings . . .

The past summer and fall have been pretty productive for me in terms of the garage . . .

The engine went back between the frame rails over a year ago now. I have since been bolting on goodies and working on details:

Several things bothered me about what was taking shape here. First the passenger side of the engine was looking pretty plain jane. Secondly, the CAW valve cover has just the oil filler cap for venting. This had me worried that condensation would be trapped underneath – when compared to the air circulation offered by the many vents found along the roof of the stock valve cover.

So I decided to go for several of the Offenhauser breathers. But a test fit led to me to believe that they would have looked sort of stupid when just bolted onto the valve cover . . . like an afterthought.

Instead I fitted them to an aluminum strip:

I pinstriped the strip using a muted brown flat enamel:

and then masked and painted the mounting flanges on the breathers as well:

making it appear more like an assembly.

As you can see in that last photo – the center breather interferes with the stock coil location:

there’s no room for the cap!

So I made another bracket from C channel so that coil could be fitted on the firewall rib:


All in all things are really beginning to take shape under the hood:



More to come. Next post will be in drive train.

regards,
stock49

Nice work. I like the piece you added under the breathers to dress it up. Very clean look all the way.

216s are far better engines than they get credit for. I'm glad you built this one and it is looking very nice. I'm looking forward to the rest.

The engine, like the rest of the car, looks really great. Please save me a lot of trouble trying to search, what size and CFM are those carbs? Jay

Those are Carter WCD - model 5340 - which was OEM on the '53 Nash Statesman with a 195ci flat-head six rated at 100hp. Carter never published CFM data for these. I have never seen anything (estimates) online either.

These are a three bolt base with a dual 1 inch flange (like the Stromberg 97). There are three venturi:
Primary 11/32"
Secondary 21/32"
Main 1-1/16"

Wow! Is one of the venturi sizes BIGGER than the throttle bore? I looked at some pictures of this carb. Looks like a triple Venturi metering rod type carb. The stromburg 97 is rated at about 155 CFM, that puts you a little lower maybe 130-140 or so. If you get the same crisp response that I get with my Dual Jet driving the car will be a blast. IMHO the triple Venturi makes a big difference in part throttle driveability even if a little CFM is sacrificed. Have you considered bigger air cleaners for more airflow? Jay

Very nice!!!

What's there is already an upgrade over stock. The stock air cleaner has a reusable metal mesh filter:

It is 8 inches in diameter and 1 inch tall. Some arithmetic yields an inlet surface area of 25.1 square inches.

The Eddie Edmunds repros are 4 inches in diameter and the filter is 1-5/8 inches tall - that's 20.4 square inches. With two inlets that's almost 41 square inches of surface area - a 62% increase over stock.

That engine looks really nice. Great detail work. Thanks for posting

Paul

In the pictures those air cleaners look smaller to me at least than they are. Is the bottom pic of the engine what it looked like when you started? Did it run? I take it that you pulled out this engine and built it? I have been watching the build progress but wasn't here at the start. Jay

Yep. I bought the car in '03. Put a couple thousand miles on it in stock trim:
my old website.
It went up on caster stands in '10. The engine came out in '12:
Inliners Post Circa '12

My efforts have been from the floor pan down and the firewall forward. The top side esthetics are fine for a driver.

I just looked at those links. The car was pretty nice to start with but now is 1000 times better! When the car was stock how did it drive? I would think that with 4.11 gears it would move out pretty good but at higher speeds you "run out of RPM". Of course I don't think anyone would push a old engine very hard not knowing what kind of shape it would be in on the inside. With the new engine there won't be those kind of things to worry about. Truth be told, after that kind of work I'd drive pretty carefully, jay