As many here know, Jim Baillaro has been producing gear sets for the cammer for some time now.
Bill Coon wants to end up with a complete cammer kit eventually that he wants to bring in at under $10,000 for people, but to produce all the parts himself is just to big an investment. To that end, he has been talking with Jim Barillaro, and they have both been looking at alternative manufacturers to try to bring the costs down. Speaking of investments, a manufacturer has been approached, and a minum run order will be 200 gears, but the projected estimate should cut the cost of gearsets nearly in half, so everyone benifits.
Make no mistakes, this is still Jim Barillos baby, but Bill is trying to help get a high quallity piece available for his kits, at a price that more guys can afford.
All of Jim Barillaros gear sets will use the factory correct 3/8 inch pitch with .222 pin on both chain sets. Jim Barillaro has the orriginal Ford Engineering gear prints and the gears will be made of the propper 8620 material and heat treat just like the orriginals.
Bill Coon is ordering a few sets of the short bottom set gears. Bills gears on the small chain will differ in that they will be set up for 3/8 pitch 0.250 pin size for a true roller short chain, as Bill feels it important since the short chain does not have a tensioner for stretch and a true roller also has less friction. He is doing this as an experiment to see how well they work and wear, and to see if others have an interest in the true roller settup for orders.
Bill Coons stub cams will mount either of these chain gear sets, plus you have the option of factory ford gears with the stub cam, and you will still be able to run the milodon gear drive settup with Bills stub cam in place of the short chain if you so desire.
All these new gears that Jim is having machined will now be machined on a hobs machine so they will the correct helix angle.
The new gears should be available in the next few months, so Bill says to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
It should be alot of fun.... Roger
This message has been edited by twistedcrankcammer on Oct 21, 2008 3:25 PM This message has been edited by twistedcrankcammer on Oct 21, 2008 3:24 PM
First of all every part is available now. The gear sets have been out for a while from others besides Barrillaro. I think what Bill is doing is Great, but he is only one man. I doubt he will ever have a kit with 100% of his own parts. He has called me on somethings to include. I have a kit right now with 20 of my parts, some of his , some of theirs. There is about 5 of us making a bunch of this. There is no need to build the same thing twice, just once and a lot of them to keep it cheap.
My main question is why build the gear sets to standard, if they can be improved for the same price or cheaper. Here we go: Why did Bill Build the Heads out of Aluminum instead of cast as Ford did. Why do we have Aluminum Blocks too. So why praise an out dated pitch chain / gears. The new 35 pitch is stronger, cheaper and readily available. Lets not go backwards when we can go forward.
Just like the New stub cam Bill is making, he changed it from standard too.
I hope you get my point without becoming upset.
You mention that Ford cast the Cammer head from iron, but I believe these were mainly the homologation motors. Of the five thousand or so Cammer heads Ford produced, I would guess half may have been aluminum. I've posted some production scheduling reports on the 500 homologation motors of 1965-66, and I recall that about half were aluminum heads.
I know Bill has reviewed a lot of the available Cammer parts, and some simply don't meet his spec. This is why he looks into manufacturing them. When he sees something he likes, he has no reason to look into reproducing it. Bill is not interested in making complete Cammer kits, only in making sure complete kits can be assembled for a fair price when searching all available Cammer sources. Mainly, Bill just wants to get his Cammer TBird back onto the strip, and he needs an affordable engine to accomplish this.
Bill's stronger stub cam is backward compatible with the original. You may have some interesting info for Bill regarding the 35 pitch, as he is mainly aiming to build stock gearsets plus some reinforcements of known weaknesses which remain backward compatible with original Cammer parts. Bill is also researching a true-roller primary chain and gears (non-stock), but this, again, is reverse compatible. Bill is not planning to fab these, but to get all the machining resources and quotes together so an existing Cammer gear vendor can order and sell them.
even do a belt drive like the Danny Bee setup. I dont think its currently on the market anymore and it is the way I would go if I was to build one of these engines.........jmo, Mike U
Wonder why Ford spend all that time and money on a chain drive for the 4.6L modular engine when they could have saved a bunch of bucks using rubber bands.
