Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

1st Gen HEMI projects and products.

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DavidBraley
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:40 pm
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by DavidBraley »

Hello all, I'm hoping this is an OK place to start this little build thread.

First, I must publicly give a huge thanks to 392heminut for helping me find a block! A Big Thanks Larry!!!!!!! I'll be heading down to Alburqurque on Thanksgiving weekend to meet Larry and pick it up. I can't wait! :wink:

Second, I have not found anyone around here that has a torque plate for honing, soooooo.... :roll: I'm going to try and build my own!

I am a machinist, and over the last 30 years, I've managed to collect a small rag-tag collection of old machine tools in my little home shop that I'm very proud of. Nothing fancy, and most of it's about 40 years old or so. More than good enough for this kind of job for sure. Now I do not pretend in any way to know much about torque plates. I only know what I've learned online. So I'll share with all of you what I'm going to do, and please feel free to make suggestions or share things you know about this subject.

This is what I have figured out so far, and how I'm going to go about it:

I'm going to start with this 8" wide by 2" thick by 48" long bar of A36 I've had for a while now. A friend of mine tossed it in the back of my Pick-Up some 20 years ago when I first arrived in Colorado from California. I was having trouble with traction in the snow. :roll:

Another friend of mine has gladly offered to stress relieve it in his big heat treat oven with a bunch of other parts he's running. He had room, so he through it in with the rest. I wanted this step done for stability reasons. For those of you that are machinists, you know how frustrating it is to chase a long piece of materials tendency to warp when trying to surface the faces one at a time. Each time you grind a little off, it warps from the built in stresses. The stress relieving is done at something between 1,500 and 1,600 degrees I think, I can find out for sure from him if it's important. He assures me it will be stress free and much easier to machine when it's done. I trust what he's doing. But most importantly, it will remain flat when I final grind both sides.

The plan is to cut the bar length down, rough machine the faces, final machine the bores, bolt holes and sides, then final dust grind the faces flat and smooth. I also plan on machining some stand-offs to simulate the rocker arm stands length so the bolts used to hold it to the block are stock length. That should duplicate as much as possible the clamping pressure the block would normally see with a head bolted down to it. The final thickness of the plate will be something between 1.75 to 1.875" after final grinding.

Ideally, a large chunk of cast iron would be the perfect material to use. But I'm going to try and use this stress relieved steel bar instead. I'm sure it will be much better than using nothing when honing.

I should be able to pick up my chunk of steel on Monday next week from the heat treater. Then I'll start making a great big mess in my shop. I'll post up picks as I go. Again, feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions.

If this plate works out, which my guts tell me it will, I'm hoping others in the area will benefit from using it too. 8)

Take care all!

David
Last edited by DavidBraley on Sat Nov 20, 2010 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Horsepower determines how fast you hit the wall. Torque determines the size of the hole you make. Holzwarth's Law
mart
Posts: 536
Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2005 2:06 pm

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by mart »

Sounds like a great project. Keep us all
informed on your progress with it and
please post some pics as you go!
mart
==============
budmspeeco
Posts: 133
Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:35 pm
Location: South Houston, Texas

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by budmspeeco »

I have a BHJ plate. If you need the dimensions, I will send them. If you want to use it, pay postage both ways. It is HEAVY !!! I also have the extensions needed to bore/hone with studs. Let me know. I am in South Houston, Tx. 77587 Buddy
'48 anglia
DavidBraley
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:40 pm
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by DavidBraley »

budmspeeco wrote:I have a BHJ plate. If you need the dimensions, I will send them. If you want to use it, pay postage both ways. It is HEAVY !!! I also have the extensions needed to bore/hone with studs. Let me know. I am in South Houston, Tx. 77587 Buddy
Buddy,

Thanks so much for the offer of borrowing the plate! But I'm going to make this thing anyway so we have one in the region. There might be some around here, but I haven't found one yet. Northern Colorado is a kind of funny place for finding stuff. Almost everything has to be sourced out of Denver, or even farther. But we do have a few nice engine machine shops up here.

If it's not too much trouble, I would like any kind of dimensions that's easy for you to get off your plate. Don't spend a ton of time on it. I have a nice granite surface plate here at home with a height gauge I can use to grab dimensions off the heads. I was planning on publishing a full drawing of my final plate for others out there that might want to make their own. Bore spacing, bolt hole locations, stand-off lengths and stuff like that.

Thanks again for the offer. Take care,

David
Horsepower determines how fast you hit the wall. Torque determines the size of the hole you make. Holzwarth's Law
DavidBraley
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:40 pm
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by DavidBraley »

Sorry for no updates yet guys. I'm caught in the middle of some other stuff that came up unexpectedly. I should be able to make some progress on this project next week.

Take care,

David
Horsepower determines how fast you hit the wall. Torque determines the size of the hole you make. Holzwarth's Law
DavidBraley
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:40 pm
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by DavidBraley »

A very short Update:

I finally got some free time to get started on this project. I reluctantly admit I've been sort of "temporarily without steady income" for a while now thanks to the funky economy. But a great little job that I could do in my own home shop landed in my lap, and I just finished it up. Makes me thank my lucky starts I decided years ago to collect some machine tools. :wink:

I haven't really gotten very far with this project yet, just some shots of rough cutting out my plate. If you are a machinist, this thread will be a big yawn for you. :roll:

I got the bar back from my heat-treater and I realized it was only about 38" long. For some reason I thought it was longer. I actually had the idea that I would build two torque plates, but that's just my "this is going to be easy" insanity voice talking in my head. I've always been cursed with the "everything looks easy" disease. :D

The 8" width just about maxed out the capacity of the little horizontal DoAll I have here at home:

Image


Just thinking about picking this thing up makes me feel old: :-?

Image


I needed to cut about 1/2" off one edge down the entire 21" length. To machine 1/2" of a 2" thick bar just didn't sit well with me. I knew from experience something like that would take a very long time. So I got this idea.... not a crazy one of course. :o

Yes gentlemen, that's a 7 1/4" worm drive Skill saw with a 7" abrasive cut-off blade. Turned out to be a worth while $4.50 idea (the cost of the blade). It actually cut pretty well. Made a heck of a mess though:

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It worked!

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I thought this was funny looking, this is what's left of the abrasive blade: :lol:

Image

I'm actually surprised it lasted long enough to cut that edge off!

I'll be spending some time this evening bringing the sides to size on the milling machine. Then tomorrow, I'll rough fly-cut the faces to prepare for holes. I'll post up some more pics when I get some more done. 8)

Take care all!

David
Horsepower determines how fast you hit the wall. Torque determines the size of the hole you make. Holzwarth's Law
DavidBraley
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:40 pm
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by DavidBraley »

Hello All! I have an update on my plate progress. This post is also a little long winded. I get that way sometimes. :oops:

As usual, my projects take a LOT more work than I originally imagine. I'm also not used to machining parts this large. In the 30 plus years I've been machining bits and pieces, most of my work has been small precision aluminum parts for some high-tech industry of some form. This project has also pushed the limits of my machines too. I ran out of table travel more than once on the mill. But all is good, I got creative, and I feel the plate is coming out nice. I've definitely got the back broken on this thing anyway. Below are some progress pics.

I drilled some holes to hold the plate down to some tooling blocks. This allowed me to rough off the two faces, and bring the edges to size. I did my facing and edging with a large roughing mill:

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Finished milling the sides with a long four flute:

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Then I dusted the faces with a single point fly-cutter to make them as flat as possible in preparation for the surface grinder:

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Ready for some big holes!:

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I used a regular hole saw to blank out the bore holes, then I rough bored each one to 3.95" in diameter. I'll leave the holes small at that rough size for now until I get the faces ground flat and smooth:

Image


The plate as it sits now. Bore holes roughed in, edges to size, and faces almost flat (within a couple thou):

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Next up, I'll dust the faces off with the surface grinder to make them nice and flat. The final thickness will end up being very close to 1.86”. I think that's a little thick for a plate, but better too thick than too thin. I'm going to also fab-up a couple handles to mount on the ends. I think it will make the plate much safer and easier to use. I also plan on putting a radius on all outside corners, 3/16” radius perhaps. Once all that's done, I'm going to stop progress on this thing until I get the block home. Here is the reason why:

I preformed very careful measurements of the cylinder heads that I have here, and I came up with what I think is the correct locations of all necessary holes. Originally I was going to measure the heads using the surface plate. Instead, I used the glass scale DRO on the milling machine to do the job. But, something strange came out of my measurements, strange to me anyway. It appears that every measurement I made, ended up being just a couple thou away from a rational number. Excuse my ignorance, but Chrysler seemed to place all bores and bolt hole locations to the nearest fractional inch location. Maybe this is what all the automakers did back in the day?

In the 30 plus years I've been cranking handles, I have very rarely made something to the nearest 16th or 32nd of an inch. I'm feeling like a big chicken about this, so I'm going to wait until I get my block home to measure it, and compare those numbers to my drawing. In the mean time, as promised, I'm including a preliminary drawing of my findings. The drawing below is what I think the dimensions of my torque plate will be, hole locations that is. PLEASE! DO NOT consider this a final drawing until I get a chance to measure my block. If someone here has these dimensions worked out already, I would appreciate it if you can chime in and confirm my findings.

The image below is too small to read the dimensions, but you can click the link to download a much bigger version of the drawing for easier viewing:

http://www.uiwriter.com/tmp/platefinal2.jpg

Image

You might have noticed, I included the dowel pin locations as well. I know that dowel pin holes are considered and option on most plates. I'm thinking of putting them in mine while I have it dialed in on the mill for final hole machining. One more thing, my plan is to take the plate bore holes to 4.090" in diameter. That should allow for a safe 0.060" overbore. If someone here thinks I can get away with less, just chime in.

Well, that's it for today. Take care all!

David
Horsepower determines how fast you hit the wall. Torque determines the size of the hole you make. Holzwarth's Law
vatopendeo
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Apr 03, 2012 12:50 pm

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by vatopendeo »

Hi There I'm new to this forum and new to building early Hemi's. I just found this thread and I have to say what a neat project. I need to have my 392 bored and honed and would like to rent this from you if possible. Very cool project and thanks for the all of the detailed info. Thanks

Craig
DavidBraley
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:40 pm
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by DavidBraley »

Hi Craig!

I'm super embarrassed to admit I still haven't finished the plate yet. One of the million or so projects I'm working on at the moment.

My intentions where to loan it out to folks in the area. I don't think shipping it would be practical because of the extreme weight.

Where do you live?
Horsepower determines how fast you hit the wall. Torque determines the size of the hole you make. Holzwarth's Law
vatopendeo
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Apr 03, 2012 12:50 pm

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by vatopendeo »

Hi David,

I live in Michigan. And you? I was thinking the same it would not be feasible to ship because of the weight. I may have to make one of these too. I cannot find any shops by me, (or for miles around for that matter), that have a torque plate for the early Chrysler Hemi. They look at me like I have an eye in my forehead when I ask them of their experience with an early hemi. I have built many Chevy's fords Pontiacs Olds, Small and large etc but this is my first early Hemi and It will be blown so I would prefer to find someone with a torque plate and is competent on the early hemi. Plenty of machine shops around. A lot of good ones too, but Very few have had any experience with the early Hemi. Those that do, don't have a torque plate and won't spend the money due to how few are done. Still appreciate the post very informative and well thought out. Thank You!

Craig
DavidBraley
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:40 pm
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by DavidBraley »

Craig,

I'm in Fort Collins, Colorado. I too had the same problem finding a plate in my area. I am betting there's one in Denver somewhere...

Here are some shops in Michigan that are supposed to be experienced with the early Hemi:

* Thomson Automotive Redford, Mi (313-538-0044)
* Dowker engines Charlotte, Mi (517-543-0249)
* Angelucci Performance Macomb, Mi (586-412-8442)
* Doug Maykovich Livonia,Michigan (248-474-8377) "He does it all from carb to pan"

These names came from the "Hemi Tech" pages over on the HAMB:
http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/show ... =HEMI+Tech

And the main "Hemi Tech" index for just about anything you want to know:
http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/show ... p?t=118764

Some good reading if you haven't seen it yet.

Take care,

David
Horsepower determines how fast you hit the wall. Torque determines the size of the hole you make. Holzwarth's Law
vatopendeo
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Apr 03, 2012 12:50 pm

Re: Roll Your Own Hemi Torque/Hone Plate

Post by vatopendeo »

Thanks David,

I will look into this further. Thanks for the info. Best regards!
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