Marty, I assume you are aware of consistency differences between casting and forging. Blanket statements about castings and obvious stress risers ... ? Frankly indeterminate from photos.
Filippo
Filippo
VTT Cast Valve Cover
- Thread starter DASN54
- Start date
You’re delusional....how am I trying to lead the pitch fork hoard when I posted a response to the thread topic. I said I regretted buying it because I do. I wasn’t even the first person to say this is a poor design. Might wanna adjust your bifocals and reread your bullshit. Didn’t over torque anything but you can keep thinking what you want while you sit your fat ass behind a keyboard expressing your pointless assumptions without even seeing anything.
I do understand how casting works as i had my own cast parts done in the past for evo's
I’d genuinely like to hear about how involved you were in this and what parts were they exactly?
One would be surprised with even a socket screwdriver, what one can do lol (I have a flex shaft driver that one of my sons recently ruined and I'm still miffed as to how he put enough torque on it to deform the driver). In no way am I saying this is your case. But just saying that a socket screwdriver is not a given for not being over torqued.
There is one photo that shows the crack. I went back and looked more closely at that photo. I have a few observations, for what it is worth.
- A stress riser would have followed the ledge which is on the other side. From the photo it seems that the crack is concave relative to the ledge. Would be nice to see a photo of the crack from the inside.
- This crack was likely not there prior to installation. I'm assuming the cover is finished in powdercoat, which is applied electrostatically. I would expect to see powdercoat in the crack, of the same color density as the surrounding area.
If one asked me to guess - given the exposed crack (no powdercoat in the crack), the crack presenting at one end of the valve cover, and having done a few VC's on these cars (kinda sucks until one has done a number of them ... maybe the suck just becomes normal lol), my bet would be that something kept that valve cover from seating flat, enough so that when it was being bolted down, the valve cover was flexing, and that may have been the weakest place to endure that stress. In my opinion, you would not need to gorilla the bolts to have this happen - in fact you could have been close on torque. There are a lot of fasteners there, so pulling down the cover with a partial obstruction would be incremental, and done so by all fasteners on the other side of whatever the fulcrum (obstruction) would be.
I'm sure my observations are not what you want to hear. Hell, I wouldn't want to hear them either. Frustrating situation. And definitely I could be wrong, but I had looked at the photos and thought about it, and wanted to share back those thoughts for whatever it is worth. I hope you work out a solution that gets you up and running.
BTW do you have a photo of the crack from the inside, where it is visible along the ledge?
Oh one other question - you said there was oil leaking. Where did you find oil?
Filippo
I agree with the assessment that it had to have happened post powder coat and could have been from install, but not because some additional object created an impingement. My bet would be on the cover not actually being machined flat, and/or because the stand off tabs are not present on the cover, the gasket is preventing the cover edges from fully seating against the head and it’s a combination of the spring back from the gasket causing upward pressure preventing the VC from seating and a very high stress riser in a thin part of the cover due to either poor engineering or a complete lack of engineering.
I never said a had a role in this casting.
I had cast parts made for me in the past.but not for this platform..
I had these cast rocker covers installed by a proper bmw mechanic and haven't had a failure or had one seep or weep oil yet.
But i also recommend billet over cast but some haven't got the cash to do this and I understand, I always ask the mechanics to take extra care installing these aswell as the billet ones
I stand by my comment its an install error and thats all, is it rhe same as factory of course its not and you have to treat it that way. This is where experience comes in to get the job done right.
I had cast parts made for me in the past.but not for this platform..
I had these cast rocker covers installed by a proper bmw mechanic and haven't had a failure or had one seep or weep oil yet.
But i also recommend billet over cast but some haven't got the cash to do this and I understand, I always ask the mechanics to take extra care installing these aswell as the billet ones
I stand by my comment its an install error and thats all, is it rhe same as factory of course its not and you have to treat it that way. This is where experience comes in to get the job done right.
So, you’re saying that you basically just paid money for other cast parts in the past, and you’re also saying that you haven’t personally installed any of these cast or billet VTT valve covers? Please correct me if any of that is incorrect.
The first pic attached is from the inside. There are no cracks where the VC bolts seat. The valve cover sat perfectly flat and had a little bit of side to side movement until I put the bolts in.
I found oil all over the motor, it drenched everything 360 degrees around the VC. I’ll attach a pic of that as well...
My initial thought was that the VC was too loose, as I was able to unscrew some of the bolts by hand. I then pulled the whole cover off, got a new gasket, and when I started putting the new gasket on the VC, I found the crack.
I’ve reached out to Doc Race to see if they’re still selling their billet VC, cause I’d rather give them my money. Finished installing my xclutch twin disk, and am in the process of an M3 read end swap in my 1. Got the PR coils waiting to go in and am just waiting for the new helix extreme to come out. After that it’s turbo swap and then onto body work.
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How oily are the cover’s breather filters? That seems like a shit ton of blow by to create that amount of oil in the bay.
They weren’t all that oily at all. I only ran them for the 5 miles I drove the car and then the billet CC’s came in the next day. Since I’m stuck without a VC I haven’t even gotten a chance to install the CC’s
So I'm going to go out on a limb. I know you are staring at a crack. I'm speculating and could be full of crap ... but I'm wondering if the crack is where the oil is coming from.
Given what you described, I would have expected to see accumulation of oil in the valley. Instead, in a short period of time you have oil everywhere. I have a strange feeling that valve cover was not all the way down on the head. I'm sure you think it was. I just know from the VCs I've installed that looks can be deceiving. You don't have a crack all the way through, so how would that much oil push through the crack? But if that cover was not all the way down, you'd definitely have oil all over the place. And that would also coincide with my prior observation that the end of the cover got torqued by something that was holding it up, which could cause that crack.
Just food for thought.
Filippo
Given what you described, I would have expected to see accumulation of oil in the valley. Instead, in a short period of time you have oil everywhere. I have a strange feeling that valve cover was not all the way down on the head. I'm sure you think it was. I just know from the VCs I've installed that looks can be deceiving. You don't have a crack all the way through, so how would that much oil push through the crack? But if that cover was not all the way down, you'd definitely have oil all over the place. And that would also coincide with my prior observation that the end of the cover got torqued by something that was holding it up, which could cause that crack.
Just food for thought.
Filippo
The crack is definitely all the way through, but there still shouldn’t be that much oil coming out of it, I agree. I guess the bolts backed out after a heat cycle and probably needed to be tightened back down again. With that much oil I was too worried and wanted to take the whole cover off and inspect the gasket. There was plenty of oil in the valley as well, it was literally everywhere. Every bolt top was full of oil and none of them were tighter than the other.
I’m just ready to get a new billet one so I can slap it on and test out all the new stuff on the car. I should’ve gone with that one in the first place, but just thought it seemed like overkill. A cast cover should be more robust than this.
Well designed, well made cast valve covers are more robust than that.
Hopefully they pulled them and are going to do a redesign. If so, I would gladly help them free of charge to make sure a good VC option gets to market.
Are all the cast ones out having problems with weeping and fitment? I’ve only seen VTT and M18 offer cast versions. Hope doc race is still making their billet ones...I emailed them Thursday and still haven’t heard back.
