1916, 1920, and 1922 VALVE CAGE PROJECT

[Terry Wiegand]

After Brian Heil posted about his new valves and valve springs project, I thought maybe I should let you caged valve Buick enthusiasts know that he is not the only one restoring, renovating, and repairing their engines.  What you are seeing in these photos is the result of about 2 years worth of waiting and work.  I have a good friend up by McPherson, Kansas who does a lot of work for the extruded plastics companies and he has a an extremely well equipped CNC shop.  I talked with him about 3 years ago about doing what you see in the photos here.  I got my tooling training on conventional machines.  There is no comparison between what a good multi-axis machining center can do and trying to do this by single point machining.  I selected 12L14 bar stock and bought 4 feet of 2.250" diameter.  I turned the material and copies of the Buick Motor Company Engineering Drawings over to Brad in March of 2015.  Our understanding was that they would work on my parts when they had some lulls and down time.  They finished everything up last week and here we are.  The beautiful thing about doing this work in a machining center is that the tolerances can be held to .0001" from one part to the next.  All of the parts pitch diameters were checked over wires every fourth part and the dimensions were spot on.  I had two extra pieces made for each part number just in case.  The cages for the 1916 use the same diameter intake and exhaust valve and the cage nuts on the left side of the photo are for those cages.  Beginning in 1918 Buick increased the diameter on the intake valve.  The larger cage nuts in the center of the photo are for the 1920 and 1922 engines.  Same part number was used for both model year engines.  The smaller cage nuts to the right in the photo are the exhaust valve nuts.  Again, the same part number was used on the 1920 and 1922 engines.  I have new stainless valves for all three of the engines and new valve springs for all three also.  I eventually will have the valve train on all three engines back to brand new factory specs.  And this will have been no small undertaking.  This will represent a lot of work.  I even made my own cage nut installation and removal tools modeled after the tool that came in the tool kit with the car when it was delivered to the original owner.  Thought you guys might enjoy seeing these parts before they are put in place.

 

Terry Wiegand

South Hutchinson, Kansas

[Guest]

Beautiful work.