The cam boxes are surprisingly complicated parts with densely packed features and little free real estate. The fasteners that will secure them to the head will also retain the bearing caps making the cam boxes extensions of the head rather than standalone subassemblies. This means that if the valve train components are not to affect the fit or subsequent alignment of the camshafts, the bearing caps must fit tightly between their guide rails.
Before starting construction, I made a few simplifications to the design. Rather than use sleeve bearings, the camshafts will be bedded directly into the 6061 bearing blocks. The cam bearings will be lubricated by pressurized oil pumped through the center of the camshaft, and so wear shouldn't be an issue. A second change involves the cup followers used to prevent side loading the valve guides. The camshaft supplied in the documentation uses straight-flanked lobes and followers with 2-d contoured surfaces that require keying to prevent them from rotating. In order to eliminate the keying, I plan to radius the camshafts' flanks and use flat top followers that can rotate. The bearing caps will also be machined with integral rather than bolt-on brackets for the cam box covers.
A sacrificial 'mule' was invaluable during the head machining, and so I started out making three cam boxes. The first step was to square up a workpiece for three nested parts to be machined in 'cookie cutter' fashion. Their nearly twenty hour machining time was spread over several days. A number of those hours were use to machine the 1/32" wide grooves for the covers. With even a 5k rpm spindle, I'd never have the patience to manually perform those multi-pass 0.7 ipm grooving operations.
The cam bearings' lower halves were machined directly into the cam boxes after developing an interpolation routine on scrap material that would produce an accurate profile. This routine was consistently repeated for all five bearings on each cam box in order to wind up with a reasonable facsimile of a line bore operation. The same routine will be also be used to machine the bearing caps.
When I originally laid out the array of parts, I spaced them for a 3/16" cutter to finish machine their outer perimeters before they would be band-sawed free of the workpiece. When it came time for this final operation, without thinking I compiled it for a 1/4" cutter which was a better choice for what was going to be three deep grooving operations. I watched in horror as the cutter traveled between parts with no apparent safety gap between them. After stopping the machine, I reviewed the CAM software to see if I had just ruined two of the three parts. Unbelievably, I had originally spaced the parts .250" apart, and since I had inputted .249" for the new cutter's diameter, the parts were unharmed. Sometimes the ball drops on the right side of the net.
After band sawing the boxes free of the workpiece, they were faced to their final heights using measurements obtained earlier from the test block used to verify the cam gear mesh inside the gear tower. Fortunately, all three parts came out to be identical. Their heights were machined so that with a .005" Teflon gasket between the boxes and head, the center distance between between the cam driving gear inside the gear tower and the camshaft driven gear is .004" greater than the theoretical on my SolidWorks model. This distance resulted in just a bit of detectable backlash. This backlash was difficult to measure because the mesh between the two gears of interest is down inside the upper arm of the gear tower. To see it, the driving gear must be held stationary with a needle probe.
A couple test caps were machined to work out their fixturing and to verify their fits. The workpieces used were short bars machined for snug fits between the caps' guide rails. The cam boxes had to be temporarily threaded for these trial fits, but they will be reamed out later. The next step will be to machine the front caps which must be installed for the end-turning operations still needed on the cam boxes. - Terry