Square wire on copper head gasket

Just wondering, has anyone tried using a square wire on copper head gaskets instead of regular stainless o-rings?

We have a 572 (4.5 bore) chevy that was bored to 4.607. We have a 206-B (gas) PSI running 17-18lbs boost. We are having a slight problem leaking right btw cylinders. We also do the leakdown when they are warm.

 

And where would you buy this square wire that i never heard of,? without it costing you a horse, and a cow, five pigs, and a fat man. and a thin lady.

 

When I thought about square wire, I to thought it would be tough to find. Oddly enough, lots of places make it. You can google square wire on google and find lots of places that make it.

We found a place that sells it for $400 for a 1000ft spool.

 

I was doing some reading on air cooled turbo v twins (ORCA) used on the salt and they use hollow rings made of silver plated inconel 750x I wonder what a set of eight would run compared to a copper gasket....

R/G

 

are they similar to the nitrogen filled o-rings?

 

They were gas filled so I assumed it was nitrogen, on the v twin they only have to seal compression as the heads/block are air cooled ( the jugs are water cooled but it is a captive water sleeve) so they only run the ring between the jug and the head.

R/G

 

mike moran used the nitrogen filled o-rings on the quad turbo car,popular hot rodding 2003robably the wildest O-ring in the engine is the silver-plated, nitrogen-filled, aluminum tube O-ring used to seal the combustion chambers. These O-rings are similar to technology used in Meaney's BB/A turbo drag race engine and come from England. Moran has them custom-built for his application and feels they are the future. "We run peak combustion pressures that are right at the limit of a solid copper gasket," Mike says. The nitrogen in the O-rings expands as the engine gets hot and does a great job sealing the head to the block no matter what the pressure. About the only negative we've have seen is when they're cold, they bleed off a little combustion pressure. But we don't race when the engine is cold, so I consider them a great solution."but the question was:has anyone tried using a square wire on copper head gaskets instead of regular stainless o-rings?

 

I think some people do things to make extra work for themselves. It would seem that many projects utilizing the newest and bestest thingamawhidget or technique are published only to see how many sheep will follow the piper.

Nothing I race has "that" much compression or manifold pressure. That said, why dont we just use the same technology used in diesel engines which have as much as 22:1 compression in stock form then use a turbo to add 30-50 psi in manifold pressure? Granted those engines arent turning 8000 rpm but they do go up and down the highway for as much as a million miles at a crack without leaking.

 

I thought most modern day hemi's were leaving the sleeve stick up above the block deck slightly. This would do a similiar thing as the diesel fire ring.

Do you hemi guys do this?

 

Not an uncommon practice in extreme $$$ motorsport engines. About $35 bucks per hole in bulk, if you figure out how/where to buy direct.

The best source is Garloc-Helicoflex. There are various "options" in terms of materials and shapes and sizes and profiles for such sealing rings.

The machining tolerances and touching surfaces must be exact. If you don't pay extreme attention to what you are doing at each & every cylinder in terms of machining along the deck/head plane, then expect problems.

These are also called Cooper Rings, or Wills Rings, or Nitrogen Rings.....

When used proper, these rings are much like high temp elastic donuts/seals which seal well at full IC engine operating tempatures. When used improper, or when over taxed or overheated, they are like breached dykes. In the face of extreme detonation, they can and do fail.

If an engine is going to be regularly torn apart between rounds (drag), then stick with the proven idea of solid wire with main grooves in the liner/block and receiver grooves in the head. If the engine will not be regularly torn apart, then the gas rings may work well for that application.

"Wills Rings" are a great concept, but everything about the machining & preparation & operating environment has to be perfect for them to work acceptably.

 

On a site that i full of Screw Blown and Nitro injected race engines, that thing looks like a total waist of time and money. If you burn a plug are nick a piston in that thing, it would be a week before you could race again.

 

Thanks for the info on all of the gas filled rings.

So, does anyone else have any thoughts on a square wire? Do you think it would work, or has anyone tried it?

http://www.unitedwirecompany.com/index.htm is where we are getting it from. We had quotes from $2k from accurate wire, and then united wire co is about $400.

 

I don't think it will be as effective as o-shaped material because the sealing force would be spread over the width of the ring, kind of like lying down on breaking ice or quick-sand to spread your weight. O-shaped wire will push deeper into the gasket.

Paul.

 

I agree with thjts,

I think the round wire would work better for a variety of reasons, if you are running a reciever groove then the dimensions for proper deformation of the gasket into the groove are already available, if you were to change to a square wire you would have to do all that research over again. In addition I would think if you were using a reciever groove then as the gasket was deformed by the flat face of the wire there would be an area of little if any contact in the middle of the flat wire between the two edges where it meets the gasket.

I only mentioned the pressure filled wire seal since the cost of the square wire had been brought up, I would definatly just go ahead and stick with the tried and true round wire copper gasket double groove setup that has worked so well for so many people.

If I were trying to reinvent the wheel I would go with some form of protrusion on the liner that meets with a reciever in the head ( simalar to the fire ring ) with a nitrogen filled ring behind it that so that the seal/ring would be removed from the direct heat and pressure spikes of combustion. But if you do go to this kind of setup then the liner protrusion, liner and head finish etc. become critical to the function of the system, fine for one time endurance application like the salt flats but unsuited to drag racing. So again we are back to the caveman like, tried and true copper gasket with its beautiful ability to conform to a variety of imperfections and still hold up under immense pressure and heat.

R/G

 

I also agree with Paul (thjts).

The round o-ring will expand into the groove sides as the top and bottom of the o-ring is compressed which, because of its shape, would give a more constant pressure at the compressed area of the rings.

Not sure how square rings would react. They compress but there would not as much force to return them to the original shape as o-shaped rings would, the round shape should have more strength than square, given they are the same area.

 

I think Pascuel or maybe Branelie?

In a tube or in this case an O- ring will force in a direction that will be equal in all areas

That's why round tube chassis over squire tube chassis

 

I thought a lot of big show fuel teams use a square ring. It's acyually not sqaure but a cross section would look rectangular. I think the .100 tall heads use them. The theory is the deeper groove in the head required to install them, with the correct amount out of the head, makes it harder to torch through the ring.

 

Agree totally. The same could also be done for a regular tear down reliable drag engine, "but", the initial machining would have to be spot-on and the reassembly would have to be careful.

AFAIK, the big nitro guns are all using round wire, or at least the team I learned from does.