Ford Duratec engine

It’s not that I was unhappy with my 2.0, 226bhp Raceline Duratec, its just that upgradeitis and building engines has grabbed me by the short & curlies.  At the end of the Dubai summer I had installed a Titan dry-sumped 2.3 Duratec with Raceline 280’ cams, forged rods and high compression pistons.  Featuring a fully race flowed head that is a work of art, hopefully this engine should put out about 270bhp.  As I am stuck in the Middle East and technical help is limited, I decided to build and set-up the engine myself. 

As with all Duratec’s actually working on the engine, is an absolute pleasure, with no real headaches,.  Setting up the cams was a bit of a learning process, however I had plenty of time, so I just checked and re-checked it several times until I was happy.  The dry sump was again a bit of fiddle, as it was literally one of the first production ones, supplied by Raceline.  Nothing a bit of baffle plate trimming didn’t sort out.  Hose fitting was again a matter of trial and error, as before all hoses and fittings were supplied by Think Auto.

Once the new engine was installed in the car I took it for a run around the block, on return to the garage there where 2 problems.  Firstly there was an oil leak from the gearbox and secondly the engine appeared to be running very lean, based on the colour of the spark plugs.

The gearbox oil leak turned out to be a crack in the Ford Type 9 cast iron casing.  The horsepower and torque of a Duratec really pushes these gearboxes to the limit and the cracked case is a known problem.  Ho Hum, out came the engine again and the gearbox was hand carried up to the UK to BGH Geartech to have a Quaife alloy case fitted.  As the box was already an uprated BGH box, internal mods required during the rebuild were minimal.  Because of the new Quaife case the box required a different layshaft, Brian from BGH kindly swapped it for my old one, fitted new syncro’s and a few seals and turned the whole thing around in 3 days.  Excellent service, particularly as I had limited time in the UK to get it done.  The good news was that the gearbox had reduced in weight by about 5kg so was only 28kg, which made had carrying back to Dubai was a lot easier!!

While up in the UK, I talked to Peter from Raceline about getting a new EPROM chip for my Weber Alpha ECU, to sort out the mixture problem and get a map that was suitable for my new engine set-up.  After a couple of tries, Peter and I came to the conclusion that I would be better off with an ECU that I could map myself in Dubai.  So we agreed that Raceline would sell may old ECU for me and I would UPGRADE to an Emerald one.  The Emerald ECU is widely regarded as one of the most usable on the market and there is a wide level of expertise available to help with tweaking it.  I ordered the ECU through AMMO of RaceCo, as he was ordering one at the same time and he could look after sorting out a wiring loom and engine sensors for me.

See here for the Emerald install and mapping

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