Simon Erland (http://www.elise-r.co.uk/category/converters/king_k/) has been quiet of late - having been banned from many online tuning communities.
Just when everyone imagines the loony has finally given up, he pops up again. Now he is on MG-rover.org (http://forums.mg-rover.org/showthread.php?t=373469) trying to pretend the last 5 years of being caught out in embarrassing fibs just didn't happen.
Excerpts from Simon Erlands posts on mg-rover.org and please remember these are the ravings of a known fantasist.
Dave Andrews, cuts the short part of the throat back way too much which causes flow separation, he also hand cuts the seats with a single 45 deg cut and opens the ports much too wide fora given valve size, his had cut seats usually bend the valves.
ifyou want a decent job where every head goes onto the flow bench, where a MIRA cutter is used to properly form the seats, and who knows what he is doing, go to Roger at Sabreheads, he is also much cheaper.
I have had several DVA's on the flow bench and they are not great, worse are the number of heads he goes into the water jacket and then fills with Devcon, he always blames bad castings - phhhh
I knew one guy who spent a fortune on a 1.9 dva built scholar, which blew 4 times before he got fed up and went honda. dva started by going into the water jackets on a brand new £1350 Vulcan casting, poor guy had to ship the lump bacjk from OZ each time it went.
speaks for itself really
but the reason why this doesn't get out is that dva requires these people to sign a non disclosure document to prevent news getting onto the forums when the engines go bang
how many traders have you come across that do that!
When I first started thinking about writing a book it was because the engine had such a poor reputation, read the opening paragraph of KingK. That article was given to Lotus and dva in 2001, where upon Lotus were curious and dva asked me to help him out porting his heads in order to build funds to design and source a new crank for the engine, the project was also offered to Caterham, but dva clearly wanted to keep on top of what was happening - he also promised to distribute KingK to the net.
It took me 18 months to realise that really he just wanted to protect his position in the market, and King K was no where to be seen.
Now that was disappointing, but no big issue, what did annoy me is that he continued to igore the work in King K which had been signed off by the design engineers at Powertrain, Alan Warbarton included who came to my uncle's tribute run last week.
For instance he blamed his constant "HGFs" on poor casting and porosity rather than realising that his "heads on exchange" meant that he was frequently swapping a good hard head from a customer for one that had become soft from being overheated and losing it's quench. Consequently building a failure into his customer's engine.
It took months of bruising encounters on seloc and Exiges for him to go and buy a hardness tester, update his site and address the issue.
Did he stop banging on about porosity? - no, until I had another bruising encounter with him and revealed how the fireface was treated in the factory and how to replicate the effect by peening the surface before skimming, a procedure he is now credited with on seloc[!] despite the thread where i showed him the method with pics only to be met with hails of personal abuse still being there for all to read. - it's always the same he's challanged, abuses people, sees his wrong, then adopts the methods I have shown him that have come direct from the factory design team, but shows no gratitude or humility.
Same goes for balancing, treatment of rods, liner and block tolerencing etc etc etc
in fact he was doing it so wrong like all the other tuners that they have created the honda conversion market. That is the bottom line ,- K has an issue with cooling, which needs sorting, but all the problems that Scuffham, Syd Rheinhardt, Mark Bowles, Mark Donald, Jonny Walker and so many others have come from tuners - including dva botching the builds.
Remember when Steve Butts dva engine threw a rod? - that happened because dva was modifying the L/Es of the rods for fully floating bushes by hand and getting them out of parallel with the BE - result piston rammed up the bore at an angle - so what rod anywhere on the plantet is going to survive that? I had another set out of Mark Bowle's engine - still here come and see them if you like, where dva did the same thing, I got Arrow to measure it up - 5 times out of OE tolerence!!!!!
He's learning of the net via these encounters, but work with him? - why?????
like Mark Bowles's engine failed, when he's done 10,000 track miles + 3000 road miles on 285 cams and the engine is still doing 217.5 bhp, Mark's dva engine blew after just 750 miles
see;-
http://www.dyno-plot.co.uk/dyno/dyno...3D61/index.htm
and the vibration free post is a pure lie put up by dva.
- I introduced dva to Steve Smith and balancing in 2001!
Getting suckered in by dva possibly? A lot of people do, but he still has to demand that the guys who have engines that blow sign a piece of paper promising not to disclose his blow up!
