MTFCA Forum

Does anyone have a factory drawing of the two piece valve? Any year would be ok.

I'm putting together an article for our local club magazine and am after the material for the head and stem & also details on how the two are joined.

Frankly I would doubt it would exist. Sorry.

I do not have the drawing, but I have experience with the Ford factory drawings, and the Benson Ford Research Center. From my experiece, I would expect a drawing of the stem, with dimensions and material call out, same for the valve top. Another drawing for the assembled valve with final overall size dimension, maybe a callout for how the two pieces are fastened together, but probably not. Each piece will have its own Factory part number, one number for the stem, another for the top, another for the finished valve. The finished valve drawing will show the part numbers for the individual pieces. The drawings when available, willbe from the start of production to end of 1927, and since engines were being made well after car production, valve drawings may go well beyond 1927.

Many factory drawings are available through the Henry Ford Museum. There is a request form on their website.

Here is pic of a two-piece valve ground away to show with a cut-a-way engine display. Shows the steel shaft and the cast iron valve head. Likely heat formed together in perhaps an electrical method. Ford did a lot of electrical welding in many processes.

OR

I don't have any way of knowing this for certain? However, I suspect that the heads were poured/cast directly onto the stems. This based upon several broken heads I have examined closely, differences and details in the ends of stems to hold them in place, and how far into or nearly through the heads the stems reach. I have seen a few where the top end of the stem can be seen on the top of the valve's head, however, most do not reach that far. Just some consideration?

Cast iron has a very high expansion/contraction from molten to solid. More than steel. I'm guessing that casting the head around the stem would result in a very tight metal to metal shrink fit between the two. If the stem was threaded, grooved, etc, the head would stay on for a while even if the fit between it and the stem failed. "Chilled iron" can be made very hard, and might make a better valve head than many would think.

A lot of old implement wheels and some tractor wheels had steel spokes cast into the hubs and inserted into holes in a steel tire or rim and bradded over.

John: A cursory search turned up some patents, and while none of the early patents are Ford, considerable two-piece valve manufacturing technology is described. I was surprised to learn that two-piece valves are still being used in some applications today, and some recent patents have been issued.

Here's the link which lists 17 patents, "Method of making a two-piece valve", from 1910-1991. The list is near the bottom of the page and is searchable.
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO1994019143A1/en

Ford's valve patent in 1928 is included in the list: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1772482A/en

I contacted the Benson Ford Research Centre and they have drawings which I'll buy. They are $30 per drawing.

I've cut a valve in half, linished and acid etched it and it looks like the head is poured onto the stem, which has either a thread or series of grooves which deform under the heat of the pour.

Thanks everyone for your help and ideas. There's a lot of great knowledge on this forum.

This is what I find :
I don't know or it is a thread like a bolt , or just grooves ? Toon

I have removed some in pieces that looked like the stem was mushroom then poured around it.

Someplace I read those two holes in the top were not there to lap the valve for a good seat.

They were there to firmly attach the head on the stem with a hard hammer hitting a punch in each hole.

Most likely two punches worked together with one hammer blow.

I find that hard to believe, first off, the head is cast iron, smack that and it breaks like a biscuit, and second, those holes have been in valves of many makes for the lapping tool right up into the 70's.

Large tractor wheel hubs were made like that for early agricultural machines, such as the steam thresher engines. There is at least one video on Youtube of them building a casting mold, wherein the pattern for the hub is rammed up in the sand, and then the pattern is removed, and the steel spokes are inserted into the hub casting area, and then the mold it filled with cast iron. The result is integral spokes that are locked into the hub when the hub is cast.

I have the cylinder drawing for my 1926 Franklin. When they started putting cooling fins on the cylinders when they cast them, they originally put in cooling fins stamped from steel sheet, then placed in the cylinder mold, and when the cast iron cylinder was poured, the cooling fins were physically trapped in the cylinder casting. By 1925, they had moved to copper cooling fins, and these were also placed in a mold fixture (probably some kind of plaster) and the cast iron was poured into the mold, trapping the cooling fins right in the cylinder casting. I would have thought that the copper would have been damaged by the cast iron, but apparently the heat dissipation and the length of time involved kept this from happening. The copper fins only protrude into the cast iron section for 1/8" or so in depth.

Those guys back then were very highly skilled when it came to castings. They don't get enough credit for the different things they accomplished, but they did indeed accomplish them. Franklin's ability to reliably cast cylinders with integral copper fins may have been the reason their engines were a success, and the "Copper-cooled" Chevrolets were a failure. I have heard that Chevy had problems with their copper fins during engine manufacture, but I don't know the details. It should also be noted that Franklin had a larger engineering staff per capita than even General Motors. They believed in engineering, and the #2 man in the company, John Wilkinson, was an engineer.

Large tractor wheel hubs were made like that for early agricultural machines, such as the steam thresher engines. There is at least one video on Youtube of them building a casting mold, wherein the pattern for the hub is rammed up in the sand, and then the pattern is removed, and the steel spokes are inserted into the hub casting area, and then the mold it filled with cast iron. The result is integral spokes that are locked into the hub when the hub is cast.

I have the cylinder drawing for my 1926 Franklin. When they started putting cooling fins on the cylinders when they cast them, they originally put in cooling fins stamped from steel sheet, then placed in the cylinder mold, and when the cast iron cylinder was poured, the cooling fins were physically trapped in the cylinder casting. By 1925, they had moved to copper cooling fins, and these were also placed in a mold fixture (probably some kind of plaster) and the cast iron was poured into the mold, trapping the cooling fins right in the cylinder casting. I would have thought that the copper would have been damaged by the cast iron, but apparently the heat dissipation and the length of time involved kept this from happening. The copper fins only protrude into the cast iron section for 1/8" or so in depth.

Those guys back then were very highly skilled when it came to castings. They don't get enough credit for the different things they accomplished, but they did indeed accomplish them. Franklin's ability to reliably cast cylinders with integral copper fins may have been the reason their engines were a success, and the "Copper-cooled" Chevrolets were a failure. I have heard that Chevy had problems with their copper fins during engine manufacture, but I don't know the details. It should also be noted that Franklin had a larger engineering staff per capita than even General Motors. They believed in engineering, and the #2 man in the company, John Wilkinson, was an engineer.

William,
In the 1970's I worked for a collector who had a 1912 Franklin, This car had a rough life, and eventually one of the cylinders developed a crack from the exhaust valve to the spark plug hole.
I was given the job of finding someone to weld the crack up.
Lots of welders would not do the job because the fins were copper imbedded into the cast iron cylinder..
I eventually found a guy who did weld it successfully. He ground out the fins away from the crack, and welded the the cylinder and the spark plug plug hole up,
We then machined the spark plug hole and tapped the thread and milled slots back in to the cast iron and made copper fins which we inserted into the slots. I then put the outer steel sleeve back over the fins on the Franklin cylinder, as far as I know it is still working though I believe the owner now has had to build a new wooden chassis as it has broken.
So Franklin was obviously using copper for the fins way before 1925.

I broke a two piece valve in half in my car. The two pieces were screwed together

I received valve drawings from the Benson Ford Research Center. These are dated 15th January 1927.

The valve stem is cold drawn steel Type EE and the valve head is Cast Iron Grade B.

Only the stem has rolled grooves, 18 per inch for 5/8". The two items are electric welded together.

The chart is from Shop Theory - Henry Ford Trade School 1943 edition. This book is on archive.org.