The TC Motorsports oil pan baffle

[Ranger]

There is a pic of it in this thread. http://www.e30tech.com/forum/showthread.php?t=79917

TC Motorsports is an outfit near Seattle. They support a Continental oriented team and are tight with the Pro3 boys. I’ve seen some oil pressure data associated with their baffle and it’s pretty compelling. Note how different their design is from the I-J scraper.

There is an issue here of baffle vs. scraper. The purpose of a baffle is to create a “still” oil volume at the oil pump pickup such that the pump pickup is submerged at all times. The purpose of the scraper is to reduce the amount of oil whirling in the crazy hurricane that is our crank at high rpm.

The I-J scraper does a bit of both. It will put steel in the way of any oil that wants to whirl around, and it also forms a ledge between the block and oil pan to make it harder for oil to wash up the right side of the block.

The I-J scraper is a better scraper then it is a baffle. The ledge it creates is 4-5" above the top of the oil pump’s pickup, and that would seem to be an issue when the objective is to prevent oil from being able to easily slosh away. In contrast the TC Motorsports baffle is really close to the top of the OP’s pickup. But all the data I’ve seen from others and accumulated myself seems to indicate that the I-J scraper prevents the oil pump pickup from sucking air.

There is a performance benefit in extracting the oil that would otherwize whirl around the crank. I don’t know how much, but it’s almost sure to be small enough that it’d be lost in dyno noise.

The TC Motorsports baffle has no scraping functionality. But it’s cheap and it’s easier to install then the I-J scraper.

[FishMan]

My current engine has the TCMotorsports baffle with IJ scraper. In turn 5 at RA, I’ve seen oil pressure as low as 11 psci on throttle. Granted, the engine is old and tired with terrible pressure at idle. I think a trap door like MM installs would nicely compliment this setup. I plans to experiment a bit with a known good engine in the future.

[Ranger]

FishMan wrote:

My current engine has the TCMotorsports baffle with IJ scraper. In turn 5 at RA, I’ve seen oil pressure as low as 11 psci on throttle. Granted, the engine is old and tired with terrible pressure at idle. I think a trap door like MM installs would nicely compliment this setup.

Thanks for chiming in. I remembered that someone told me of an issue w/ the TC Motorsports design, but I couldn’t remember who.

Turn 5 is an unusual place for this to occur because the lat g load there starts kinda low, goes high when you get good traction around the apex, and then falls away during track out. The only place at RA that my data shows occasional OP issues is at turn 4 when I hugged the inside of the turn where the camber isn’t too bad.

I wish I better understood why this was happening to you at turn 5.

I agree that MM’s door on the oil level barrier is probably significant.

[Steve_D]

I’ll be running the TC baffle this year in addition to the crank scraper I have run before. I have not had OP issues, but it falls in the ‘can’t hurt’ category as far as I can tell.

I can’t get over how responsive Carlo was to my questions, how quickly he processed and shipped, etc. Seems like the polar opposite of that group that rhymes with “Mireland”.

[FishMan]

Carlo is very nice to deal with and he sends thank you cards!

[Ranger]

FishMan wrote:

My current engine has the TCMotorsports baffle with IJ scraper. In turn 5 at RA, I’ve seen oil pressure as low as 11 psci on throttle. Granted, the engine is old and tired with terrible pressure at idle. I think a trap door like MM installs would nicely compliment this setup. I plans to experiment a bit with a known good engine in the future.

Note to those that follow. IMO most (but not all) SpecE30 types put in a quart extra of oil. The day that Rich saw this behavior, I don’t think that he was running a quart high. Rich will chime in if I’m wrong.

This isn’t a matter of attempting to prove that a quart high is the right approach, it’s a matter of trying to accuratelly comparing data and experiences. So if some folks say that their scraper behavior is < >, and other folks say their scraper does < >, in order to be able to compare the experiences one has to know what the guys are doing differently.

[FishMan]

Ranger wrote:

[quote]FishMan wrote:

My current engine has the TCMotorsports baffle with IJ scraper. In turn 5 at RA, I’ve seen oil pressure as low as 11 psci on throttle. Granted, the engine is old and tired with terrible pressure at idle. I think a trap door like MM installs would nicely compliment this setup. I plans to experiment a bit with a known good engine in the future.

Note to those that follow. IMO most (but not all) SpecE30 types put in a quart extra of oil. The day that Rich saw this behavior, I don’t think that he was running a quart high. Rich will chime in if I’m wrong.

This isn’t a matter of attempting to prove that a quart high is the right approach, it’s a matter of trying to accuratelly comparing data and experiences. So if some folks say that their scraper behavior is < >, and other folks say their scraper does < >, in order to be able to compare the experiences one has to know what the guys are doing differently.[/quote]

You are correct, I was not running a quart over… The additional oil might help, but I suspect my this engine is on it’s last leg and something is failing in the oiling system.