New here - considering building my own FB.

[olympiadis]

I keep my flowbench in a controlled environment. When the bench is running the air conditioner is set about 74*F. Haven't had a problem with overheating.
Ray

I don't yet have the A/C hooked up in my shop, but I am considering putting the bench near the A/C and hooking them both to 220v lines & that way I can run both the power lines to the same place.

I won't just be testing low lifts, but that's the part where I would be spending most of the time by far.
I will be making an adapter so I can use the shop vacs up until I get the vacuum motors set up, or if they stop working for some reason.

[Tony]

If motor overheating and motor life is an issue, then you could always use a large diameter industrial centrifugal blower (or a supercharger) driven from an induction motor and a variable frequency drive.

My own bench works that way, and others here have gone down that same path.
It is not a low cost option, but it will run silently and reliably for many many years.
Vacuum motors are simple, relatively low cost and they work well, but it's not the only way to build a flow bench.

[1960FL]

Took two heads to get tested.
Man tried to test head on SF600.
Bench got hot, he turned into an ass, took my money and told me to leave because he wasn't going to run the machine anymore.
Took heads to second shop with similar SF600. This one also got hot which stretched out my wait time to half a day, and the operator also got frustrated and just wanted to take my money and let me leave.

Stop comparing an SF bench to a PTS bench the only thing they have in common is they are flow benches…..

A SF bench uses an Air valve to control flow thus all motors run full speed and a toilet plunger limits the air through the bench thus they make HEAT. In the early days of the forum the DIY benches using pudding bowls AKA MSD benches would also suffer from motor burnout, but since we have moved to motor controllers we really have not seem much on this issue.

Remember in this new design you are only using as much motor as the air you need to flow and the only time could see this being an issue is I you are trying to port map with a pito at .050” lift and 40” depression .

Rick

[Old Grey]

Took two heads to get tested.
Man tried to test head on SF600.
Bench got hot, he turned into an ass, took my money and told me to leave because he wasn't going to run the machine anymore.
Took heads to second shop with similar SF600. This one also got hot which stretched out my wait time to half a day, and the operator also got frustrated and just wanted to take my money and let me leave.

Going through 15 lift stations on two ports was more than it could handle and I consider that ridiculous, and hence
it is a very important factor to consider.


I'm not going to be doing porting, then only check at one lift and shut it down. That's dumb.
....

If those guys couldn't do 15 lift stations on two ports without their benches overheating, it sounds like they were giving you an excuse to NOT do your work. 15 point sweeps sound like 0.050" lift increments, and is probably why no one wants to do your work - 0.050" is a pain to do without electronics -, because basically, if a bench couldn't do that little work, what's the use of a bench. I personally wouldn't waste my time with 0.050" increments if I had to measure it manually, because it would reduce the amount of tests I could do in a day for no benefit.

I will give you an idea of time to do a typical 4 cyl twin cam 16v head manually
A 10 year old SF110 develpoment

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78870261@N08/9503740343/

60 hours development and porting, which included 57 inlet and 38 exh tests, and that didn't include the analysing time. You could imagine how much extra time it is to do 0.050", with so much more time to actually measure it and analyse it, and all it would do is add wasted resolution to trends that you can already see at 0.100"