I was talking with a group of my Triumph racing buddies, and we were
discussing a new oil pump design for the TRactor motor (TR-3 / TR-4)
that came out of the Chicago area Triumph club. I realized that I
may not have properly promoted this product. Steve Yott (aka
"Drippy") has developed an oil pump design based on the stock pump,
but with some important modifications. The rotor and shaft are NOT
two separate parts, but are one piece - eliminating one of the
failure modes of these pumps. Also, the end cap has been machined to
accept a new shaft sticking out of the bottom of the rotor - so the
rotor is supported on BOTH ends, rather than the stock single end
support. The end plate is pinned to the main housing so that the
location of this bore is consistent upon disassembly and
reassembly. The rotor has oil passages in key places ensuring that
all of the moving parts ride in an oil bath so there is no metal on
metal contact.
Steve Yott is at tr4@wi.rr.com . I believe the price for this was
$225 with a core exchange.
There are two primary failure modes of the stock oil pump. One mode
is the tangs breaking off of either the oil pump shaft or the
distributor drive, and the other mode is the rotor spinning on the
shaft. They believe that the tang breakage is caused by "wobble" in
the rotor due to it only being supported at one end. This causes
binding and additional force on the tangs. The new pump eliminates
this wobble with the shaft sticking out the bottom of the rotor. The
second mode - the rotor spinning on the shaft - is eliminated by the
rotor and shaft being made out of a single piece of steel.
This is one of those parts that "just seems right". I ran one in my
motor all last season and had excellent oil pressure the whole year.
For some reason the newsletter detailing this part doesn't seem to
come up from the links on their website, so I've taken the liberty of
scanning an old beat up copy of that article to my website here:
http://www.tonydrews.com/OilPump0001.pdf .
- Tony Drews
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