Oil is one of the most critical components in your engine. Everything from the most basic yard maintenance engine to the most insanely powerful Top Fuel engine requires an adequate supply of oil to keep all the moving parts lubricated. While a lawnmower engine and a Funny Car engine might have different requirements, they both need to have an oiling system designed to maintain pressure and volume in each of their specific performance envelopes.
In order to help performance automotive applications stay properly oiled, Canton Racing Products has developed the Accusump oil accumulator. While the Accusump has been around for a quarter of a century, it’s applications are constantly expanding, as motorsports gets more and more extreme. Enter Shane Whalley and his fleet of drift cars.
As the project this particular install is taking place on is a budget build, Whalley opted for the less expensive manual control setup. While less expensive, the manual system provides pre-start oiling and ample insurance against oil starvation
Drifting puts some unique G-forces and performance demands on an engine, as you are bouncing the engine off of the rev limiter while the car is sideways for an extended period of time. To help the engine live under those circumstances, Whalley is installing both an oil cooler and a Canton Accusump system.
Starting with an oil filter sandwich plate to easily reroute the oil, Whalley spends a solid amount of planning time to ensure that the path of his oil detour is correctly laid out. The plan being, that the rerouted oil comes out of the oil filter, travels through the oil cooler, where a one-way check-valve-equipped T-fitting will both supply oil to and from the Accusump in normal operation. From there, the oil will then be routed back to the sandwich plate which then feeds into the engine block.
As Whalley has configured his system with a manual valve, the Accusump’s benefit is twofold. “For a race engine, it’s important that you have good oil pressure when you first start the engine. With the Accusump, when you open that valve before you start the engine, your engine’s oiling system is pre-pressurized and the engine is pre-oiled during a cold start,” says Whalley.
“Then, during operation, you have a two-quart system of pressurized oil on standby. So if anything happens where you lose pressure, like the pickup runs dry, the Accusump supplies oil to the system. [The Accusump] has saved my engines in the past.”
Available in more cost-conscious manual valves, as well as more expensive electrical solenoid-controlled units, either system offers an insurance policy against oil starvation. Whether you go for a bare-bones budget system or opt for all of the electronic bells and whistles, all it takes is one instance where the Accusump kicks in for it to pay for itself in a saved engine.
This diagram, slightly modified, is how Whalley plumbed his system. By using an oil filter sandwich adapter, at the location of the “Block Off Adapter” on the diagram, the external oil filter is eliminated, but everything else holds true.
