Bolt-on HORSEPOWER? Tuned Exhaust Installation - Power Flow Systems

[Music] and that's the stock exhaust you see the problem with these right here it leaks all of them that's good we're not even at vy cool that's cool zero zero 22 celsius sitting down to vy doing a thousand feet a minute with three people on board 901 cross return is approved to our call to base crosswind turn approved not another one we'll wait for your call so we've done exhaustive research [Laughter] i know it's a lot to intake but you know feeling under pressure i'm josh a pilot and flight instructor who loves the sky sharing it with those around me and using it to see the world from a new perspective flying can seem super complex but i make it my mission to promote safe practices while enjoying the beauty this world has to offer subscribe to climb into the cockpit on future adventures this is aviation 101. new orleans clearance on departure maintain 2 000 feet chelsea and i have flown november 80991 all the way from san marcos texas to daytona beach florida home of power flow systems the last two videos on youtube cover the two days of ifr cross-country flying it took to get here and they include some really good insight to my making process and how i work through my planning when it comes to long trips definitely check out those previous videos right here on aviation 101 and the full length edits of those flights are also on cockpit club i've been looking at getting a power flow tuned exhaust system for our cessna 172 for eight years now ever since we bought it and i started chatting with power flow systems back in 2019 about how it could really encompass the benefits of their tuned exhaust system for youtube and we finally made it happen at the very beginning of 2021. this video is actually going to cover four days worth of footage a before test flight with the original stock exhaust the installation of the power flow and after test flight on the new exhaust and a short debrief of the data we gathered on both flights in that time we also installed a challenger air filter kit it's basically a high performance air filter that's stc and we also did a dynamic prop balance which doubled the warranty on the power flow exhaust to 24 months or 500 flight hours and that actually showed that my prop was way out of balance to begin with effectively the challenger air filter is going to help the engine breathe in better and the power flow exhaust is going to help the engine breathe out better we start this video at the power flow factory in daytona beach where we got some insight from jim shafer about how the tuned exhaust does this [Music] when the engine is rated they do it on a test stand with four inch neutral stacks which impose absolutely no load on the engine as soon as you take those neutral stacks off and put on any exhaust system it's going to restrict the horsepower to a certain extent and what the standard designs on most general aviation aircraft actually reduce the rated horsepower by anywhere from 25 to 35 horsepower and what the power flow will do will give you most of that loss back up to about 95 percent of the loss so instead of losing 25 to 35 horsepower on 160 horsepower engine you're going to be making about 157 to 158 horsepower with a power flow equipped engine you're not increasing the rated horsepower beyond the the rating level you can't do that but you are getting much more of the engines rated horsepower developed uh been delivered to the propeller okay so basically the gist is that the stock exhaust on these old engines are not tuned for performance and efficiency and because that wasn't a priority in design they in fact restrict the airflow of the exhaust out of the cylinders and thus restrict the airflow of combustible air fuel charge into the cylinders basically the engine isn't breathing as freely and efficiently as it's capable of with this old set of pipes and a big can muffler chelsea darren tillman from powerflo and myself are going to take november 809.991 out over the atlantic ocean hence the inflatable life vests and we're going to run a thorough performance profile to gather data on how my engine runs with the stock exhaust we'll be paying close attention to the engine's revolutions per minute rpm fuel flow which is measured in gallons per hour cylinder head temperatures chts and a reading of the exhaust gas temperature from each cylinder egts i learned a ton of stuff on this flight one item being the relationship between the chts and the egts is really important for determining the efficiency of the exhaust system more on that later all right so we're going to do a normal power flow test profile which is where we want to establish the performance differences between the standard exhaust system as you've got now and once you install the power flow and we're going to do it in ideally the same conditions exact same weights same pilot techniques same kinds of air speeds so the first thing we do we're going to do a climb from uh sea level so what we're going to do is because we're near the ocean we go a couple miles offshore that way we have the no real lifting effect from the ground because we're over the ocean we also avoid a lot of traffic and the idea will be we'll get down around seven eight hundred feet positioned so we can do a straight ahead climb without any turns unless we have to for traffic and we're going to climb straight ahead from a thousand feet up to 8 500 feet okay and what we're gonna do is once we pass through a thousand feet you're gonna slow the airplane down to v y you'll establish v y go to full power keep the vy pitch so between 700 feet 1000 feet that's your time to fine tune your pitch we don't start the time until we hit a thousand we hit a thousand we're going to start a timer okay every 500 feet you're going to give me a you're going to give me a call out hey approaching 1500 approaching 2000. once we hit that ideally one of us will figure out who can read the time or better we'll say the time and you're going to tell me the airspeed in average you've been holding okay i'm going to record airspeed outside air temperature rpm and i'm going to attempt to record as many chd and egts and fuel flows as possible thankfully the camera is going to back it up right so what we'll have when we're done is we'll have time hacks every 500 feet okay we're not going to record rate of climb we're going to calculate it okay just easier yeah because it's instantaneous instead of actual average absolutely once we get to 8 500 feet we'll transition to a cruise speed profile so what's the favorite rpm you like to cruise at i like 2450. 24.50 that's a great number for the 172. also the perfect rpm for the power flow okay because the not super secret issue is the tuned exhaust system has a totally peak rpm response it's at 24.50 perfectly you've accidentally been perfect for the test right there so what we'll do is we'll go up to 8 500 feet and we'll start at a lower power setting for lower cruise speed say 2300 rpm we'll set the engine to 2300 rpm and we'll lean it we'll lean using your normal technique and then we'll need a couple of other techniques one of the other things you'll see with the power flow is that you can actually lean the engine lean of peak safely effectively and with the same output dramatically cooler temps so we'll get our baseline data for that on this we'll choose 2450 and we'll also do a wide open throttle number because in the end more power should mean more rpm and up at 8 500 we can do so safely we'll then come down to 5 500 feet we'll repeat those numbers all right are you ready i am ready sir all right so just to recap as you pass through the thousand let me know it's hitting start time yell out the air speed and i'll record as much else i can okay good deal all right i'm gonna try and maintain 80 here and either to full power and we're going to maintain this track of about three five zero well done all right we're established on 80 full power crossing 1000 now 82 knots got it all right outside air temperature i'm going to go with celsius 17. 2460 rpm fuel flow appears to be 14.6 good number crossing 1 500 now 52 seconds 81 knots now because it's carbureted the fuel flow will boggle a little you know jump around for a little bit so we kind of look at it and try to just take a weighted average catch him three thousand three minutes 49 seconds 81 knots copy that outside air temperatures 12 degrees back to 24 40 now your egt's are awesome good yeah they're definitely much lower now after the carburetor got done there's 3 500 4 minutes 56 seconds 82 knots crossing 5 000 8 minutes zero seconds 80 knots copy that eight degrees all right crossing seven 13 minutes and eight seconds 80 knots all right getting ready to cross 85 17 minutes 51 seconds 81 all right we'll call it 80 knots 80 knots 7 degrees celsius 470. i write down things the best i can 9.0 okay you can level this off at 8 500. okay what we'll do is once you've gotten their setting and you think we're speed stable and the engine stabilized then we'll start a timer we're going to wait at least three minutes before we record data okay allows airplane to establish its equilibrium we've been maintaining 82 knots this whole time level at 85 or past three minutes all right so i'm going to record 82 all right the time is three minutes our fuel flow leaned your way is uh giving us five eight to six two outside air temperature here is six i've got it all recorded okay uh oil temps uh sitting there at 181 that's really good go ahead and enrich in okay and uh your new target rpm is 2450 start leaning very slowly okay we're going to watch all of these exhaust this is now watching the sea all the exhaust gas temperatures something's going to lean first and it's looking to see which one's gonna lean first now you can feel the power coming off we are on the lean side right now okay just stop there for a second let it keep dialing down now we've lost 130 rpm you'll need to adjust your pit well you're doing a good job you're holding your pitch we want to hold altitude so we're going to lose a lot of speed now this gauge is confused because it's like well is that really your peak no not really but this is where you feel more comfortable right would you would you feel like this is a good cruise yeah i mean just just feeling the engine it feels like it's a little bit on the lean side okay but it does feel okay you're not like oh my gosh something's trying to escape the cowling no no not at all no parts are departing so a hallmark of a really good leaning especially in a peak is how close the eg are relative to each other okay and as your clever device is saying you're a 58 degrees difference between the hottest and the coldest that's more normal for a carbureted stock exhaust gotcha when you when we get the power flow on there i hope we're going to see a difference well we should we are it's been about three and a half minutes our speed as you predicted came back up about 93 93 what i would call it 93 to 94. we'll give it a little benefit your fuel flow is doing pretty well six well uh right after i said that right right after you said it right six zero to six three i think would be an accurate number for that outside air temperature is seven now phts dht 337 1417 number two is 323 1434 349 14 61 38 1398 okay so you may enrich in the airplane and then take us down gradually uh we're probably going to play with some clouds at 5500 i hope not let's see if you can get us to 5500 and we'll do the next round of testing 5500 set with the power flow system the maximum available rpm is going to increase usually by about 100 to 150 rpm therefore if you're shooting for a particular power setting say 2450 it's going to take a smaller percentage of the available throttle to hit that that rpm level 2450 is a is a smaller percentage of 2700 than it is of 2500 which was probably your maximum rpm pre power flow so the engine's turning over less fast it's it's not burning it doesn't burn as much fuel in cruise flight because you can get the same power out of a smaller percentage of the throttle we flew the rest of the altitudes and power settings and gathered all of our data on darin's performance profile then we made our way back into daytona beach international where we then began removing the old stock exhaust to make way for the installation of the power flow tuned exhaust system daytona tower 942 foxtrot output i'll go ahead and load ground in there so it's less work for us and that poor too far short off four four zero eight number one or only two five left cover for the option before we're gonna float a little bit get that side slip gun now we're just gonna get down here in ground effect let the airplane tell us when it's ready to stall strike sensor took off from the daytona's tower change my frequency one two zero point seven hole short row and two five left all right we can make whiskey [Music] see the problem with these right here it leaks all of them a lot of times on the stock exhaust you'll get cracks in this can right here especially if the airplane is used for training [Music] this is what's underneath that shroud this is our collector assembly the idea behind the tuned exhaust system is a couple things number one balanced length so each cylinder should have a balance length but it also should have the right diameter so it's both diameter and length that matter turns out that's three and a half feet per cylinder it's a lot of a lot of uh tubing but this is why you see this big long loopy section is so that we can totally get us to the right length but now this section is a big radiator there these are sealed tubes the only welding is to attach the end plate here these four tubes protrude through this end plate they're welded to the end plate you can see there's like a star in the middle so that stars welded and then we weld the rest of it then we do something most other exhaust don't do we send this out for heat treatment in particular it's called an anneal it's a bright vacuum anneal so this entire thing is sent out and under intense vacuum is heated up to i think 1825 degrees and then for 20 minutes it's held there and then it's rapidly quenched so this material is as soft as it could be every time you run your engine you're functionally stress relieving it but annealing takes all the stresses and all the stress from this thing being built this being formed the welding going on and it brings everything back into solution so there's not a particular hardpoint or stress point there it's all kind of homogeneous now okay so what we've got here is a cessna 172 power flow tuned exhaust system with our short stack option so this would be right here so these headers are going they're relatively short they're going in here and they're going through the long section this other side these really long pipes we're trying to get the right length because what they're going into is this they're going in a shorter length of this tubing so we've gone to great lengths to get it there that's why those tubes are so long we're trying to get the balance length or trying to get the right length because that's what the tune system is has to do in order to function correctly and there's where you can see this section here is the carburetor heat this section here is the cabin heat this is the same part this has a shroud on it the design of the tuned exhaust allows the engine to develop a greater percentage of its rated horsepower we're not doing anything that the engine isn't designed to do we're just letting it work the way it was designed to work and without restricting the flow which the normal standard exhaust on most ga aircraft does it's a choke point on the engines and most people can sort of feel that because you can feel when you give it the throttle it stumbles a little bit usually before it starts to open up and develop full power so this is the tailpipe what's this is a two inch exit continues two inches and in fact stays two inches throughout but inside of it where these screws are that assembly going up to here is a sound chamber it's an attenuator it's a technical term in fact it's called a non-obstructive attenuator because the gases don't have to go through any pathway they just continue straight out i'm going to show you what it looks like inside what's in there is one of these see i can see straight through it so the gases come right through and come out there the pathway is unchanged for them but they're running down the sound chamber so here's my cheesy demonstration but it'll work i'm going to remove my mask so you can hear it this is my voice this is my voice this is my voice this is my voice this is my voice it's a pretty effective attenuator but it doesn't get in the way a traditional exhaust system the atta the gases have to diffuse through its tubes and holes and they wear out this will eventually wear out but what wears out is this this fibrous outer layer has a 400 to 800 hour life expectancy we specifically designed the exhaust system to be easy to maintain so when that happens it's held in by four nuts and screws you get the new one and you put it in you line it up you drill the new holes and it comes with new hardware you're done in a half an hour start to finish no sending the muffler out for rebuild or anything like that [Music] [Music] all right so we're getting ready to go do the test flight now we're gonna suit up with our life vests the wind is pretty it's ripping out of the west right now and we've got some cloud cover here over the airport in daytona and then we've got a little bit of cloud cover to deal with out over the ocean so we're gonna take a little bit different approach to how we're gonna do this climb and descent profile because we need a constant airspeed uninterrupted climb pretty much in a straight line so we're going to find a long strip of ocean that has clear skies or as clear as we can get it above it and we will go from there start the climb at about 700 feet again start the timer at a thousand and hold that airspeed all the way up really excited to feel the difference of the airplane and hear the difference in the engine i'm really excited to see what the egts and chts are going to do and the fuel flow fuel flow is what's going to make me really excited if we're able to really dial that back while putting the same amount of power out as we could before so everything's installed we're done with the pre-flight topped off with gas we're going to suit up with our survival equipment life vests and everything since we'll be out over the water let's go do this post installation test flight i'm super excited to see how it feels all right the mixer is rich we're going to get all set up for a climb here i think everything else looks good you remember the sequence and call outs i believe so yep good they're on the right as far as i can see okay and we're gonna level off right here it looks much better that way yeah let's go south that's a good let's go south all right we're stabilized on about 81.82 okay as you pass through that thousand start the timer please all right climb power set time 1000 feet 81 knots and we're off crossing 3 000 3 minutes and 30 seconds 82 knots the rate of cylinder head climb has now dramatically flowed it's only gone up one degree okay in the last 500 feet which is about where we normally see so this condition kind of represents sort of like a worst case i'm in the rockies or in a mountainous area i got to keep doing the sustained climb right so you're really demanding a lot out of the engine we're running ahead of the stock exhaust despite it being four to five celsius hotter today and way more humid five thousand feet seven minutes 48 seconds 82 knots copy that your honda cylinder now is just approached the 400 mark it's 404 but it is by no means a uh particular hot concern right we're running almost 30 seconds faster to altitude thus far cool and that's with worse temps the worst temps so there's more performance had it been ideal and we could have done it all like that but that just right didn't work out for us and that's okay all right crossing 6 000 that's 10 minutes and 12 seconds 80 knots it's holding that rpm number for quite a while still at 2480 which is where it's been for 2000 feet which is really impressive wow now your chds are starting to back down as their power density all that stuff's decreasing a little bit and now the chd is just starting a little bit of a climb up but only very barely because you just touched the mixture you raised the mixture about 40 degrees on that egg on the egt so enough to give you you know hey you got to get out of a bad situation there's a little more there right 8 500 feet 17 minutes and 17 seconds 80 knots copy that so in the end about 30 seconds faster to altitude despite it starting out significantly well reasonably warmer normally when the power flow is put on we anticipate seeing more air into the cylinder and typically the fuel flow will go up a little bit at wide open throttle settings right however on this climb we were showing a gain of 20 to 30 rpm at the lower fuel burn with the power flow not by a lot two to three tenths and yet it was a 20 to 30 rpm higher uh number and it was warmer by three celsius on average i had my own video show the most appropriate like segway is stay tuned yep you know stay tuned about the only thing i could say be perfect for what i'm doing that's right stay tuned particularly on your exhaust exactly well once in a while when someone really starts kind of doing a little fun bantering i said you know i'll say we've done exhaustive research [Laughter] i know it's a lot to intake but you know and then they're like oh please stop you're killing me i'm like i'm sorry you're feeling under pressure yeah bad that's good we're gonna go to full throttle now okay because that's gonna we're gonna start from full throttle anyway we might as well go to full throttle right and play with it so let's go ahead and go to full throttle and lean to best power as you've seen it and then after that then we're gonna play with the mixture to see how far down we can take it with the engine all right and i'd like you to slowly start leaning the engine i want to see how many rpm we can take out of the engine smooth so when you start to affect the change just kind of stop wait a moment or two like right there just so wait a second let it all equalize watch what happens to the cgt's they're gonna level off and start coming down yeah i see that already how would you characterize this somewhat smooth somewhat smooth it's this is this past those your comfortable point yeah i'd probably want to go a touch more rich so let's go touch more rich and just give it a second because you could see how much you just affected that yeah so i think there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle what i want to try and do is i want to get us to 2450 because if i'm doing it right we should be able to go lean of peak and save you fuel and run the engine cooler and get the same air speeds of course i'm attempting to show you on camera with this all the different things that you're going to get to play with as you're flying and doing a lot of cross country so don't be afraid to do this kind of thing because number one lycoming says if you want the engine to run cooler lower cylinder head temps lower oil temps well you're going to do all of those right it doesn't matter what the eg all you're doing is cooling the s you're cooling with extra air instead of excess air instead of excess fuel right that's all you're doing um and right now this is trying to say hey we think you're seven degrees lean a peak i'm not sure i buy that um but you are a carbureted engine so this is this is really kind of cool now we're down to a third less than a 40 degree difference i think we might have actually finally found our sweet spot so we were really it wasn't 26 10. we wound up starting at 25 30. we got it down to 24. well i was trying to get it to 24.50 and it now 24 30. so previously on the rich side of peak we were burning a gallon an hour or more one to one point two gallons an hour uh the only other one to get would be a wide open throttle all right please now that's good that you're getting more net rpm um previously you could see maybe 26.90 that's pretty good when it's been stable it's been 27 30. yeah 27 28 to be exact yep yeah so i mean that's some solid okay does it make more power clearly right you know you can go ahead and turn around if you'd like and you can back off and descend and all that stuff so your airplane can really get up and go that's really good daytona tower skyhawk eight zero and then another one straight in two five left hey zero nine on one daytona left to clear the line two five left clear to land eight zero now another one but what's the other thing that is going to happen because your engine should be a lot more responsive so if you ever needed to goose it the engine down for a bit doesn't have that happen at all gotcha two five left and contact ground no delay accident travis on shore fauna 476 right at the end and contact ground no delay november not around one go around going around not another one 901 spark one two zero four one able left traffic two five left i'll call the crosswind turn left traffic 1204 on the squad watch the flaps up one that's good we're not even at vy cool that's cool five hundred dollars have increased productivity on an end of the sanity of the airport one two zero zero 22 celsius getting down to vy doing a thousand feet a minute with three people on board and one crosswind turn is approved to a call to base crosswind turn approved now another one we'll wait for your call and you got your go around practice right i was gonna say you were just telling me about juicing the power on a go-around and there it went i have both traffic and sight age romeo perfect so you're number four following the south now turning base from eight to five left number four all right runway's ours i was coming idle runways made oh sure roll it on if you're developing chts in the 400 450 500 range that's severely impacting your engine law engine's longevity and with this with the power flow on a properly tuned engine you're usually seeing three 380 max even in climb so that's significant you keep it in the healthy operating ranges almost all the time you can develop your full rated horsepower at that rpm and at those engine settings uh without stressing the engine and you're never in a situation really where you're trying to get more out of the engine that it's capable of producing you're going to get the rated horsepower or very close to it in all operating regimes of the aircraft darren spent many hours behind the desk compiling a summary of our before and after numbers on these flights all of this data has been corrected for temperature and pressure and here's what we saw time to climb from 1 000 feet to 8 500 feet above sea level was 34 seconds quicker with the power flow wide open throttle at 8 500 feet yielded 6 more knots of true air speed with the power flow exhaust but at the same fuel flow as the stock exhaust that right there tells me the engine is running much more efficiently wide open throttle at 5 500 feet with the power flow installed yielded 30 more rpm than the stock exhaust five extra knots and we were burning 1.5 gallons per hour less that's a perfect example of the engine breathing better the added leaning capability with the power flow exhaust is also super impressive the stock exhaust lean rich of peak at 8 500 feet at 2450 rpm yielded 97 knots at 7.1 gallons per hour while the power flow tuned exhaust allowed us to run lean of peak also giving us 97 knots but now at gallons per hour same speed for 1.1 gallons per hour less the oil was also reading 9 degrees cooler and all of the cylinders were reading cooler as well what made all of this finally click for me was when darren described the egt and cht relationship to me in simple terms powerflow yields hotter egts when leaning because it's effectively sucking more heat out of the cylinders than the stock exhaust could the heat has been transferred from the cylinder heads into the exhaust gas hence lower chts higher egts this combined with better intake through the challenger air filter means 80991's engine is breathing better than it ever has better breathing means better cooling better performance and a longer lasting engine i'd been contemplating getting the power flow installed for years and my first hand experience with the system and the company has showed me that i should have done it long ago they have a truly amazing line of products that's backed by data and the company and everybody in it are absolutely awesome huge shout out to power flow systems for making the process so effortless and using their expertise to bring such a needed product to the legacy general aviation fleet you can learn more about power flow by visiting the link down in the description and the full-length versions of these performance flights are available at aviation 101.com cockpit club if you're interested in seeing those in the next video chelsea and i desperately try to get a word in with daytona clearance we fly over nasa visit the factory of an experimental aircraft manufacturer and we take a few days to cut across florida where chelsea gets some more first-hand ifr experience as we make our way to pensacola subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss that upcoming content definitely leave a comment down below i'd love to hear your feedback on this video and all of the technical content we had in it and until next time everyone you know the drill stay happy healthy current and most importantly stay proficient we'll see in the next one fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Aviation101

Views: 87,999

Keywords: flying, aviation, general aviation, air traffic control, atc, radio, intercom, audio, cockpit, takeoff, landing, training, vfr, ifr, flight, vlog, flight vlog, pilot vlog, aviation101, josh flowers, cfi, flight training, private pilot, commercial pilot, flight instructor, 4k, hotrod, tuned exhaust, performance, horsepower, cessna, 172, skyhawk, n80991, power, flow, systems, daytona, profile, atlantic ocean, flying over water, test flight, bolt on horsepower, lycoming, continental, engine, motor, propeller, manifold

Id: XDTeVod9Cfo

Length: 35min 31sec (2131 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021