Cheap, Easy Power Where You Least Expect To Find It

well it's finally above freezing down here in the deep south again and uh it's a mess it's still a mess everything is like a swamp but we're back shop here and we're making progress on our various projects no progress on listing right now uh we're still gathering parts for it we probably will touch the gambler valiant again i'm going to say at least a month before the weather really starts getting nice and it's happy to work out here again so this she's on hold although we do have we got our uh we got a truck oil pan distributor we've just been gathering parts right uh also the miata we've been gathering for the miata too got my truck lid i picked up this i picked it was this robot for 50 bucks you know they're so refreshing working with something that you can get just cheap parts for like they're everywhere i have to get an ignition cylinder and a key for everything 20 bucks right try it out with these old mopars but that's another one that's that's coming in next but i've been focusing mostly on getting our plan z dart ready for its maiden shakedown run and one of the things that we did one of the things that's going on with this car is that we converted from stick to automatic and that leads us to the i got some good stuff for you that leads us to the to the tech portion of or of of this video we are converting from stick to automatic and because of that there are certain things that need to be done with the exhaust on the car so let me let me let me let me come up let me explain this here this has happened to a lot of you guys it's happened to all of us okay you have your car your street strip car okay and you're taking the tim track and you're running the car and you're getting good consistent times out of it and you're like let me see what happens if i drop the exhaust on this and you know it's going to go faster with the exhaust off of it right because you know race cars don't have exhausts so if you drop yours it's got to go quicker open headers right so you drop your exhaust and the car slows down two tenths right off the bat what happened right maybe it's lean right so you make a couple of jet changes or wow still nothing still two tenths of two and a half times off what the hell happened you bolt the exhaust back up and both the car goes back and runs exactly the way it did it's because of the headers okay and it's because of the way headers are designed your street and strip car has street headers on them meaning that you have an abbreviated collector and a flange that you're going to bolt the rest of your exhaust to the difference between street hunters and race headers like it says here's your short collector a race header doesn't have the flange here and it has a much longer collector and the collector can be upwards of a foot and a half long past the point where the tubes merge so now what happens is when you drop the exhaust you're taking away so here's the collector but you're taking away the column the smooth column that pulls when you've got an abbreviated column a collector like this we've only got about four inches between the point where the pipes merge and the open end here there's so much turbulence and and and confusion going on in this section with these pipes feeding the way to do that this area here is too short to create a column that smooths and helps to scavenge so you've got the individual pipes handling their exhaust pulses and moving everything forward but you don't have the collection of exhaust here pulling is a smooth column and so you don't get the true scavenging effect of the headers actually the truth of the matter is running headers like this street headers open like this is just about exactly the same as just running a plane exhaust manifold they don't you're not getting the benefit of the header and that's where the collector comes out collector extension so here this is this is one that i made for bottle rocket because i wanted to be able to switch between uh the the mufflers that are on the car and open pipes so i whip these up real quick and all it is just a three inch pipe and a flange what nuts welded to it so i can take it on and off like in a minute and uh it's a short collector it'll mount up exactly like that and it'll give me approximately uh approximately 11 inches between the collection point and the end of the collector and because it's a stick car and we don't have to drive it out right we don't have to attack the converter with it the car is going to leave the starting line on the momentum of the on the inertia of the flywheel we don't have to be too concerned with bottom end torque we're really concerned with torque from around 3000 4000 rpm up all stick cars are kind of like that but now when you go to an automatic even with a super loose converter the motor still needs to make enough bottom end torque to hit the converter and that's where collector tuning and collector length is is like crucial so the situation with this car is that it has it has three into two headers or three into one six into two headers and it has two and a half inch collectors now when it was a stick we were in we ran the collector short on it but now we're going through an automatic so at the initial hit it needs to make as much torque as possible to attack the converter and go and the longer the collector the longer the extension the more bottom end torque you make so on that car we've come we've we i've got a set of 18 inch long extensions right now on the collector so it's giving us approximately 24 inches total of the collector length and i'm going to trim that as we go now one of the methods of doing it is to use a grease pencil or paint stripe lots of different things that you would paint onto the collector okay and you make a run with the car and wherever you see that line still intact that's where you're supposed to trim there is one little caveat with that and that's the fact that you're getting a heat signature of the entire run and not a heat signature of the the early part of the run which is where it counts so collector length basically works like this below the engine's torque peak is where where the length of the collector is really important once you get above the torque peak you want to make the collector shorter and shorter and shorter there's a lot of downside to having too short of a collector as far as getting the car off the starting line but there's almost no downside to having too long a collector up on the on the top end as long as there's no other restrictions so again places on on the stick car you want a shorter extension and also you know it's easy enough you say if you if you're launching the car and you're like you know what it needs a little more bottom end it's easy enough to take another piece of pipe or someone's obviously too small for this it's easy to take another piece of pipe like this cut slots in it right so you take your cutoff wheel cut it like that cut it like that cut it you know cut it with slots slip it over and then you can band clamp it in place and so let's say you know i want to add next an extra four inches well i'd get a four inch pipe that'll fit over the outside of that and do exactly that and then you can trim and tailor to where the car works best that's if you're getting into real high science so high science now there's also programs like pipe max i believe it is has a program where you can calculate collect only but i tell you years ago over the years i messed up all the different formulas and all the different and you know the truth of the matter is there's no substitute for just going out there and testing right uh you know just just just make them longer and make her shorter it's cheap it cost you a couple of dollars it's that but for performance gains like there's no comparison there's nothing you can there's nothing you're going to come up with that's as cheap and effective as a well-tuned header collector so that's it for uh for right now it you know the car is all done there's nothing else mechanically i need to do to it um so i just have to wait for it to like it's a swamp out there it's a mess so it'll probably be at least a week before everything is like dried up and the road isn't all you know salty and dirty and everything else so probably about a week or so before you can take the car out and start hitting it off the off the 60s you know and get some numbers out of it and bottle rocker is ready to go she's just sitting there waiting to go for the race may 8th i said 17th last week it's not the 17th it's may 8th it's jake's dragway in alabama and it's 318 fest so i'm that's going to be a fun event we're really looking forward to going to that one so that's it and tomorrow we get back to our kitchen engine rebuild series uh we we got put off way put off with that because i don't want to do any work here right i don't want to do any work in the garage at the house i want to do it all outside you know and in the kitchen the way you know you guys do like to keep it in the spirit of of doing it that way and it's been miserable out there and we were supposed to have a block back early late last week and we won't get that back for at least another week or so so you know we're just dealing with the weather the same way that you guys are but we'll get everything done everything on track so that's it for now i'll see you tomorrow

Channel: Uncle Tony's Garage

Views: 39,789

Rating: 4.9550381 out of 5

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Id: yLudN9E6Nzk

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021