Don't Do This! How to Ruin Your Engine's Horsepower | Engine Masters | MotorTrend

every one of these cooling fans that's mechanically driven off the front of your engine is going to take some horsepower to spin as they're moving air they're going to give you some parasitic drag which one though takes the most horsepower and which one takes the least that's what we're gonna find out when we bolt them all up to our 350 small block chevy engine now every one of these fans is 18 inches in diameter every one of them has six blades but there's different designs there's an oe type clutch fan there is a plastic flex fan there's an aluminum low profile fan and then there's the very old school steel fixed blade fan there's gonna be one winner here and three absolute losers we're gonna go find out which is which right now next up we decided to go with a plastic flex fan because it has softer blades than the steel one so we figured that it's probably going to eat less power the theory on these is as rpm increase and it's drawing more air that these blades flatten out like this and therefore take less of a bite of the air and eat less horsepower one thing you do need to pay attention to if you're installing a fan is making sure you're spinning it the right direction because there is such a thing as a reverse rotation fan if the belt arrangement on the front of the engine spins the water pump the wrong direction did you take the bolt okay plastic flex fan ready to grip okay plastic flex fan i'm almost wondering if it's gonna be better than the clutch never know oh that's hideous [Music] horrible we just made 388.3 pound feet at 3800 and the horsepower 325.1 wow at 5100 that is pathetic we just lost 18.6 pound-feet of torque looking at the horsepower number we just lost 23.9 horsepower from no fan to plastic flex fan that plastic no but i've seen this yeah it's not my first barbecue i've seen it too but i just thought with the fan and all that and the shroud and everything in front of it i couldn't see it taking you know wow that's bad okay last one we're going to install what we assumed was going to be the worst fan which is this factory type steel non-flexible fan but i don't know the plastic one could be worse it's all about look at the pitch of the blade see how there's like a 90 degree cut on that blade whereas this one's more shallow so who knows what's gonna happen here [Music] okay ready here we go this is all of our number one pick so we'll have to see how smart we are or aren't we all said this is the worst right yeah it will be but then i was stunned by the plastic fan so i don't know the plastic fan was pretty bad this would be worse [Music] wow and the winner is [Laughter] bam i called it now you nailed it 30 horsepower gone i actually read nearly all of the comments on all of our videos and one of the things i saw pervasively is people want to know how much horsepower is killed by the accessory drive on the front of an engine and specifically people asked about the water pump and so that's what we're going to do here we're going to start off with an electric water pump that has no parasitic loss to the engine whatsoever and then we're going to start killing power first we're going to install a wired aluminum high performance mechanical pump and it's going to have a performance pulley ratio that spins the water pump more slowly in an attempt to save horsepower we'll find out and then we're going to go to a restrictor for the thermostat to see if there's a power difference if you do or don't have a thermostat restricting the water outlet on your engine after that we are going to go to the high flow water pump pulley ratio which spins the water pump even faster then we're going to put on an alternator and load that thing up and find out how much power it kills and finally we're gonna look at the power difference between coolant temperature that is low or way too hot like 200 degrees torque 468.2 no real change there all right give me the averages and we'll find out what it is but it's definitely down a couple numbers so as an average across four runs that made 467.1 pound-feet of torque 467.9 horsepower that actually killed 3.7 horsepower oh more than i thought yeah that seems like a reasonable amount i mean it's not going to be 20 it's not going to be zero yeah four horsepower sub 3.7 apply it to your life though you won't feel it no there's absolutely no way okay one more pull with this combo so our average numbers with the more high cooling ratio 463.5 pound feet of torque 465.9 horsepower so once again we're just a tiny bit down from the electric water pump until the fast drive ratio on the mechanical water pump it's five horsepower with the restrictor so a thermostat and a mechanical pump costs you five horsepower at this rpm versus an electric pump but we have more stuff to put on we have to go put the alternator on there [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the alternator ends up killing more power under a load than anything we've tested so far it also turns the fastest compared to everything else we've done yeah this is what i was thinking is that the alternator it's not like the water pump where the load increases as the rpm go up that draw on the alternator is there even at low rpm and so it's killing roughly the same amount of power throughout the curve instead of the water pump which only affects the very top again it's not a huge amount but it all adds up well yeah the difference between our first test and everything that we've added now the restrictor the alternator the electrical load the mechanical water pump the pulleys it's 11.8 horsepower overall and 6.5 pound-feet overall almost half of it came from the alternator alone right yes wow so what if you had even more load on the alternator like an electric fan electric water pump and everything powered probably be more yeah i mean you can tell when you hook up a battery that has a big load and the engine idle speed slows down because the alternator is really grunting against it yeah i think the alternator is a bigger difference than anything else everything that we did is going to contribute to better cooling and having cool water temperatures way more important than any of this little itty bitty stuff we've been missing run to run absolutely we're gonna run it up to 200 which is what you'd see in a car find out how much that kills at this point we can throw away the four run average and just do one dyno pull because the coolant temperature is 200 degrees and that's going to make a big difference all throughout the episode we were starting runs at 132 degrees and uh now actually 206 205 204. here we go [Music] how hideous was it one thing i guarantee is that this is the biggest change we've made yes yes this will be the biggest thing that's happened the entire episode so torque 453.3 horsepower 449.7 so that's down 10. what we're going to do to pick up significant power is dumbfounding honestly you're not even going to believe it and once we're through with that you're also going to see a comparison of a stock type oil pan like this versus a performance aftermarket pan it's going to be pretty good let's talk a little bit about what we're going to use as a test mule here if you've watched engine masters for a while then you saw this in the episode that was called 600 horsepower camshaft shootout we compared a hydraulic roller cam to a solid well it's exactly the same configuration this is a big block chevy it's a 454 it makes 600 plus horsepower it's a pump cast deal it's actually really really cool but the good thing about it is that it's got a giant rotating assembly down there because it's a big block it's got a four inch stroke it's churning all sorts of trash through the oil all of the time and that's gonna be a big deal and it also runs to 6 500 rpm because of the nice little solid roller camshaft in it so it's a good candidate to show you how controlling the oil in the crankcase is going to make power first thing that we're going to do is install this turd fill it up with amsoil of course and then we're going to run it and show you how you can make power with oil for less than free [Applause] so our final answer is 577 pound-feet of torque at 4100 rpm and up top it made 614.6 horsepower at 6400. but let's have a look at what's going on with the oil pressure because we all suspect this is a little over full and i'm gonna say yes and i checked that this is exactly what the factory recommends for this level with this filter and actually i thought it was kind of interesting but if you use a short filter it actually takes 6.7 quarts with a short filter and seven quarts with a long one so they're down to that kind of accuracy yeah that's interesting i thought it was great they're also not running 6 500 rpm from the factory they're probably only running 5 000 likes some more left yeah with that fan originally on a one-ton truck so you've seen this right dulcet well the thing is eventually suggests a control problem but this particular motor has a solid roller which is not going to be affected as much as a hydraulic flat tap or hydraulic roller that's a good point there's no piston in there to lose compression and cost you lift and duration with the solid roller so let me tell you exactly what's going on with this curve right here what we're seeing is that at high rpm above 5000 the oil pressure is dropping off and that means that there's probably too much oil in the pan it's getting all whipped up and steve's talking about how that can affect a hydraulic roller camshaft if there's a bunch of air in the oil that's aerated from being whipped around then that's why the pressure drops off and the pressure drops off a hydraulic lifter is going to start to fall apart some squish so we're gonna go pull a quart out of this thing ish and hope we can see that improve here we go run it that's pretty happy for just draining a cord of oil out we actually made more power let's have a look so let's overlay the full oil pan versus the one quart low okay there you go kind of predictable on the rpm i think you know down below 5000 it really doesn't matter but once the crank starts whipping that oil around what we see there like five horsepower at peak it's the difference between 613.8 to 619.8 oh yeah six horsepower just from draining a quart of oil out of the stock pan so super interesting basically we just ran the aftermarket pan with what we believe is way too much oil in it and look at the curves the red line represents the stock pan with the reduced oil level in it and the black line shows that we killed 22 horsepower with too much oil in the aftermarket pans i bet the audience has no idea that too much oil kills 20 horsepower it's surprised a lot of people over the last 10 years or something we started doing these tests so the question really is how much oil do we drain out of it i think we do it a quarter at a time okay i think we're gonna take three quarts out of it i think this thing wants five in the pan and one in the filter we picked up some power but we're still losing oil pressure pull another cord out i agree now we have six quarts in the pan i'd still pull a cord out and see what happens we have to yeah all right now we're down to five which is the number i called i think you might be right that's the most important part of the episode i know me being right [Music] [Music] boom best run yet make you win thank you thank you nice work fryeburger you

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

Views: 576,329

Rating: 4.8531518 out of 5

Keywords: motortrend, motor trend, motor trend channel, motortrend on demand, motortrend full episodes, engine masters, engine masters full episodes, horsepower, engines, engine rebuild, engine modifications, get more horsepower, ls engine, hemi engine, stock engine, engine boost

Id: Hz0ebc6XkFE

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020