The Real Reason Why I Am Not Racing At Hot Rod Drag Week 2023!

this time on Finnegan's garage we're back at Harrell engine and Dyno in Mooresville North Carolina to find out why is blasphemy not making the power of the rear tires that we're expecting I think we know why it's something to do with this right here [Music] Channel guys thanks for hanging out let's do something I rarely ever do announce to ask you guys to subscribe to this channel tell your friends about it hit the like button leave me a comment tell me if you know I'm doing it wrong tell me if you got a better idea and uh in this video we're gonna autopsy my 528 cubic inch Chrysler Hemi that was put together by Harold engine and Dino then I went to drag week with a fuel pump that was not up to the task of fueling this beast on E85 and we melted it down we knocked all the tension out of all the Rings we collapsed the ring land on one of the Pistons I believe it was number three maybe and then Tony Angelo and I heroically I think heroically rebuilt it during drag week with the one spare piston I had and then made one pass at Bowling Green on my way home foreign [Applause] and then since then we've spent a bunch of time on the dyno here at Harrow engine and Dyno right now we're in the engine room because every time we were on the dyno we just weren't making the power we thought we should be and Pete pulled the Hemi out of the car with us tore it all apart shot a bunch of video on his own and we're gonna discuss what's happening with this thing right here right now the great thing about working with Pete is not only can he build the engine but he can machine it he knows how everything in this room functions and because we're no longer on a crazy deadline with blast maze Hemi he's going to go back and do some things that we wanted to do in the beginning we just didn't have time to do like measure the combustion chamber volume of my cylinder heads the first thing you're going to see here after he pulls the engine apart is he's going to take the stage five Hemi heads flip upside down and fill the chambers with a liquid that you can measure the volume of and then he and I are going to autopsy the Pistons and see what's going on with every one of those things right there [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] all right one of the things that we have to do this go around on this thing is to confirm that our compression is what we think it is uh and one of the things we need to do to accomplish that is to determine the chamber volume of the seat of these cylinder heads we know what they're supposed to be but let's uh let's double check and make sure for ourselves and the way we do this is with a Barrette that we're going to fill with liquid and see how much liquid it takes to uh completely fill this chamber water or alcohol both so he's getting uh 169. well that's I think 70 right all right so we got uh 169. if you look we got a full Beaker and then a 69 so uh that's pretty close they claim 170 that's pretty damn close so we're not we don't have a crazy problem there but we had to confirm because we're just kind of trying to back double check on things anyhow 169 is what we're going to use for for our math uh here for and to recap these are CP Pistons custom made for this combo these are a pair of these are a set of aluminum rods that I'm actually not sure where these came from Pete can tell us but we went with aluminum rods due to the fact that we were in a time crunch and we had a piston we did not have a rod for this engine we went with a rod we could get our hands on which ended up putting the Piston down the hole about 30 thousands further than we wanted so we had less compression than we wanted but more importantly we had some things going on where we couldn't run the cam timing where we wanted and while at drag week and or here on the dyno we had a couple of mishaps that resulted in this thing seeing not enough fuel and maybe too hot of air and we've got some issues with our Rings here so they're all marked on the rod and numbered so we know which cylinder they came out of for instance this is number five and the first thing I look for when I take these apart is do we have any tension left in the Rings now let's talk about why this engine came apart on one pole it put a thousand to the tires on the next pole it put a hundred less um we had one cylinder that had less cranking compression than all the others we had it puffing smoke intermittently um there were just things going on that didn't make us feel real great about taking this thing to drag week and we didn't want to go through what we went through last year so we ripped it all apart now this one number five the Rings seem to move just fine the ring Gap is a little smaller than I would expect coming out of the motor it's possible we don't have all the tension in this oh there's Pete okay so Pete's here which is good because I like to think I know what I'm looking at odds are good I don't at least not completely okay here's number five you want to put them in order and just go through them yeah okay so there's six there's five [Music] one eight seven okay two so this is the one I was most interested in because this is the one that had less cranking compression than all the other ones what do you see um yeah okay so the main thing is this top ring is just completely annealed oh there's no gap on me yeah there's hardly any Gap so the compression ring is just cooked you know and that's the oh that's heat related there that's heat yeah and that's are we talking heat from just the combustion process or the fact that at one point we had 250 degrees air Inlet time well no it's not really the air we manage that with fuel okay and E85 we use a lot of fuel and so it manages it that's one of the reasons we use E85 sometimes um but our tune is just out of whack right now the main thing is we're searching for missing horsepower with the laptop right and we're we're gonna fix it so we don't have to do that you know if we're all right we've got missing power and we're trying to tune it to death to uh to find it and a lot of times that's not the best way to do things you know that's the last place you want to go right yeah we're literally in there trying to find 10 and 20 horsepower at a time right and when not to do that we should easily be there to begin with right um okay so this one knocked the tension out of the top ring or the ring lands okay on this one no this one's pushed down right here just a little bit okay so that Ringling being pushed down that's not heat is that that nation that did it well or is it heat the Heat and detonation it's not so much just the heat the detonation brings tons of heat with it okay once things start to get out of control in the chamber once it starts to happen it's quickly unless you until you let out and start over right it's hard to get it back under control and uh and the heat builds up and detonates and beats and bangs and hammers everything and that's what we got here you know that's why the second ring is sticky because the first the first the land pushed down pushed down on it so it's it's tight right there like it'll move but no like it should be free right and it's not and the interesting thing about all this is we know approximately when we started having problems you know Pete could see in the egts that number two was different than all the others and so he started compensating in that cylinder because we have injectors in our individual ports and then we have injectors in the blower case and those are set up where the bulk of the fuel should be going into the blower case and then we should be trimming the individual ports to compensate for things like this one cylinders running different than the others and we had an issue where Pete and I weren't communicating and he was trimming the cylinder and we weren't getting the results we were looking for and when he told me he was and I was sitting there going well wait a minute the whole car got ripped apart at drag week and I walked out there and there's two sets of injectors there's two plugs and they're marked clearly and they got plugged back in backwards at Dragon beak when Tony and I rebuilt the motor and so Pete was making trimming to what he thought was cylinder number two but that fuel injector was in the blower case according to the wire in the EFI and so nothing was happening right so I'm pretty sure that's when this yeah I ended up putting like 40 in this hole right but the EGT never did anything right that's because it was happening in the blower instead of the port and anything you add in the blower is liable to go pretty much anywhere but where you want it to go right right so who knows where it went but it didn't go in here so that didn't didn't help the situation okay but the root cause of this whole problem is that to be honest the motor's kind of a dud [Music] I mean I wasn't going to say it it's got potential it's how I like to think of it right so we're gonna make some changes to uh to fix the root cause of the problem now I mean this thing the reasons that it's that that we have this issue is because when we built this thing especially at the end we're going to kind of a Mad Dash to make drag week and it was the last minute deal when they sent the rods and the Pistons the rods had a different wrist pin than the Piston so we had to we had scrambled we had to scramble because it was going to be another 14 16 weeks to get another set of custom rods yeah originally we were going to have steel rods in this motor right and there were steel rods showed up with the wrong bore in the small end yeah so you found the aluminum so I had a I rushed a set of aluminum rods for custom rods so you know generally speaking you can get custom aluminum ones way but quicker than custom steel ones so I called my buddies at r r and got a set of rods made and we're all good but that necessitated a sacrifice and that is aluminum rods you've got to short you can't put this you got to put it down the hole a little bit to uh to allow for stretch yeah they stretch and you have to get more clearance or else okay so you can't zero deck the Piston yeah let's say if you run 40 000 quench on a steel rod okay General speaking especially on a big block you can't think about doing that you need probably 70 or more okay all right so well that what that does is that changes our compression a little bit and just Alters things yeah what Pete's referring to is the distance between the top of the piston and the deck surface of the engine which is where the cylinder head holds to which is where the valves you know come past you know in a Max effort n a deal with steel rods on a big block you know you can you can zero deck those things because then you have like a 40 000 stick gasket on top you can't do that with these but what happens is when you you know shorten the rod put the Piston further down the hole now you lost compression so we're not compression that we were I think shooting for right we lost a little bit there and the other thing when I was assembling it I was really really short on clearance here right pissing the valve clear pissing the valve clearance and with a with a stick shift big block that's not a good thing to be short on yeah sometimes I rather pretty eye right so uh all the time so I had to back the cam up a little bit to get clearance right okay uh so was it in there the cam timing was it in there or just not as advanced it was at least two degrees might have been three degrees I can't really remember but okay it was not where I wanted it because if I put it where we wanted it we're going to be really close and okay and by retarding the can timing you're moving the Power Band down well you're uh yeah you're you're uh your cylinder pressure is lower generally speaking that's why this thing only pumped well one of the other reason that it only pumped like 125 or whatever you know if we just if you just take the same motor and Advance a couple few degrees you're probably going to pump 150 or more just from that right so you know in some Motors it may be maybe likes being a little bit right this is probably not one of them okay especially when we're kind of on our back legs or on our heels with the compression to start with right right so you had to you had these two things together and you've got an underperformer yeah and then you add in the fact that there's no ring tension on this one like number two legit was cranking 75 PSI of compression that that's really in the end what made me want to take it apart was number two was cranking compression around 100 around 75. all the other cylinders were 125 which when I saw 125 I was like that's really low but 75 tells you there's something wrong with that cylinder it's not operating it's the same as all the others and and your goal I think with any engine a lot of ought to be to treat each cylinder like its own engine you know just maximize everything like I know guys that run different valve lash different heat range spark plugs and different timing for every cylinder and their engines run great blower motors generally speaking are some of the worst as far as needing individual cylinder stuff right root ball and stuff you know like a lot of like Pro Modified stuff may have different Leaf rods even though big block Chevrolets I'll put different length rods in every hole right because if I got a hole that we're constantly picking on okay well I'll shorten the rod up twenty thousands and we'll you know you think oh it's a big sacrifice no you're probably gonna make more power when you do that yeah you know so make it all equal make it all happy right and some things you have to look at it kind of like eight individual Motors and a big block Chevrolet is probably one of the worst well not a big one a Roots blower deal is probably one of the worst offenders in that regard right yeah and so you know to your point blasphemy is back home at my house I'm going to be doing coil unplug ignitions the next time we're here you can do individual cylinder timing and then when you go back through this it's going to get a piston that will allow you to advance the cam and you know uh compression height and everything about it'll get changed so that you have the compression ratio you want and you'll be able to do the valve timing that you want via the camera yeah we'll we'll generally we'll start off with a much safer tune-up and I can not guarantee you we're going to make significantly more power even like that right so we're not going to have to go trying to squeeze out every last little drop and like that's never a situation you want to be yeah well and here's the thing like you know we made a thousand of the tires that is enough to get the job done in my car at the same event like hot red drag week you can run deep into the eights with that much power um I can only go 850 in that car with the cage that's in it and I'm not changing that and a lot of you are asking the question well why don't you guys put an intercooler into this car you know solve your air Inlet problems it's not legal to drag me it's not legal at a lot of the drag and drive events in an a gas car you can't run nitrous you can't run turbos you can't run an intercooler you can't run those quote-unquote more modern things that they weren't running in the late 60s um and yeah you know a last resort would be putting it on methanol that would help with the air Inlet charge but I don't think we have to do that you know and I I think you're you're there with me I think that's yeah it's not like we got 40 pounds of boost right yeah yeah we're the teens we're in the teams right so the low teams we're in thorough street car territory so yeah we can manage this without that and if you have to you know it's all always great to have methanol but like I don't think we need to right now you know I'm gonna just saying internet meth for now right so anyway for now um we're gonna look at every one of these real quick get the Pete's opinion on them and then new parts are already ordered so with any luck in the next month I'll be back here to hang out with Pete and assemble this thing starting over here which cylinder is this number one this is number one this one actually looks really good and if you'll notice there's none of that frosting this one looks I mean looks brand new it's got a much bigger ring up there yeah the the ring you can see the ring tension is much more like it should be yeah um now let's go to three I've seen two three ring looks really good I'd say it's in a similar situation I believe this is the one I replaced a drag week okay this is three and three or five I forget thank you four pretty close to the same maybe a little tighter run Gap yeah on the top one there just a little bit but not bad it really looks pretty good it looks fine this one looks brand new plenty of ring Gap tones there for intention [Applause] okay this is steaks um and this one actually the ring looks halfway decent but we're starting to see if you look this looks Frosty and usually that's a sign of a lot of Heat starting to occur and if you'll look oh yeah we got a little Gap yeah anytime you beat on something like this what happens is it it bounces and eventually it starts to lift it can't go down very easily without pushing all this down but if you smack it enough it's going to curl up right and that's what's happening because this is this is getting soft it's annealing it loses its hardness very quickly and uh We've lifted the ring land on that one yeah if we run this long enough this is going to completely peel off and that's really going to be game over oh wow yep number seven a ring tension is a little bit diminished overall the Piston doesn't look bad but that ring is probably not in the best shape for sure Corner cylinder this is number eight and it's got the same issues oh yeah see that land is starting to push down a little bit on the exhaust side yep a little Frosty here I don't know if this can be seen on video but you can feel it it's a little it looks a little rough around the end it's like like this is slick machined aluminum this has got a little when it gets a little Frosty it gets a little feel to it you know yeah um and we're kind of annealed a little bit and the thing you notice is that this ring doesn't like to slide around in the bore it's pinched it seems like it's actually pinched over here a little bit Yeah but somewhere anyhow it's kind of the clearance that's supposed to be in there is no longer available okay so we're gonna end up replacing all the Pistons with new slugs from CPU I think we're using the rods right yeah the rods all feel so General speaking like any big power motor first thing I do want to take it apart is check the for slop in the in the small end of the rod all right try to twist it that'll show up uh if you're picking on a whole tune-up wise or whatever that's where it'll show up first a lot of times right there okay now these all feel great so these rods are going right back in there they're over built for this application anyhow uh this is normally like a rod that we'd have in a 3000 horsepower motor so plenty of rods and because we ripped it apart our heads are good like everything's everything else on that car you know except for the over abundance of silicone I used to seal the pan sorry about that that uh this stuff is all fine you know we didn't have a catastrophic failure you know but I'm guessing if we keep we'd kept running on that yeah so it might have made it through drag week but it wouldn't have been happy right I have a saying that any motor that's a little bit blowed up is about to be a lot blowed up because when you put that on a t-shirt what happens is as when these Rings go away you lose oil control right and compression as well but like this all starts to get back into the chamber bull is very low in Octane and very high in BTUs so pretty quick it's like having another spark plug in there that's just kind of random yeah and it's going to start uh the motor will will quickly eat itself and you'll have you'll have rods at the bottom you know yeah we don't want that it's a new engine block right I'm actually going to come back here in about three weeks because we will have the new Pistons we will have all the bearings the gaskets everything we need and we're going to actually film the Assembly of the motor this time around right here at HED right thanks Pete yeah no problem and that's it for this episode fitting his garage thanks for hanging out I'll see you all very soon go to fsmgarage.com because as always every time I blow up blasts me I need you to buy a t-shirt thank you [Applause] maybe two foreign [Music]

Channel: Finnegan's Garage

Views: 257,118

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Id: 8UsknndKm1k

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2023