ALWAYS LEARNING

12

One of the things I enjoy most about this job is the relationships—the new people I get to meet and work with on a regular basis.

Because I have been in this industry since I was 17, I really was a fan first and grew up idolizing certain innovators/racers/manufacturers. As a kid, I was always hoping I could be even a fifth of what they were; hoping that one day, I’d be able to do some of the great things they had; hoping that I could be just as knowledgeable about diesel as they were.

That’s probably the number-one biggest thing that made me even more excited to stop building trucks for a living and start building magazines/websites/etc. Now, I get to rub elbows with some of the best in our industry every day, and I love that.

Over the last two weeks, I got to spend a ton of time with two innovators in the industry, the first of whom was Lenny Reed of Dynomite Diesel Performance (DDP). I spent several days with Lenny, learning how injectors of all types “do their thing” and how he makes them do what he wants (making engines run better with more and safer power).

Now, I’ve seen how the big manufacturers do it, and after going to Dynomite’s facility and seeing how they’ve broken it down into a science at an engineering level, it was impressive and eye-opening to say the least. DDP takes what the mfgs built and improve upon that, in a massive way. Shoot— their test bench is at least five times larger and eons more complex than even the one Bosch uses. (More from my trip to DDP later. Look for what I learned about injectors and how it applies to your truck, no matter how you intend on using it, in the next issue of Diesel World.)

The second trip I made was a more local one: down to see Gale Banks at his facility, which is only 50 minutes east of me. I’ve been working with Gale and his team for almost a decade now, and he was one of the first ones I met when I got into this bit.

Hands down, Gale is an engine performance genius. The more time I spend around him, the more I realize I don’t actually have a clue how an engine works. He probably quite literally has forgotten more about engines than most of us will ever know. One of the things I really enjoy is listening to him build engines based on math or analyzing parts and how they’ll perform based on math. As large an algorithm as it always becomes, the math always checks out with the engines/parts in the real world. Last week, this is exactly what we did, I’ll briefly explain:

Engines are predictable when they’re not broken. I know that sounds like a “no duh” comment, but think about it: When an engine is unpredictable, it’s always due to something going wrong; something not working as it was intended to. So, assuming the engine is working as intended, it is very predictable. It simply sucks in a bunch of air, adds fuel and turns it into horsepower.

This predictability makes them easy to build (on paper) for any situation or horsepower level (want 30k hp? No problem). And this is because we know a few things: We know exactly how much oxygen a given amount of fuel needs to burn efficiently; we know how much power that given amount of fuel produces at peak efficiency; we know how atmospheric conditions affect the air’s ability to burn said fuel; we know parasitic factors from bearings, as well as a bunch of other smaller factors such as that. The big stuff for this discussion is fuel and air.

Taking that info and combining it with the displacement of an engine giving us our amount of air factor (1 rpm of an engine equals its displacement. Go up in rpm, and displacement goes up proportionally). Calculating power at any rpm is easily done with simple math.

Exactly when the power comes on is a matter of taking all that info and using it for tuning. If the engine pumps enough air at 4,000 rpm to burn enough fuel for, say, 500 hp, all that needs to be done is add the correct amount of fuel—less at a lower rpm and more at a higher rpm. Adding turbos or a supercharger simply multiplies the engine’s displacement (by roughly one per 15 pounds of boost pressure at sea level).

There are tons of equations I could share here, but telling myself I know exactly what they mean would be a lie. So, in the interest of not lying to you as well, I’ll save that one for a future issue ... and I’ll see if I can get the expert— Gale Banks—to explain it.