This was literally a month of pure hell that Ken and I went through to get to this point but we both learned a lot with it! I definitely want to ride in it now for some fine tuning in the correct environment...:hug:
Before I move to far into the next stages of the build, I wanted to give a big shoutout to MarkBroviak, Larry, and all the crew at Danville Performance for allowing me to basically live in their shop for a month. It's a super clean facility, and I'm a major slob, just ask my wife, or Mark for that matter.. lol
Anyways I borrowed countless tools, made plenty of messes, and ate every bag of Cheetos up front in the customer waiting area. Even left my junkass broke down cumbucket parked in the side lot for a week, while taking up a second spot with one of my rental car"S"..
When I finally did a bypass belt on my locked up AC pump, and then the dam Dodge tries to kill me on I70 four times hauling one of the Duramax engines home. DEATH WOBBLE!! Called that for a good reason.. Guess it was pissed I'd left it parked beside a blown up Powerstroke for over a week, then tossed a Duramax in the bed and expected it to get me home. Which it did, at 45mph on side roads in the pouring rain for 5hrs.
That's just one of the 4 trips over and back. Every one had some stupid adventure added. Like week of FFA convention, every hotel booked, so I went AirBnB and slept in a barn one night.. And I haven't even got started on the fab work, electrical gremlins, dyno issues, oil leaks, coolant leaks, belts eating the cam sensors, or Mark making a dang good effort at removing a knuckle while machining out some exhaust V-band flanges. If he's slow to reply on email, it's cause he was down to only 6 working fingers and was typing with thumbs when I last saw him...
Hope that gives ya an Idea of what went into testing and tuning these engines. According to all our logs, we started out around 640hp, and some 20 "logged" pulls later was finally happily into the 900's, on the second engine. Sure we could have just tossed some huge injectors in there and a big single off the shelf and been done within a week. But goal was to do this cleanly, slowly, and test all hardware as if it was running in a boat. So once I drop them in the boat, no big surprises like the cooling system can't keep up. Or better yet, those twins are too big and can't make enough boost to get the boat on plane. Remember, we a buying "2" of everything on this job.
If you go back several pages someone ask how I was doing things differently than the guys in Utah building my buddies C powered Skater engines. To which I replied, "not going to just toss em in and drop the hammer." We spent a good bit of time doing part throttle stuff fully loaded in the 500-700hp range logging data. Then moved up to WOT loaded runs, and confirmed the twins wern't gonna achieve the power we needed, cleanly. And guess who has more dyno data on different turbo setups than probably Gale Banks?
So I ended up learning a lot about turbos, and Mark learned why he never wants to own a boat that uses more than oars for power. I'd love to spent another week testing with larger injectors and the new turbos, but some guy from Exergy wanted to play with his fancy Cummins engine.. Lucky for him one of mine started leaking past the head gaskets, and I'd all ready hauled the second engine home. :spit:
I'll post up some new pics taken over the month for everyone to enjoy. Mark has at least 100hrs of video footage to share, if he could figure out how to use his dang DVR. :hug:
