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View Full Version : How's the weather in Oregon compared to Colorado?



benfoxmra95
October 6th, 2007, 02:01 PM
Chilly, rainy season has started here. I was told that it was coming but I wasn't quite prepared for it. It's like getting colorado december weather 2 months early. Oh well no big deal as 80% of my day is spent in either the engine build room or the dyno room.

I got a call last night from Glenn Conser giving me the usual updates on whats happening, He was telling me about his cobra kit car that he's building, it's going to be pretty cool, you should hit his myspace account to check out pics of it and the progress etc... and he was telling me about the new track stuff and some mra stuff.

Anyway, asked what was happening in out here and I let him in on what I could and thought that I'd make a post on the mra forum if anyone was interested.

So far it's been pretty busy, I average somewhere around 60-70 hours working a week, still. Currently we are still in engine development on the dyno and about to finish with that.

I posted in an earlier thread that we were experimenting with different firing orders by cutting the cams apart and putting the back together in different configurations, well we settled upon one that made the best power, I thought that this was a lot of work, until one of the engineers here that worked for cosworth in F1, threw down a thick stack of documents for me to go over which was a study paper done on firing orders on a V-10 F1 engine, where they tested over 24 differenet firing orders and all of its variables. I thought the half dozen we did was a huge job, there's so many things to test on just four cylinders and 16 valves, let alone 10 cylinders and 40 valves.

well once we settled on a nice firing order that had the proper scavenging effects, we then have went into injector testing, We've tested enough fuel injectors over the last two weeks to make you want to throw up, we changed injector brands, injector hole patterns, injector cone degrees, injector heights, injector sizes, injector spray patterns, single injector configuration, dual injector configurations, shower injectors....just on and on. This so far was some very cool stuff to learn about injectors and how they interact and what effects they have on the power curves. Phew!!! I was glad I was the guy behind the computer at the dyno, and not the one in the dyno room swapping injector configs, every 10 minutes. We have a full cnc shop here that made up about a dozen different fuel rail configs so we could easily swap them in and out when making a chang but it was still days and days or work.

along with this we were also testing at the same time intake tract lengths, again this was really cool to learn what was really going on here when you start changing the intake length by 5mm at a time up to 50+mm longer

were going to be starting into some exhaust pipe testing here this week. with primary and secondary lengths, we have so many pipes to test it's silly.

When seeing the development process actually taking place right in front of you, you really get a sense of appreciation for what the major manufactures are producing, i mean the years of development behind the GSXR motors really is something to be applauded.


Well were heading to vegas for some testing at the end of next week, I'll make another update sometime soon.

Ben

dave.gallant
October 6th, 2007, 02:29 PM
Super cool!

Without blowing the NDA, could you overview the order in which new parts are developed?

I would think that if you settled on a firing order or cam overlap or <xyz> before the intake tract length or tuned exhaust length, you might leave some power on the table? I would guess it is really a chicken-and-the-egg problem, but I don't get to play with those toys for a living! :)

So, are you able to divulge the order in which new parts are developed around a new engine?

Also, do they use Motec systems? And if so, are they as cool as we had always dreamed they were?

benfoxmra95
October 6th, 2007, 07:04 PM
Well, I can tell you this, when starting from nothing, you get your initial motor config in order, i.e. firing order, crankshaft rotation, combustion chamber size and shape, and your intake and exhaust port shapes and lengths.

Then after that, everything else is considered tuning. like cam timng, and injectors, and exhaust

You have to pick the best firing order so as all the cylinders are working with each other, so that the exhaust from one is helping to draw out the exhaust from another. It's a little trickier on this motor as it has two cranks spinning opposite of each other, so you have the benefit of switching them 180 degrees, so you can have to two outer cylinders up at TDC together, or you can have #1 and # 3 cylinders up at TDC together. That's been the reason for firing order experirmentation. A typical inline four has you pretty limited as to what you can do with it, there's on so many combo's and they've all been tried and tested, but like I said with two cranks you have more combinations and freedom to change it up so that's the main reason we've went into that whole experiment.

The management system we are using is Magnetti Marelli, and it's F'n cool. expensive, but cool. one harness is $11,000, the ecu is $7000, the alternator is $7000, the dash is $3000, plus thousands of dollars for suspension stuff and sensors, Everything for one complete bike is $35k. The software is pretty easy to use, and has inputs for everything from suspension data logging, to Traction control, we have one side of the motor's throttle bodies running off an electric stepper motor that's ecu controlled(fly by wire), so it can be contoured for torque and used as a slipper clutch, so when your hand closes the throttle the ecu open up two cylinders, shuts off the fuel to those cylinders helping with engine braking.

akuretz
October 6th, 2007, 07:38 PM
Very cool and interesting stuff to hear, thanks for posting the details you can!

Kickstand
October 6th, 2007, 07:51 PM
whats glenns my space page?