A month of torturous dyno tuning on a Dynojet finally revealed that the fuel pump and pickup in the fuel cell were the culprits. Another month also revealed that the Hondata ECU wasn’t working properly either.
These items were finally fixed and some tuning revealed that this engine had an insatiable appetite for fuel, requiring injectors that were generally reserved for use in boosted applications.
This engine produced torque that nobody’d previously seen from a B series engine of any displacement with power peaking at 280+ at 9500 rpm….and it wasn’t leveling off either.
Just like anyone else, I sometimes become overwhelmed by the moment and the old adage, “if some’s good, more’s better, and too much is best” took hold of my mentality….and that thinking proved costly in the end.
I made the decision to go for more rpm, as this thing would certainly top 300 whp at the rate it was running. I figured that about 10,000 to 10,200 would do it……………and it did. It also blew the engine up.
The quench distance, or piston to head clearance had been set at .032”, to effectively give us “zero” quench clearance at 9500 rpm, due to rod stretch. .032” caused the pistons to hammer the head pretty hard at 10,000+, ultimately work hardening the pistons.
#4 piston was the first to shatter, taking out the cylinder, the cylinder head, and a few more ancillary parts in the process. The debris from #4 was in turn distributed to all the other cylinders, courtesy of the intake plenum chamber, leaving no cylinder exempt from damage.
It was an expensive reminder that one needs to think (hard) before making any hair-brained decisions regarding rpm with any engine. You’d think that I’d have been old enough to know better, but……………...adrenaline can be a terrible thing.
During the past couple years, we’ve built a lot of normally aspirated Honda engines here. Each and every one has caused me to want to feel the “thrill” of one of these NA monsters in one of my own cars. Naturally, building a duplicate of the blown-up engine became the order of the day…when I wasn’t working on customer parts.
Picking a car to install it in was the next decision. My thinking was that the Civic offered the quickest ET potential, but I feared that “CARMA” would prevail and the Civic would kill me if I messed with it’s D series combination that runs so dependably well, leaving me with the two ITR’s I purchased in 1997 as the next options.
One was ruled out, since was my “collectable ITR”, having been put into storage the day it arrived here with 27 miles on the odometer The only choice remaining was my “other” ITR with 5500 on the clock and a blower under the hood.
That decision made, it was time to start the engine project.
In this business time never stands still. We continue to develop better products every day, as do most of the vendors we deal with. Many of you probably think that I’ll be using the absolute latest and greatest, but our customers always have priority for the “good stuff”, and I’m on a budget and the many of the parts we’ll use are machine shop “disasters” and “leftovers” from earlier development programs.
Next decision is on the engine’s displacement. This shouldn’t be an issue, since the previous engine had been built using a 84.5mm bore and a 89mm stroke, but since it’s going in my street car, should I go for more displacement and torque?