Adding Propane Injection and Nitrous Boost to a Chevy Duramax Diesel

Hey, welcome to trucks. We've got a great show for you today because we're talking diesels

this 2002 Chevy

Duramax to be exact

as you can see. This truck's already been modified a good bit, but

nobody's touched the engine. That's what we're gonna do

in the past. You've seen us do various projects on diesels and get some pretty serious numbers. So the question I keep getting asked

is just how much to work in horsepower. Can you get out of one of these and still keep it reliable and

not blow the engine up? Well, good question today. We're gonna show you the answer. But first we need to make a baseline dyno run on this thing.

So we went over to the horsepower TV shop to see our friend Joe Elmore.

All ready. Here we go.

There you are, Stacy, 100 and 94 horsepower, about 3 92 ft pounds of torque. That's not too bad. I'll tell you what though. What is the best horsepower number you've ever pulled on this

dyno?

Uh 426?

What would you say if I said, I bet I can beat that number with this New Chevy.

What are you gonna do? I don't know. No, I can't tell you that.

55 bucks says I can beat the horsepower number. 426. I'd say let's bet. Ok. All right. Five bucks. Yes. Bring it back when you're done and

bring your wallet. Bring your wallet too. Now he ain't gonna do that. No.

Ok. With our baseline set and old Elmore getting a little nervous.

It's time to show you the first upgrade we're gonna do to this truck and that is propane injection that we got from Bully Dog technologies. Now, the kit includes a propane tank,

all the hoses and hardware and the regulator, everything you're gonna need to just bolt this in and go.

Now, I know the first question you're asking

propane. What does that do?

Well, it gives you a better air fuel mixture

that burns quicker and more thoroughly. That'll give you a 30% increase in power,

but it also lowers your exhaust temperatures and gives you better fuel mileage. But the best part is

this won't harm your engine if you use it correctly.

Now, the first thing you need to decide is where you're gonna mount your regulator.

You really want to keep it within 20 inches of the air intake. Now, on the Duramax,

right here on the driver's side,

using the bolts for the air conditioning compressor is the perfect place. So Bully dog also includes a bracket.

Now you're ready for the nozzle that injects the propane

into the air intake

drill and tap the hole on this nice flat area on top of the air intake,

then take your nozzle

and just thread it in.

And this thing is ready to go back on the engine, just make sure you don't have any shavings down inside before you put it on.

Finally trim the hose and connect the regulator

to the nozzle.

One thing that you don't want with propane injection is for liquid propane to be injected into the engine

damage.

So this kit uses hot water from the heater, runs it through the regulator and that makes sure that the propane is all well vaporized before it's injected. Now to hook this up,

disconnect the outer heater hose

and then slide on the new hose. It comes with a kit.

This will go to the regulator

with the hose connected the hot water runs down through the regulator making a loop and then runs back through this hose to the heater hose.

Next, we'll hook up the air pressure switch. Now to do that, you slice into this hose that goes to the waist gate actuator,

then we'll plug in another hose

and run over here to the air pressure switches.

All right. Now we are ready to get out from under the hood, come in the cab here and mount a toggle switch. Now where you put, this is entirely up to you, you can put it on the dash

down here underneath all the way at the bottom, just somewhere where you can get easy access to it.

Now, our situation is a little different.

You can see we've got a whole bank of toggle switches because this truck's got a bunch of accessories on it,

but half of these aren't even being used yet. So that's what we're gonna use

to turn our propane on. Now, hook up is very simple. It's three wires. It doesn't get much easier than that.

Ok. The tank, where are you gonna mount the tank? You got three choices. You can put it in the bed,

but that's gonna take up some of your cargo space and you have to drill down through the floor and run your lines

or you can mount the tank here outside the frame. But

that's my least favorite. It makes it look like an RV or the best place if you have room is inside the frame rail and that's where we're gonna put ours.

But first we need to get this thing on the lift

to mount the tank.

Bully dog offers these universal brackets that can be adapted almost any situation

and notice I've drilled into this floor support and bolted them up there.

That should be plenty strong. Once you have these in,

you're ready to match your tank.

Now, I shouldn't have to say this, but I will don't fill the tank before you install it. It's already heavy. And awkward enough as it is.

Once everything's installed,

go ahead and hook up your hoses. Now,

make sure that you wire tie these up out of the way. So they're not by anything hot

or any moving parts or anything sharp.

Now, you're probably wondering

how we're gonna fill that propane tank now that we've buried it under the truck. Well, bully dog also offers this remote filler neck that bolts right to the bumper

and hides under the license plate

to help maximize the power that we're gonna squeeze out of this truck.

We're gonna pull off this old stock 3.5 inch exhaust system,

make room for something that'll breathe a little better. Now, remember if your truck came with a cat attic converter. Well, you got to put it back on.

Now, the new system that we're gonna use is bully dogs four inch rapid flow exhaust system.

And this thing consists of a whole bunch of preformed prebent

pipes

made out of four inch 304 stainless steel and the kit that you get,

all these pipes will be polished.

You also get a big flow through muffler and bringing up the tail end

is a huge five inch polish tip.

Now, another cool thing about this kit

is you get the stainless steel brackets that allows you to mount the system right in the stock location.

And for clamps,

you get these stainless steel bands that go around the joints

and these prevent any leaks or distortion that you get

when you use these kind of clamps.

Installing this kit is pretty much as simple as just sliding on the pipes in the proper order. We'll finish that up during the break.

But when we come back and we got a secret weapon, we're gonna put on this thing something you've never seen go on a diesel.

You're just gonna have to come back,

just can't get enough of trucks. Check us out online at trucks, tv.com,

welcome back to trucks. We are right in the middle of showing you how to get some serious power out of a diesel. In this case, a new Chevy

Duramax. Now we've already put on propane injection.

That's gonna give us about a 30% increase in power.

But what about that secret weapon? The one that we're gonna have to have to win that bet with Joe Elmore.

Well, for that, we went back to Bully Dog and got one of their nitrous systems. I know what you're thinking. Nitrous. What on a diesel? How the heck is that gonna work? We're gonna answer those questions. But first let's go take a look at the kit.

Bully Dog offers four different levels of nitrous kits and those include all the hardware nozzles, brained stainless steel lines,

relays, wiring

cleoid,

and of course the tank, but we're gonna add more to that. We're also gonna put on a bottle warmer

and a purge kit

So what

level are we gonna use? Level four? What do you think?

Also we added this remote bottle opener because that is just really cool. Now your questions,

remember, nitrous oxide is an oxygenator which means it adds more oxygen atoms than regular air. Now, we've already got more fuel coming in with the propane injection.

Now we got this oxygen coming in.

They blend together to make the perfect speed ball of supplemental fuel and that's ignited right at the magic moment. Now, the good news is

you can't lean, burn a diesel and melt everything down like you can a gasoline engine on nitrous. Also, diesel engines are designed for a lot higher compression ratio. So they're a natural for nitrous. However,

it doesn't mean you can't blow the heads off of a diesel engine with nitrous but

not with these kids bully dog designs, these to be all within safety parameters

because the idea here is to build tons of power not to blow your engine up.

We're gonna mount our bottle in the bed

on the passenger side

out of the way.

Then we'll run our hose down through the steak pocket under the truck and up into the engine compartment

under the hood. We've already drilled and tapped our inner cooler pipe.

So all we have to do is thread in our nitrous nozzle.

We'll follow that with the solenoids. Now, ideally, these need to be mounted fairly close to that nitrous nozzle. So right here on the firewall is gonna be perfect.

Now, all we have to do is run our wires,

hook up our hoses and we are ready to go inside the cab.

The last thing we're gonna do for our nitrous install is put on some switches.

Now, just like the propane kit,

we're gonna use one of these switches to turn on our nitrous. That way, everything will be nicely mounted in one spot.

Now, we've also got this little guy and this is a throttle position switch

and it goes somewhere down here on this accelerator pedal. So when it's fully pressed,

it clicks that switch on. Now, this is a little different for each application. So you're gonna have to do a little bit of fabrication here. I'm gonna go ahead and finish this up after the break. We're gonna deal with a computer

and then we're gonna pay Jo Elmore to visit.

Welcome back to trucks. Our Bully Dog diesel upgrade

where the point here is to get just as much power as we can out of a diesel engine. Now, we've already talked you through the installation of propane injection

and nitrous. Then while you were away,

we've brought the computer up to the level of what we're doing.

Here's what we did.

This little gem from Bully Dog is called the dyno

Dominator and it controls everything from injector, timing and pulse to transmission, fell safe.

You can also get these in three different power levels. The first gives you a 40 or 70 horsepower increase with a twist of a knob. The second will give you a 70 or 100 and 10 horsepower increase. And the third,

and that gives you 100 and 10 or a 220 horsepower increase. And of course, that's the one we put on.

The last thing we did was put on some gauges. We know what's going on with that engine. Now, at Bully Dog, you've got a couple of different choices. You can put on traditional gauges and pod like this or something brand new that they just come out with is called the Watchdog.

And this has three functions, exhaust temperature, transmission, temperature and turbo boost. And this thing will warn you if any of those get too high. Of course, it's got the pod mounts there on the A pillar.

Now

we've got our propane tank full.

We've checked for leaks.

It's time to go kick some horsepower.

Heiny.

Ok. You brought your truck back. Did you bring your five bucks? I got my money. Get on the machine. Joe doesn't realize that the first room we're gonna make is with propane. Only

423 horsepower. That's a huge jump over 194 but

not quite enough. Oh,

no, just a minute. Just a minute. How about we make one more? Run double or nothing,

double or nothing. 10 bucks, 10 bucks

easy money. Come on.

Now that we got Joe. What we want,

we're gonna add the Nitro to the mix. Bye bye Joe.

Ok. What's the number?

I don't, I don't believe it. 455 horsepower. I know this thing's working, right? What did you do that truck? No, no, no, no. You need to watch trucks, man. And you owe me 10 bucks.

Ok.

Now I know you guys are going crazy because we just put on over 260 horsepower and over 480 ft pounds of torque and it's something you can do in your driveway. Now, I need to warn you though.

You can't add this kind of power and not expect to blow up that stock transmission. So you're gonna need to upgrade it like this truck's already had done before you put that kind of power on it. Now, for more information on that

or on any of these accessories you may have seen on this truck, check out bully dogs website for more on trucks.

Well, we'll be back after this. Where'd you go, man,

man, if Philly was gonna pull the wall out. That was awesome.

That was awesome, man. We need to take it on the road

when it comes to engines. Well, they pretty much all have pistons, whether they're gasoline or diesel,

but a big difference is in a diesel engine.

You're gonna find small ones with pistons like this or great big ones with a huge pistons like this,

this is out of a submarine. So, what is the deal with the diesel engine?

How come they're so big or so small? How did they develop such power?

What's the deal with diesel fuel? Well, good questions. So, today we're gonna take you inside of a diesel engine.

Show you how it works.

Oh,

it works.

Brought to you by Wyotech.

All right, Dan, what we've got here is a cutaway of a smaller version of the engine that's in that dodge. And that falls somewhere between that big piston and that little piston. I just showed everybody,

take the viewers through a diesel engine. What makes it different? Like the fact that it has no spark plugs? What's going on here? Really? There's not, not a whole lot of difference between the gas and the diesel. If you really look at it, we've got a block, we've got a crank shaft setting down here. We've got the pistons and the rings

and we've got the valves up here in the rocker arms, our push tubes back here and our cam shaft that's running this whole thing up here. So, so I guess the difference is really in the combustion here. What's going on

exactly the combustion chamber. And also we're running about 18 to 1 compression ratio here when we move that piston up, you can see how close it gets to that head

awful close. So all we have is a little dome in that piston that we are gonna spray in between 30,000 P si of diesel fuel in on top of that piston. Of course, when you compress air makes heat.

So that's where you get your spark for your combustion. Exactly. Right. We don't have to have a spark because we've already created the heat and on top of that piston

and then when we checked in with that kind of pressure,

she's gonna light up.

Ok.

Now, diesels are legendary for having that,

that rattling sound. What causes that? The same thing we just talked about, we're talking about between 30,000 P SI G

in on top of that piston, something's gonna make some noise, not only that, but our, our timing over here on our injection pump also has a lot to do with what kind of noise we're making out of there. Ok. Now, diesels are legendary for their power. How do they build such power? Same thing I think with as much pressure as we're putting on top of those pistons, number one and the compression ratio. But also

um just like this little four cylinder, we can jump up to six cylinder like we put in that little in that dodge pickup right there. Add more power. We also can make these things put out more than the factor. We can add some things to this nozzle, change the

pump in the tiny little bit and put out more ponies on it. So, basically if they want more, they just build it bigger.

Ok.

Well, that should give you an idea of what's going on inside of a diesel engine, but there's a lot more than that

and we're gonna show it to you as we continue to show you

how it works. All right. What's the biggest diesel you've ever seen? Probably in the mines, man. You

got the huge trucks, you know, they're going up a little

teeny pickup

because the size of that truck

get in there and wash them with a brush. You know,

today's first truck gear has absolutely nothing to do with something you put on your truck.

It has everything to do with why it is so much fun to be a truck enthusiast.

I bet every single one of you out there have noticed the incredible popularity of diecast replicas,

but it's not just race cars and street cars. Johnny Lightning also has a whole line of trucks. Look at this World War two trucks,

four wheel drives,

classics, street machines.

You can even get monopoly trucks

and look at this, a

Partridge family bus that you can put together yourself. The truth is if you haven't seen this stuff, well, you're really missing out, but the good news is you can find Johnny Lightning stuff at almost any toy store across the nation,

man at 59 El Camino

back in the world of real trucks. One thing is for sure. People love shiny metal, whether it's aluminum or stainless steel or chrome,

it's also a pain in the butt to keep it shiny. And that is where max polishing systems comes in.

They have a complete line of compounds and polishes, different shapes and sizes of buffs all the way down to tiny dye grinders to get into tight little spots. So if you want to keep things shining

and don't want to sacrifice your day or your fingertips to do it.

Give max polishing systems a call.

Well, that's gonna do it for today. I'd like to say a special thank you to Joe Elmore for contributing his $10 to my growing diecast collection.

I don't worry about it. I'll give him the Partridge Family bus. We'll see you later.