Scholastic Engine Builders Challenge

It happens. Now young gearhead graduates fight to the finish and horsepower scholastic engine builder challenge. Two teams battling it out for big power on a budget. Who's got the edge, who's got the prize winning power on horsepower?

Hey, welcome to a special edition of horsepower. You bet it is. Imagine you and your team member have a brand new ZZ four short block from GM performance parts and

a $5000 parts budget from summit racing. Now, your mission is to build the most powerful pump gas naturally aspirated motor you can

and beat the other team,

the showdown. Well, it takes place here in the dyno Cell. Now each team will be able to make a test run and then do a little bit of tuning. After that. They each get three pulls and then the horsepower and torque averages are added up and we get to determine a winner

right now. Let's meet the two teams competing in horsepower scholastic engine builder challenge

from the wild

tech campus in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, the East team. Recent grads, King Balis

and Randy Collins, their instructor Paul dominant

from the wild

tech campus in Sacramento, California, the West team, Trevor Joyner and Jeremy Matson, their instructor, Nate Sanzo,

each contender successfully completed high performance power train education at Wild

Tech. And they've all learned how to blueprint, build and test engines at their respective schools. Awesome instructors, great curriculum. Uh, got to mess around with a lot of real cool stuff over there.

Um Build lots of engines, tuning a little bit of everything and

they really prepare you for, you know, just doing things like this. Now they get a chance to use their training in a one of a kind shootout

knowing that this is the first one between the two schools.

It would just be an honor to be able to take away or take home that trophy back to our campus.

I think they know what they need to do

and, uh, how to get it done, but I'll be there in case they have any questions. I would love to be an engine builder for a race team, um,

drag racing or circle track. I'm a big fan of both. So that would be just amazing if I can get into that. I would love to build street rods, uh, especially blown street rods.

Uh, I like the way that they look anything from 28 on up.

Uh Even the muscle cars, I'm really into building muscle cars as well. Both of them have an incredible attention to detail, which was definitely a, a first and foremost thing, you know. Uh, we want, we wanted to have somebody that really could pay attention to what they were doing as they were doing it in the time frame that we had

after a quick tour of the Power Block Tech Center and a chance to meet some of the TV hosts. It was time for a quick briefing.

By this time you've read all the rules, I guess you've, uh,

got your strategies all together and ordered your parts from Summit. So uh we ought to be about ready to roll. Yeah. Now one thing we want you guys to remember, it's not a contest of speed. It's to see who can make the most horsepower and the most torque without any power ADDers

tomorrow. Eight hours to do all your assembly the following day, we're doing our runs and seeing who comes out on top.

Any questions.

Yeah. Uh what kind of roller instructors gonna be playing in all this good question? Uh They can

give you all the advice that they want to. Uh they can yell at you but they can't touch any of the parts. You guys are getting your hands dirty.

Uh

Speaking of parts, I think they're all in now. So uh let's go in the horsepower shop and start unpacking

Summit racing provided the parts for each team's engine combination. Not only do they have a massive inventory and fast delivery,

they got a tech support that made order and for these guys a lot easier

they really seem to have a very solid knowledge of what they were doing. They, they had the ideas up front.

They just knew exactly what they were doing where they were headed with it.

Remember that feeling you got when you were like a little kid and you go to a toy store,

we had to do a little finagling in the end to get those little pieces to,

to meet under the budget. but it ended up working

16

Rockers

and that's her car. Pick that out.

A little bit of bling doesn't hurt. Well, basically the cylinder heads we chose to go with were the uh dark pro ones. They have uh 215 cc intake runners, um 64 cc combustion chambers.

Uh We think these uh heads are gonna be

about where we need them for this application.

The first heads we were actually gonna run with was actually the dark

heads and

with the research that we were doing,

they had the uh 215 runners

and we found out that

that was way too big for this application. We're actually running uh

195 runners a good two hours on each head or so for clean up time and you're gonna handle that, right.

Yeah,

the intake we chose was uh designed to specifically work with the pro one heads. So the combination is good.

Doesn't take much clean up on those though. Um Just very small work.

Uh just uh clean up a few little areas in there and it should flow very well

for an intake manifold. The Blairsville Red team chose an Edelbrock performer R pe M.

If torque is a factor, this manifold is pretty much a way to go.

Um

As far as what we can do to improve on what's already there. It's not a whole lot. Um We are gonna use a one inch carburetor spacer on it.

So what we're gonna do is smooth out this valley right here. Um Since we're gonna increase that common plenary and move the carburetor up, of course, you have to conserve wherever you can and obviously you didn't break the bike on these uh valve covers. This, this is where you save money, right?

Those are uh $19 from summit uh including the flames and everything.

The East Blairsville team has their parts package just about ready

and so does the West Sacramento team.

Next. They've got to put it all together for the decisive test of torque and of course horsepower.

Welcome back to horsepower scholastic engine builders challenge. Now, our two Wyotech teams have their $5000 worth of parts from summit racing. Yeah. Now they're gonna use them to build up the short blocks and hopefully make some winning horsepower and torque numbers.

Blairsville

red team. You guys ready. We're good to go

Sacramento blue team. You guys ready?

Well, gentlemen, start assembling your engines.

Go for it.

Beautiful

on the blue team side, Jeremy goes to work on the short block while Trevor radiuses the intake and manifold ports.

So I'm trying to radius out

the uh dividers here just a little bit to help increase the flow through here. There's a few flat spots and a couple of sharp edges that will disrupt the flow across the intake.

How much? 16 of an inch or

so. Yeah.

So it's

about

probably halfway down just to make sure that

three

things right in

there.

Next Randy on the red team begins what will be hours of hoarding and polishing

while gene starts gasket matching the intake, everything he can do to just open it up and make air and fuel flow better is three horsepower.

So we're just taking advantage of that and uh getting everything out of this, we can get

after a little touch up on the intake and cylinder heads.

Trevor installs the Denz spark plugs that both teams are using.

Then it was onto the hydraulic roller cam shaft.

Beautiful.

There we go.

Meanwhile, red team Randy's hands are getting pretty numb as he nears the end of extensive po Polish work.

I think it'll pay off. I mean, we, we, we've done this stuff before in class and it, it really makes a difference on, on a low bench.

So

I, I think it's gonna pay off. Looks like Trevor and Jeremy got their pulley set up to fit

and their coach thinks it's worth the effort. And with a loosening of a couple of simple bolts, you can roll the cam from 10 degrees, advance to 10 degrees retarded and anywhere in between

for the dining room that gives us the ability to be able to adjust cam timing really easy.

The other great benefit from this system is the fact that it is very, very lightweight,

very slowly.

Ok.

You ok with that, sir,

six pack,

six

pack sounds good to me. Ok.

It's a solid roller lifter. So there's a hydraulic

um we chose this one because we can get a little bit more RPM out of it and it's a much lighter set up than what they have.

We chose what we did

to keep the velocity up because when you get velocity, you know,

you're gonna get more air and fuel because it's moving faster, it's gonna pull more stuff behind it. It's gonna cram it all in the cylinders faster. We're gonna be able to keep it there.

Ideally, you'd like for the roller to be set directly over the top of the valve

and all the rest of them seem to do. Well, there's one that is just a hair touch off of. Perfect,

but I think we can live with a touch off. Perfect.

Yeah, if we have to, if we have to.

Ok. The bills are finished and it's almost time for the big moment of truth.

Beautiful

soon we'll know whether it's wild

tech. Red team from the east

or blue team from the West

that makes winning power at horsepower's scholastic engine builder challenge.

All right, you guys have all met Dan from DTs. He'll be sitting behind the console running both your engines. Dan, why don't you give us the rundown of the game plan?

Ok. What we'll do is we'll start your engine, like you said, initial timing, do 30 minutes of a break in period,

Then there'll be three back to back, warm up pools and you'll have 30 minutes after that to do whatever tuning you wanna do on the engine. And then after the 30 minutes, there'll be three competition pools from 3000 to 6500

RPM, three back to back pools and then we'll average

the overall data of all three pools to add them together and that'll be your final score.

Any questions?

All right. Well, red team, you guys finish first. Uh, you'll go first. All right. Is that ok

for you

guys?

Let's do it.

The wild to

Blairsville. Red team goes first about to see how the countless hours of blueprinting porting polishing

and finally engine building pay off in real power

by the time they dropped on their MS D distributor and wires poured in the oil and prime the system.

Pressure was building in more ways than one. Is there? Pressure yet

the moment of truth

getting excited now,

go for it. Yeah.

Well, it's the worst possible nightmare. For the red team,

man.

It's not even trying.

You would expect to see a backfire or something.

Well, depending on where they're at.

Oh, they got, they got it. They got Spa

God. It's making me nervous.

What are you nervous about?

They

are, they're rolling it backwards.

They're going the wrong way.

Stop being nervous. I just gotta get the timing right. And she'll start up.

Finally. It was time for some official intervention.

It smells a little bit like gas. Now,

that's just as

we swap out Motors,

let the other team go first while you guys try to figure things out and then, uh, give you another shot. Ok.

All right. Let's do that.

So, after a quick swap, the blue team from the West rolled in their high revving small block for its first time firing.

I

know.

Ready,

lay down,

hold it down.

They got us started. We're ready for this thing.

We'll get, it

wasn't worried before. Wasn't nervous before and guess what?

Still not.

Go ahead and pull.

Oh,

right here.

That's it.

That one backed off, it backed off. It's all

backed up

here.

We need to go through it and tighten all the locks, every single lock.

Well, Trevor Jeremy used their 30 minutes of tuning time. Gene and Randy tried to solve a mystery. Everything else is good. We, we readjusted the valves. I mean, if it doesn't start, I'm gonna check, impression on it.

Ok. We're good.

This is the big moment for Trevor and Jeremy. Their competition.

Dyno

runs the ones that really count.

Made it good job.

They look pretty heavy over there, so,

probably not a good sign for us, but we'll see.

Look at him.

Thank

you.

How are you feeling now?

I'm feeling a lot better now.

Real, real good now. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate

it. Good luck.

Good luck, man. I hope you get it running

this time. The red team's motor has to run

and nobody feels the heat like Randy.

Ah. All right, Lisa started this time. Just give it some gas and start it up.

That was her starter.

You too much

got

very hard. Go back.

All right. Do it.

Can we get a half hour to 2.5 for that and then we run it right. Sounds good.

I don't know.

It was

test run. Results are good, but the red team decides to bump the timing up a bit for the final decisive pull right there.

That's it.

See, I, I think this is pretty cool. We just put one degree of timing in it

and I mean, that, that's a decent amount of difference.

All right.

Good job.

Hey,

that's a good engine,

man. It sounded real strong.

Well, the

dyno runs are a done deal and we didn't even have to pick up a wrench that's a switch and I guess it's time to reveal the winners of the $15,000 scholarship trophy and bragging rights, right. Not quite make sure you sit back and relax because the big announcement is coming up right after the break.

That sucks.

And here it is the announcement of our first annual horsepower Scholastic engine Builder challenge. And man, I gotta say all you guys are winners in our book, your professionalism this week was amazing. And

we're happy to offer a scholarship that will help more guys like you pursue an education at Wild Tech.

Now, once again, after three competition pulls, we added up the average horsepower and torque numbers divided them by three, then added them together for a final score.

The winning team had an average horsepower of 3 98.77. Average torque was 3 63.15 for a combined score of 7 61.92.

And they are the team

in red from Blairsville, Pennsylvania.

Thank you.

Thanks

Jill.

It, it turned out exactly how I wanted, you know, I wanted to see both engines just basically were under their full potential and just see what these things can do. And that's exactly what we got. I mean, both of them, I mean,

they did what we wanted them to do

and we got fair results and I'm, I'm happy with it

but to come out with the numbers that we did

and the time we did and the

absolutely no tuning time basically, I think we did really well for this and I congratulate you guys. I did a good job.

I said thank you for allowing us to do this. I really appreciate it.

Now, to present this beautiful trophy. Here's N

from Summit Racing.

It makes me very happy to present this trophy to you. Gentlemen. Congratulations, did a great job.

Thank you very

much.

And of course, from horsepower TV, this check for 15 grand to the Wild Tech Foundation earmarked for their campus.

And we wanna give our thanks to the engine builders and their instructors.

We had a blast this whole week and we'll see you guys next week.