Cheap Horsepower

Wait, wait, wait.

Hey, you want more horsepower in your street machine. Simple. Just drop one of these in it. A blown big block with twin carbs.

Nothing to it.

But seriously, this week's show is all about horsepower, cheap tricks.

Oh, and we're not talking about an eighties rock band

buddy. I think that was a record hooking a motor up. Yeah, that was pretty cool. All right. Now, what we're talking about today are new and old budget minded parts and procedures designed to make more horsepower. Now, the first two involved this 383 small block and our trusty DTs engine,

dyno,

we got this mule motor as a short block from GM. Then added a set of dart heads and an aluminum intake manifold.

All right. The first trick we're gonna try is not only cheap but a no brainer to install.

It's a stub stack from K and N. And the whole idea is to increase the air flow in the carburetor by decreasing restrictions

around the choke horn goes on. Like so

now stole a stud.

Ok. After the wing nut,

we can fire this baby up and see what it does

after making runs with and without the air cleaner, we picked up a few horses but it seems like the stub stack would get better results at the crack with more incoming air.

Next many people swear that the cheapest power comes right out of a bottle

spray, giggle gas, squeeze, whatever you want to call it, it works.

And it's relatively cheap with single shot kits starting at about $400. Now, we picked up this slightly used Nitrous Express Hitman kit for right at 200. Now it'll fit all 4150 style intake manifolds. And the thing I like about it is most nitrous plate systems use a spray bar, but this kit uses a bill

plate that has holes drilled in it to introduce the nitrous and fuel to the intake manifold. Plus it comes with jets that range from 50 to 200 shot. Well, first of all, nitrous oxide itself is not combustible. It just helps fuel burn faster because of the oxygen content. How much we'll just check this out

the air you breathe is 72 parts nitrogen, 23 parts oxygen,

the oxygen content of nitrous oxide,

50%

per cubic foot.

That's some good info. Joe

higher octane gasoline burns slower than lower octane gasoline, which is critical in a nitrous environment.

So you need to step up the premium fuel for a 50 to 100 and 50 shot of nitrous. Anything over that requires race fuel.

Now, they may call it laughing gas, but it's actually a liquid before it comes out of the bottle

and it creates a lot more cylinder pressure and stress on the rotating assembly. So it's a good idea to run a forged piston and a racing application, heavier duty connecting rod, even a forged crank shaft.

Ok. What are the bottom line benefits for a weekend drag racer?

Generally speaking, if your car runs 12 to 13 2nd ETS a

100 horsepower shot of spray is good for a whole second off your time.

Well,

time for us to get busy and get to work on this kit.

Now, in the car, this nitrous bottle would probably be installed in the trunk in a safe place with this

nozzle facing forward. Of course, the other end will go to our nitrous solenoid once we get it hooked up,

don't forget on your plate to make sure your holes on your spray bar are pointing down into the engine. Very good point. I gotta ask you a question.

What's your reaction when you hear those kids call this stuff? Nas.

Oh man, I just wanna,

I can't say it on camera but

I just think you could. But now the car can go back on

next. The 50 horse nitrous jet goes in place, followed by the blue nitrous solenoid.

Now the fuel is so annoyed and I don't know about you, buddy, but I like the way they got the inlets and outlets marked.

Yeah, it makes a lot easier. Of course, we didn't need that. We

knew where they were.

Yeah.

All right. Now, the

throttle activation switch.

Now we're talking.

Yeah,

they had a little wiring work to finish up the installation

and that's that. I

had a customer come by one day and he says, hey, man, I put nitrous on my motor. You want to check it out, open up the hood and it looked like this. It looked like he just threw all the wires on to and said, hey, how you like it?

So it looks real good

man. At 475 horsepower, that 50 shot of Nitrous gave us 57 more torque is 498 ft pounds, which is an increase of almost 90.

Well, now that the motor is cooled off a little bit, we're gonna turn our attention to something a lot of people ignore with their first nitrous experience and that's the spark plugs.

After your first blast down the track. You wanna check each one for signs of detonation

and that would be little tiny black and green dots around the electrode.

Ours look pretty good so we can put them back and make another run.

Our second run on the dyno

is with jets good for 100 horsepower,

all a set of 150 horse jets

and taking out more timing before the final run.

Now we're up to 560 horsepower and 625 ft pounds of torque. And we're gonna go ahead and quit while we're ahead. See, we've been conservative on the timing because we want to keep this motor around for more tech later on. Plus our pistons are hyper eutectic, not forged anyway, though. 100 40 horsepower of a baseline 216 ft pounds of torque.

It's easy to see why a lot of people swear that the best bargain in power is good old Nitrous, whether it's Nitrous Express or

nos

right. Oh, here we go with the dirty words again.

I'm not gonna make any more comments on that word. Ok.

We're back with more cheap horsepower tricks. Now, here's one that most of you do it yourself guys can accomplish over a weekend. The best part, it only cost you about 75 bucks. Now, as most of you know, an engine is nothing more than a glorified air pump

with this intake manifold, the more air you can move through it

along with the additional fuel, you can add

the more horsepower the motor's gonna generate. Even though

if you don't have a professional porting booth, you can still do a professional porting job at home in your garage. All it takes is a little bit of patience and a few simple tools. Plus you won't be spending the 200 to $250 of professional engine shop charges

to show you how it's done. We're using a Victor Junior small block Chevy intake manifold from Edelbrock. And the first thing we need to do is clean the services using a little lacquer thinner,

cleaning the intake flame just gets rid of any dirt or oil.

It's a chicken. Unless you wanna look like a cartoon character, you're gonna need a pair of gloves for this.

Now, we recommend you get some of this di

chem machinist layout fluid and brush it all around the ports of the manifold after it dries, which only takes a couple of minutes. You can lay your gasket down and either tape it or silicone it in place.

Now, using a metal scribe or even a pick, scribe the intake around the edge of the gasket.

All right. Now we can go ahead and remove the gasket. Now, check out how the dyke

allows for a clear and precise scribe mark into the aluminum. Now, before we get started on the porting, here's a little tip. I wanna share with you if you don't want aluminum shavings all over your garage, go ahead and put your shop back to use. Now, I made this little contraption using a piece of sheet metal and exhaust tubing that bolts to the top of the intake and sucks up all the aluminum shavings.

Now, you wanna use a variable speed dremel tool or a die grinder with a regulator attached to it.

That way you can control the speed of the bur

and prevent it from jumping around and possibly damaging the runners. Now, I'm using a Mac code die grinder with the regulator that has a gauge attached to it.

The bird we're gonna use is a cylindrical ball

nose bird. But first we want to spray the runners down with WD 40 to keep the heat generated by the pouring down

during the porting. You want to let the bird do the work with just a little pressure on the grinder.

Also to get that additional flow, you only need to go in about an inch and a half. Although it won't hurt to go a little deeper

after every couple of minutes of porting, make sure to reapply the WD 40.

When you get really close to your scribe marks, go ahead and swap out the bur for a 40 grit cartridge roll. Now, this will allow you to smooth out the roughness that the bur left in the runner when you're done with the 40 grit, move on to 100 grit and that'll allow you to give the runner a really smooth finish.

Well, that's it for the grinder and the tools. Now it's time to thoroughly clean out the intake manifold and please take your time. The last thing you want are a bunch of aluminum shavings left in this thing that can get down into your engine.

Now, if you don't have a parts washer at home, you can get this done with a pressure washer or even a garden hose and to break up the WD 40 good old brake cleaner does the trick after getting it cleaned. Go ahead and spray it out with air or let it air dry.

All right. Once again, you're gonna need an aluminum bur

and some dy

CM you can pick up at your local industrial supply house plus a variable speed grinder and some cartridge rolls you can get at your local home improvement store. Now, this is definitely an easy project. As long as you take your time, plus you get the benefits of more airflow, more power and the pride and knowing you did it yourself. Now up next, Joe's got another trick up his sleeve that's gonna put a lot more power to the wheels of A Z six B.

Hey, we're back in action and still on the hunt for more horsepower that won't cost you an arm and a leg. Now, by the way, this is where we keep all of our engines for upcoming projects. Now, carbureted engines have always been good candidates for power ADDers and they'll always be around for racers and hot rodders alike. But now let's take a look at how to make more power out of a more modern push rod engine.

In 1997 GM introduced the LS One. Now they started this design from a clean sheet of paper and what they ended up with

was a 5.7 L small block that made 350 horsepower at the fly wheel. Now you could first find them in vets and that's what started a new age of high performance, high tech horsepower.

We borrowed this LS seven powered Z six that belongs to a buddy of ours gathered extreme auto accessories in Memphis

and we thought this little black beauty would be a perfect candidate for one of the most popular and

easy to use power enhancers for late models. The power programmer. Now this one from Hypertech is a max energy for the LX seven.

They claim power gains of up to 34 horsepower, 35 ft pounds of torque. But first we gotta get it up on the dyno Jet for a baseline.

The new car is B

stock of course

and we'll start the run at 2000 RPM and click it at seven grand.

Ok. Here we go.

Ok. The car made 439 horsepower at the rear wheels which is pretty much on the money factor in the engine, the chassis dyno

differences.

Ok. Time to plug the hypertech max energy unit into the port.

Well, now gotta close the door,

make sure all the accessories are off. That might be drawing power. Oh,

I don't think we'll need a radar detector for this.

Next, we can plug in the programmer

and follow the prompts.

Now, in addition to maximizing power and fuel economy

it's got features that let you raise the top speed limiter. Correct. The speedo and odometer for bigger tire sizes and you can update it on the internet. A few minutes later, the programmer has done its job

and we're ready to see what kind of job it does at pumping up the power.

All right. Check this out with the Hypertech tune. We made 460 horsepower. Now, it's a peak to peak difference of 21. Now, our max gain was up here at 7000 RPM that came in at 34 horsepower.

Too bad. We don't have time to check the fuel economy benefits of the program or that's important to everybody these days. Now they sell for 379 and for 50 bucks less you can get this Econ version, got the same power and fuel economy tuning without all the extras. Well, now it's time to crunch some numbers and see how much money we've spent. I'll have the grand total for you in just a minute.

Ok. Well, I guess I didn't need remedial math in school after all. With this thing,

we just tried a handful of performance components and one procedure in hopes of a good payoff without a big payout. Now, the first thing we tried was this $35 KNN stub stack on the car,

no appreciable results on the engine dyno.

But guys tell us these things are good with the incoming air out on the street and strip.

Then with that second hand Nitrous express kit we bought for 200 bucks.

We made 100 and 40 horsepower over stock

easily the most power for the dollar. But that's only power that's available in occasional doses.

The intake port matching might show you increases air flow into any engine. And this allows you to add more fuel to match that air labor intensive but materials only cost $75. Well, finally, the hypertech Max Energy tuner produced 21 more horses than a new 06. Now that's full time power plus reportedly more fuel economy

cost $379 for a grand total of 689. Not too shabby

here on horsepower, we show you the basic steps of power producing projects, but there's only so much time available in each week's show. So here's a way you can learn all those fine points, step by step.

Power building videos is a DVD series with sets that cover subjects like super chargers, nitrous carburetors and rotating assemblies. It's hosted by race engine builder Aaron Johnson and he goes into detail covering everything you need to know about all kinds of applications.

It's all covered in plain English with special tips and insight from Aaron. Now, the power building DVD sets will cost you about 30 bucks.

We get emails every once in a while from guys who wanna know do any of today's additives really work well, we decided to put one to the test on our chassis

dyno

and the one we're going to try is PX three's new extreme oil booster.

Now, according to their test is yielding horsepower increases up to 5%.

We baselined a 6.1 hemi

with conventional oil. We got 358 horsepower at 5400 RPM

and 365 ft pounds of torque at 4600 RPM.

Then we added the PX three synthetic oil booster.

What the heck?

Well, the numbers speak for themselves. 367 horsepower at 5700 RPM, s3 179 ft pounds of torque at 4600 RPM.

Well, they say that

dyno doesn't lie. That's right.

Of course, they recommend that you add a bottle every other oil change. We don't have time, of course to check out the other benefits. But hey, nine horsepower, 14 ft pounds of torque, I'll take that any day.

Finally, a hot part that fits in perfect in what we've been doing today in the search of more horsepower and performance. Now, a while back, we saw some impressive results on the engine dyno

using a Fitch fuel catalyst,

but they also make these drop in pellets that improve fuel economy emissions and horsepower. Now they use a special metal alloy that refines fuel to its factory fresh state. You can get a box of eight and this installation tool for a little less than 100 and 20 bucks. Well, that's it for the show today. We hope to see you next time.