Passing along some Darin Morgan info
Your know you're right. Mixture quality has no bearing on timing requirements.
Darin should go and get a flow bench because that will tell him everything he needs to know about internal combustion engines.
I have NEVER said that. What I’m saying is you are dead wrong if you think you can take a chamber that needs let’s just say 35 total and drop it down to 32 or 30 because you have added swirl or some bullshit like that. Ain’t happening.
I had a customer (actually more than one because guys can’t read plugs worth a **** and they listen to their buddy who can’t read a plug either) who are just like you. They get so excited over a number they **** the bed when they think that number doesn’t match what the next it is doing.
So this customer, he was a real smart feller. He had all the answers. We dyno the engine and send it out and I go to the track to actually SEE what this dude is doing. The car runs almost exactly what the dyno says it should.
A month later I get a call from another customer telling that guy lost .2 and they think we did something wrong. So we tell him to bring it in and it goes back on the dyno and sure enough it’s down on power.
After screwing around a bit, the guy running the dyno walks over and says “when we sent this out it had 34 total on it, and now anything over 29 total and it drops power like a rock and from 26 to 29 it makes the same power”? So I say pull a plug and let’s see.
I can see walking across the shop the plug is so hot you can weld with it. Like 3 ranges too hot. Now I have to piss away more time to go pull his file and see WTF it went out with for a plug and sure as ****, not only did he change brand of plugs, he was 3 ranges too hot.
I walk over to the shelf, grab the plugs it went out with and back on the dyno it got almost all the power back and it did it at the 34 total it went out with. To get it all back we had to take fuel out of it because they were using that extra fuel to cool the red hot plugs.
The customer was called and he came in and looked over the numbers. He was glad the power was back, but he said straight to my face there was no F’ing way he was going to run the cold plugs (a they weren’t “cold” they were the CORRECT plug) and jack all that extra timing in it.
So we put everything back the way it was when it came in, made him sign another waiver and sent him down the road.
My point is you can’t claim anyone and everyone is running too much timing because their fuel system is jacked up, and that by the miracle of swirl, twirl, tumble, swumble and any other made up nonsense you won’t reduce total timing any more than what the geometry says it should be.
Seen way too many guys get caught up in this and it’s just silly.
If you tune to a number or for a number you’ll get in trouble. And, I’m not even going to address the FACT that you can have 2, 3 or even more degree variance in what your timing light may say. Add that in and you can get sideways right quick thinking you have to achieve a certain total timing number or you have an issue.
The plug will tell you exactly what it wants.
