V2Rocket

once again, the validity of the phenolics will be confirmed or debunked in a few days regardless. the purpose of this thread was to gauge interest in them if my testing shows that they work.

i have a good feeling that they will work out. obviously they arent going to give 20hp or anything but it might be a small appreciable gain that can be compounded on with a chip, cam etc.

ideola, i just went through that thread on 924board and saw all of bruni's statements. one of his first posts really caught my eye though. he said something like "what kind of temperature loss would you expect to see just by putting an aluminum pipe on the front of your car with no fins or anything". i would like to submit that most oem power steering coolers i have seen (including the 944) have been just that, a series of twisted aluminum pipes. and PS fluid gets much hotter than the intake air ever will, and in some cases is subjected to upwards of 1000psi pressure.

in my testing i will be monitoring ambient temperature and temperature in the manifold. i believe runner #2 would be a good spot for the runner test, another could be in the plenum, and a third could be in the air filter box for ambient.

ideola

The power steering cooler is a llllooonnnggg tube, a matrix really, and the fluid is traveling much more slowly through that than charge air through an induction system, especially on a forced induction setup, so probably not a good basis for comparison. As I said, though, I'm not an engineer.

How do you plan to record the results during testing?

whalebird

Good luck V2. Cool thinking(no pun intended). Most increases in HP come at a cost... there is always a trade off. There are several HP gains that are free and those are the ones that make it all come together. Temperature control is a great freeebeee.

GTSilver944

Interesting idea. Even though there might not that great of a power increase for NA's, it should be a good way to reduce IAT's (and reduce the likelihood of knock) for your SC project.

V2Rocket

thats where it all started....

TRP951

interested

V2Rocket

if i have enough time i might be able to get the temperature testing tomorrow!

Mark944na86

Regardless of what temps you read, the skeptics won't be satisfied until there is some direct evidence it translates into real performance gains. Drive the car until operating temp, and dyno. Wait until it cools down, put in the spacer, drive the car until operating temp, and dyno again. End of all argument.

ritzblitz

Yea dyno numbers for sure.

Potomac-Greg

I used to have this debate on a forum for owners of the C32 AMG. It has a supercharged V6 (350HP) and there were a few performance mods out there (pulley, phenolic spacer, heat exchanger) and I could never get anyone to do a basic, legitimate test of a single modification in controlled conditions. You end up with seat-of-the-pants claims by people who had already plunked down the money; or actual data but based on multiple modifications and faulty test conditions.

Fishey

Story time.

Long ago I was helping to develop aftermarket parts for Volvo's. The owner of the company "QuickBrickMotorsports" was like I use to have a phenolic spacer on my Honda Delsol and I thought it made a difference. So we did some research and built a test sample to run on our testbed Volvo 850R. Now, we didn't have any perfect way to do it so we decided we would dyno the car on 3 pulls and measure EGT, IAT (as close as we could with sensor in the runner) and then of course AFR. So anways the car was dead stock and we pulled 205whp on the first pull, 204whp on the second and 201whp on the third. So we pulled the car off the dyno and quickly as possible installed the "Spacer". We got it back on the dyno in almost exactly the same conditions as before. We did the pulls and the first Dyno was 190whp, 2nd 189whp and then 3rd was 190whp. We were kind of left scratching our heads like WTF^ how did we lose so much HP? Well, we saw EGT's rise, AFR's lean out and IAT reduce. Again left scratching our heads. Then we noticed what you will find the truth to be in every single situation of a spacer. We had totally screwed up the injector angle with our flat gasket and were spraying a nice pattern all over the intake ports of the head. So needless to say we ended up putting a slope on the gasket to change injector angle (even from what it was stock) and gained 2whp but as you added modifications you would gain more HP up to about 5whp by 260whp. However, we never noticed a single change in IAT from the spacer after fixing the angle problem. As a matter of fact we are convinced we only gained power because of the angle change of the injector compared to stock.

ritzblitz

Very interesting Fishey. I wonder if this applies for 944 intake manifolds as well.

ideola

@Fishy
Very interesting anecdote, and this is exactly why I'm interested in understanding and defining a set of test criteria. Adding a spacer may have impact on more than just IAT, and this anecdote is a perfect illustration.

@Ritz
In the case of the 924/931, the injector angle wouldn't be impacted because it is directly in the head, after the intake manifold.

@All
I still want to know what the proposed method of measuring and recording IAT's will be. On the 2.0L cars, there's no easy way to record something like this. On one of my cars, I have an S1 931 motor / ignition, but I have an S2 intake and throttle setup. The S2 cars had an IAT that was used to interface with the DITC (digital ignition & timing control). The sensor is still there (to plug the port), but it's not connected. I could conceivably pull readings from it, but how in the world to record them? My car has the old CIS system, no EFI or anything to interface with for doing the data capture.

I sure hope the plan isn't to visually monitor a gauge. It might be barely adequate on an NA, but on a forced induction motor, I would expect the IATs to fluctuate wildly depending upon the amount of on-boost driving. This is why a very specific and repeatable test methodology needs to be established. A dyno would be great, of course, but even driving on the street could suffice IF one could define a route where the driving conditions, traffic and ambient temp were all within some reasonable bounds.

V2Rocket

this is interesting.

any idea what the angle was of the injector relative to the head? also how thick was the spacer?

944Ross

Optimum angle for power on a fully-warmed engine is not likely to meet OEM emissions requirements, and may not be streetable when cold. Lots of voodoo involved, also manufacturiong compromises.