AO

Supercharging does allow you to cram more air and fuel into the combustion chamber. True. Does that put more stress on the head gasket? Yes. But it does not put nearly the stress that detonation does.
A properly tuned SCed engine has no more probability than a NA engine. My issue was that for one year, I was not properly tuned.

My bet is that there will be more HG failures if people continue to run their SCer with the stock ignition maps.

Yes, that is one way to do it. Another way is to have your timing set correctly.
Yep... what's your point? Should we talk about 2/6 bearing failures too? I think more than 3.3% of racers have experienced this.
Agreed. Unfortunately, my attempt to mitigate the detonation issue was probably just a little too late. If it happens again, then I think we'll have some better data, but right now, I have no knowledge of the history of the motor. After the rebuild, we will have a clear baseline should it ever happen again.

hacker-pschorr

Too much timing and / or running lean caused detonation. It's that simple. Hell, he could have a bad injector.
Or it could just be a bad head gasket. Jim Page up here in Green Bay has a very large collection of worn out head gaskets that came out of stock (not even high mileage) 928's. They simply failed.

With the Shark Tuner, too much timing is no longer an issue.

Hell, most of the 60 supercharged sharks are pre-shark tuner anyway. They are running just fine. Rick Carter is tracking his supercharged 928, drove it from Ohio to Elkhart Lake and back. His clutch did fail, so I guess that's the fault of the supercharger to?

Tim Murphy's battery died last week on one of his cars. Was that due to the supercharger?

AO

Ernie-
No. The kit was not presented as a pre-production kit. However, I had recently put a smaller pulley on the SCer to increase my RWHP (boost is addictive). DR, to his credit, warned me that he had not tried this setup and that I was venturing into uncharted territory. However, I felt confident the motor could handle it given the number of people that are running much higher levels of boost on their stock cars. Guess I was wrong.

Again, the SCer did not cause the detonation per se. It was the fallacy that using the stock ignition map along with the stock knock sensors would provide a wide-enough safety margin. It did not. With the advent of the STer for the EZK, I was able to design a chip that brought it down to a reasonable safety level (in my opinion).

AO

To your credit Ernie... you sure do know how to stir the pot!

hacker-pschorr

Yes, but he forgot to use this smiley:

JEC_31

I'm in. I'll see your gorilla and raise you a 6 foot tall invisible rabbit:

Increasing the power (by any method, whether force-feeding, increasing displacement, nitrous, etc) on an open-deck motor leads to head gasket failure.




This thread is getting fun already.

ErnestSw

"Enzo"
Seems you're more interested in defending the idea of supercharging than discussing how to make it safer.

Abby Normal

I'm on the casualty list... Hence low compression engine build.

ErnestSw

"Again, the SCer did not cause the detonation per se."
Wouldn't it be more correct to say that it was your decision to ignore the detonation caused by the supercharger that caused the head gasket failure?
My point, by the way, is that you can't JUST "plug and play" a supercharger without some serious risk. It seems that those who already have them would be well advised to use a sharktuner.
BTW, Andrew and Gretch, it seems to me, are at both ends of the spectrum as far as frequency of getting into the boost is concerned.

DonT

+ 1

FlyingDog

I know of 3 broken strokers within 300 miles of me. As far as I know, there are only 5 strokers within that radius.

hacker-pschorr

You must have missed:
Not sure how else to put it?

I'm sorry, mis-information like this drive me nuts. Any car not properly tuned will blow stuff or melt parts.

ErnestSw

Enzo,
Mis-information? Explain please.

RicerSchnitzzle

Superchargers don't kill headgaskets, people do.

hacker-pschorr

This is mis-information:
This is the explanation:
I also mentioned this: