Everything you might possibly want to know about blowing up your engine through forced induction (FI):
Ok, as a general philosophy here is what I’ve learned in increasing the power levels in the NSX. Got a minute, this might take a while.
Disclaimers
First a few disclaimers. The first is that this is just my experience and understanding and in by no way considered “expert” advice or absolute facts. I also am not advocating any specific system, manufacturer, or approach. These are just my opinions based on multiple experiences and observations.
The very first thing you need to keep in mind is, anytime you start modifying the engine and putting out more power than it was intended to you will decrease the longevity of that engine. Period. Sometimes it is more immediate (blown up engine), sometimes it takes longer, and sometimes you won’t even notice it at all. Think of FI as smoking cigarettes. Will it affect your health? Most people say it will. Do people who smoke cigarettes die very early from lung cancer or emphysema as a direct result of smoking? Sure. But have people lived to 100 who have smoked their entire life? Yes they do. What I’m saying is there is no guarantee that smoking cigarettes will kill you or shorten your life by X number of years. But it does increase those odds. So the only way to avoid a smoking related illness is to not smoke at all. However, people who do not smoke at all still get lung cancer. So it’s not a direct correlation. The same thing with FI. There is no magic HP limit that will guarantee a blown engine. There is no magic equation that will say X HP increase will result in a X decrease in engine life. I get asked that question all the time. If I add X power, how long will my engine last? The simple answer is nobody knows. The only thing you need to know is that you will always increase the percentages of engine failure the more power you add. By how much? Who knows.
The second thing you need to understand is anytime you add parts to a system you increase the percentages of something to fail. As I mentioned before, if you had just one part, like a wheel, then only one thing can go wrong; the wheel. If you add an axel to that wheel, well not only did you add one more part that can fail, but now you have to worry about the interface of the wheel to the axel that can go wrong as well. So adding ONE more part, added TWO more points of failure. If you added a third part, it would add up to SIX more points of failure. Any time you increase the number of parts, you exponentially increase the probability of the system to fail. The other question I get asked all the time is can is can I build a reliable FI setup? When you add a turbo or supercharger, you are only adding multiple parts to the system, so keep in mind what that does to the reliability to the entire system. Again, no direct correlation, just odds and percentages.
Methodology
So first let me start off by talking about my methodology in how I got to my understanding. When I started my big power build, I didn’t realize the crazy path I would eventually end up taking. In fact, in reflection, I certainly did not pick the most effective, nor cost efficient, path towards big power. However, as I mentioned in another thread, everything has a value and the entire process was very entertaining, educational, and unique and I have gained a lot from going through the experience. In the end, the way I ended up building my NSX was to push the limit of the engine until something broke. Then I would go back and fix that part, upgrade it, beef it up and then increase the power some more until the next thing broke. The NSX is like a chain made up multiple links. Power is generated on one end of the chain and delivered to the ground at the other end of the chain. The power is passed down each link on the chain, with each link representing one part. If one of the links were to fail, then the chain no longer works. So a link could be a piston, a rod, an axel, transmission, etc. When I started adding power, I would eventually find which was my weakest link. Sometimes it would be a minor link and I could just replace it. Other times one link breaking would cause multiple links to fail simultaneously (blowing up the engine) and the failure was more catastrophic. In some cases I would have to upgrade the same link multiple times, because what I could handle at a certain power level, it couldn’t at a higher level. For example, at 425 whp, my clutch didn’t hold well so I upgraded it to something that could hold 450 whp. But eventually I upgraded enough parts to get up “chain” to handle to 500+ whp and my clutch wouldn’t hold again. So I had to upgrade that link one more time. I didn’t intend this to be my methodology in upgrading my car. It certainly would have been more effective to just beef up the entire chain all at once, but there are many benefits to the way I did it as well. I won’t get into all of them, but it certainly allowed me to know more about my NSX then I ever thought I would.
Con’t
