MayF, very interesting comment. I always wondered, that if the spark
had good energy, then why would the gap mean anything, since its going
to ignite the gas. I don't have the experience, and have never seen
this discussion in the hot rod mags, on the hp and torque of the same
engine, with different plug gaps. I guess I may have missed this, or it
is not interesting enough to do an article on.
I do understand that cd, such as in the MSD unit has major advantages,
and firing over a period of the crank of up to 20 degrees also makes
sense to me. There have been articles on this, and of course you seen
the MSD unit on just about everything that races. I have used an MSD
unit for over 20 years, and they have worked very well on all the cars I
have owned.
Did your engineer index the plugs?
Larry
DrMayf@aol.com wrote:
>
> Interesting discussion, this! The last 2 months it has been my pleasure to
> crew on a car driven on the salt flats at Boneville. The car is a 1980 Camaro
> (the one that was in Hot Rod Mag a few months ago) and it has a 296 cubic
> inch engine. The engine has a static compression ratio on the order of 16 or
> 17 to one and uses 118 octane race gasoline. It has a full complement of MSD
> hardware, primarilly an MSD 6AL. This year we laid on a 200hp shot of Nitrous
> at the top ends of the run. Now the interesting part is that the engine
> consultant comes from Conn, the car from Alabama and me from Las Vegas. The
> engine man always takes the plugs out and his comments are generally, "gap is
> not an Issue". He reads the plugs looking for bit of aluminum and clean
> firing. But he generally just pulls the plugs from the box they came in and
> sticks them in. And this is a very knowledgeable engineer who has worked on
> many formula 1 cars, top fuel, funny cars, and Bonneville cars. Oh, this car
> has about 765hp on the juice, so it has the capability to missfire. But, it
> runs very strong at WOT for a full 6 miles! "Gap is not an
> issue"...Interesting thoughts...
>
> mayf
|