StanceWorks: Explosive Dyno Session: K24-Swapped Ferrari Goes Boom!

StanceWorks Video Transcript

Happens you’re lucky that 100 shot of knots didn’t blow the welds on the intake almost had it though Brian O’Connor got lucky with those welds on his intake me not so much Dino session number two ended mildly explosive but thankfully we don’t have to pull apart the block and

Replace any piston rings let me show you how it went last week we finished up some major revisions to the Ferrari’s cooling system we added steam ports to the high points of the radiator hoses where they cross over the front wheels to reach the front of the car we routed those steam ports

To an expansion tank that we’ve mounted under the hood of the 308 which gives us a way to both fill and bleed the system but when we concluded the episode we hadn’t yet actually filled this revised system with water so the first thing on today’s list is to actually fill the

System up and find out just how much easier it is because coolant isn’t allowed on most race tracks we’re going to fill the system with water wetter and distilled water and right out of the gate it was clear this system’s working better than it ever has I wasn’t dealing with any air

Pockets or bubbles the system just filled right up check this out this is how I know this whole system is working if I pour water I think we’re pretty much full at this point if I pour water in fill this up I don’t know if you guys can hear that

But that’s water emptying from The High Point steam hoses into that front expansion tank I’ll move the camera up there and do it again and unfortunately it’s almost impossible to actually hear it but what this tells us is that the system is filling completely with water even the high

Points the air has been pushed out of the system and into our expansion tank and it was abundantly clear almost immediately that this system is going to perform better than it ever has along with everything else that had to get done to prepare the car for the dyno

I got a last minute phone call on Sunday evening from Andrew at animal Auto telling me that he would love it if I could add an extra O2 bung to our exhaust I was told acetone would remove the Sarah coating so that we could weld to

The surface but that did not work at all so I turned to an abrasive wheel to give us some fresh clean stainless steel to work with drilling through the stainless steel on the other hand was a totally different story every small bit I’ve got in this shop is totally dull and getting them

Red hot against this stainless didn’t help either it took me almost a half hour before I was able to put a dent in this stuff but then the step bit worked its magic and I was able to fit our O2 bung right next to our original

By adding a second O2 sensor bung we have a more reliable place to mount the Dino’s O2 sensors so that both it and our ECU can get a reliable reading and with this welded up we got the car loaded up onto the trailer and then over to the dyno

Once again we’re back at Andrew Molina’s shop animal Auto the animal Auto dynapack Hub Dyno is going to offer us a bunch of benefits over a traditional roller Dyno that we could find elsewhere and those benefits begin with the fact that it bolts directly to the hubs of the Ferrari

We’re gonna get rid of a lot of variables with this such as tire diameter rolling resistance tire pressures and more not to mention the fact that if we do hit our power goals we’re also going to eliminate things like Tire spin it’s also a lot safer for the operator

Because we don’t need to strap the car down it’s incapable of moving and last but not least it’s going to give us the most reliable readings so that we can get a good reliable tune on the other end of that process is our haltech Nexus R5 Standalone ECU and PDM

At the hands of Andrew I think he’s gonna work some magic the day was off to a solid start the Ferrari was running great and although the car was bucking on the dinos similarly to what it did last time this time it was expected Andrew tells me it has something to do

With the way that the dyno is loading up in contrast to the way the engine loads it given that we have a VTEC delete Once we have some time on the dyno we can easily tune through this but we hit an issue preventing that if you look closely in the replay you’ll see that gust of air escape from the engine bay and this was before we even had an opportunity to make a single power pole

If you look closely you’ll notice that the end tank of the intercooler has blown wide open but while this would normally halt most Dino days Andrew was willing to let me use his TIG welder and attempt to give it a fix as you can see we’ve got two seams that

Have blown completely open clearly a sign of too much pressure inside of the intercooler there are a lot of potential culprits that could cause this but we’ll touch on those later in the episode so in order to fix this guy we’re gonna need to drill a hole at the end of each

Crack because if we don’t drill out the crack even if we weld over it it will still continue to crack and break again so same thing down here gotta get those drilled clamp this thing back together and uh hope that it holds I we really aren’t entirely sure why it broke we

Weren’t running crazy boost or anything I think we are only in about 15 psi I’m gonna assume that it comes down to maybe an error somewhere in the weld versus backfiring we didn’t have any backfiring or anything like that so fingers crossed it will hold up a second time or we’re

Gonna have to go back to the drawing board so as explained I drilled out each end of the crack to ensure that it wouldn’t crack any further I used a burr to clean up the Weld and give myself a bevel to get some further penetration for this

Repair and then I used Andrew’s welder and did my best to take it back together during this process I also noticed that there was a hairline crack on the bottom weld so this got ground out and re-welded too initially we did have some concern that our intercooler exploded as the result

Of a backfire in an effort to be completely thorough we thought it was worthwhile to pull the valve cover and check the cam timing underneath everything looked exactly as it should and when paired with the data that the haltech R5 gave us we felt reasonably confident that with our

Repaired intercooler end tanks we should be good to get back on the dyno and make some pulls once again there was a lot of effort that lie ahead of us if we want to get those smooth power poles in and it felt most likely that our failure was

The result of a contaminated or poor weld mm-hmm After some tinkering and tuning to smooth everything out it seemed like we were ready to get back to business however the first failure was small compared to the second This time we blew the entire bottom out of the intercooler end tank by every measure this is a catastrophic failure so we turned to the data to see exactly what was going on but with no rise in manifold pressure and no spikes and intake Air temps it

Was clear this was not a backfire we were certain and given that the throttle was open at the time it’s also not something like a stuck blow-off valve so what could possibly be causing this catastrophic issue well I’ll explain that one later in the episode but for

Now because I know most of you will be curious where did we land when this thing did pop well as said we haven’t even made a true power pole yet everything so far is just to get a good Baseline going but at the moment that the intercooler exploded we were seeing

19 PSI of manifold pressure and 530 horsepower at the wheels it doesn’t mean much in the car’s current state but Andrew sounds pretty confident we can hit some crazy power numbers once we get this stuff sorted out given the state of the intercooler I wasn’t about to try fixing it a second

Time clearly there’s a bigger problem at hand so we backed the car out of the shop and decided to get it back to the stanceworks garage where we could dive in and take a closer look at what exactly we’re working with my buddy Blake helped me load the car

Back into the trailer which for the Curious this thing has been amazing it’s so much easier to load than the previous one and it’s a lot easier to get the car strapped down not to mention it makes it so much more simple to carry all of my

Stuff with me I’m really excited to use this more as we start to get this car sorted and out on track back at the shop I was able to get a closer look at the exploded in tank and all of the damage that it caused or should I say a lack thereof the

Intercooler core itself made by CSF held up wonderfully and everything outside of the intercooler received no damage I think we got pretty lucky even the wiring that runs underneath it was unharmed while I get this thing removed if you’ve made it this far into the episode and you’re enjoying it please consider

Subscribing if you haven’t your support helps this channel grow and allows me to keep making episodes like this one on the workbench it’s pretty clear the damage to this intercooler and tank is absolutely chaotic in fact it blew apart 40 inches of weld so what kind of

Pressure would it take to actually do this now after a failure like this one I already know the keyboard Warriors are running those fingers at 100 miles an hour coming out of the woodwork to say things like oh it’s the crappy well it’s bad penetration bad layout set up

Whatever coming up with every reason as to why this thing failed some of you might say it’s X Y or Z but the best part of any of this is we have data logs from our Nexus R5 and we’ve got an awesome community over on the stanceworks Discord I shared my cad

Files that I used to make this with one of the members Rogue who then took that information and did an FEA on it a finite element analysis and he was able to pinpoint exactly why it failed we don’t even have to take a guess let’s check it out

So this is the cad model of my intercooler and its end tanks and you can see the exact design that I built in real life the material I chose to build it with is 095 wall 5052 aluminum give or take 13 gauge or about two millimeters thick

If we take a look at rogue’s finite element analysis you’ll notice that the highest stress areas the parts colored in red happened to be the welds that failed the corners of a pressure vessel are where the highest stress will be so this does make a lot of sense but what

The FEA tells us is what pressure it actually fails at the computer calculated this at the absolute bare minimum rating for 5052 aluminum and it suggests that the failure would occur somewhere around 13.79 PSI the data on the haltex says that this happened at 14 PSI which is

Impressively accurate it’s also a good explanation as to why the second failure which occurred at 19 PSI was so explosive in nature now as a solution to this problem what I’ve decided to do is rebuild our intercooler end tanks in a thicker material this time around I’m going to

Use 3 16 of an inch or nearly five millimeters thick more than twice the thickness of the previous part an FEA on this construction ignoring any potential for problematic welds suggests that we should be able to push the pressure all the way up to 72 psi before we see a failure

So I got everything drawn up and then sent off to send cut send which will revisit here in about a week now there is another thing that I want to touch upon and it’s to answer some questions tons of you have been asking with every video that I posted of this

Car especially after the last Dino episode everyone wants to know what I’m gonna do about the soot above the exhaust and the Damage it’s causing to the vinyl and some of you are asking why only one exhaust pipe is showing that soot well for starters we’ve only got a

Four-cylinder engine and I’m not going to split four cylinders going through a turbo up into a dual exhaust I think that sounds pretty cheesy so what I decided to do was to Route the turbo’s exhaust out of one pipe but to give myself that classic Ferrari dual exhaust

Aesthetic the other pipe serves as the wastegate dump tube which means once we get to pressures that open the wastegate it too will begin to soot the rear of the car it might look like only one side of the exhaust is functioning at the moment but we just haven’t gotten far

Enough along in the tuning process to open up the other side but that does still leave the question what am I gonna do about it some of you have found this to be so unsightly honestly I don’t hate it I love the way that the exhaust itself looks and sits

In the back of the car and I’d rather have some soot on the back end than to have a longer exhaust or a different solution the alpha 155 DTM cars are famous for having some stainless panels above their exhaust to prevent this exact same problem and I could do something similar

To that perhaps coated in the same color as the exhaust to make it match but I’d have to nail the aesthetic because having stainless panels on the back of the car isn’t necessarily something I’m excited about but most importantly just remember that this car is covered in vinyl we can

Easily fix it at any point it’s no big deal for now I’m going to let the back end burn so a somewhat unsuccessful but still successful Dino session that I know is going to yield some peanut gallery comments that say things like man you guys don’t know what you’re doing or is

This car ever going to get done or who knows what stupid comments like that that really just show off those that don’t know what goes into building a completely custom car and all the teething pains you’re going to have when you don’t you know have groundwork laid before you

When you’re really flying by the seat of your pants and trying to figure it out as you go and building a car like this is going to have some hiccups everybody that I know that has a crazy car has spent some serious time on the dyno that’s just how it goes but we’ve

Identified the latest problem we have identified a way to fix it we’re gonna build that new intercooler with 3 16 tanks on it and then as maybe an upgrade further down the line I’m gonna do some measuring somebody pointed out there is a plasma man uh intercooler that’s all Billet end

Tanks water inlet and Outlet the whole thing and it is in the same layout that mine is and it might fit I’m going to do some measuring if it fits I’m gonna buy that and put it in here a few months down the line it

Has like a five to seven week lead time I don’t want to wait that long before we get the car back on the dyno again so future future we’ll do it later but overall I think we’ve got a good path on how we’re going to fix the current problem we’ve definitely identified why

That problem happened which I’m really excited about thanks again to Rogue from the Discord server for chiming in helping out through that and for everybody else to join in the conversation you guys are awesome um it’s amazing that we can analyze and look at problems like this one and truly

Figure out what’s going on and I just take a guess I’m so stoked about that aspect of it it’s really cool so we’ll get this fixed it’s just a small setback I’m still excited the car is killing it otherwise 535 horsepower on 19 PSI before that thing popped and that wasn’t

Even really leaning on it we haven’t even gotten to power poles yet we’re just trying to make it go through the full rev range so anyways I’m rambling you guys got it I’m gonna uh I gotta go edit this episode I’ll catch you guys later this week or next