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That's impressive, both in the scams attempted and in the diagnosis of said scams.
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Jul 29, 2016 22:54
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I'm not creating a quora account. Any chance you can quote it here?
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Jul 29, 2016 23:08
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Didn't know you had to be signed up. Here you go: > How did you foil/dodge someone else's attempt to cheat or deceive you? Eric Bradley: I spent about a year and a half doing just that. Here in California we have what is known as an automotive lemon law. Based upon how many service visits, time out of service, and severity of the failure, a manufacturer will have to repurchase your vehicle for the full value of the vehicle from the date and mileage of the first documented failure. It's a great way to keep manufacturers and the franchised dealers honest and treat your vehicle professionally. I've had to use this myself for a brand new car where the air conditioning failed 5 times in the first year, a a motorcycle that had a dangerous shifting failure and spent 2 months over 6 visits to the dealer. But it also leaves a loophole for crooks. I worked as a technician at a luxury car dealer in beautiful Glendale California. There is a large contingency of a population whose cultural norms encourage deceit in this area, and it made for some interesting days in this unique area. In automotive you deal with faults on the 4 C'S, complaint confirmation cause and correction. In this area there was an extra step after cause to determine if it was failure or outside influence. The idea was they would damage the vehicle within the first week of ownership, then repeat occasionally over the next 4 years, and instead if trading it in or turning in their lease, they sue and get their full money back to use on another new car. My first repair was on a $130k vehicle that someone had put salt water only in the 4 connectors at the cam advance solenoids. This was confirmed as they used so much that there were still undiluted crystals of pure table salt in the bottom of the connector. We had dozens of power steering failures that were a result of pouring metal filings from brake rotors from a brake lathe at some local corner shop into the fluid reserviour. Testing confirmed the same alloy was not used anywhere in the vehicle or during its manufacture. The next power steering failure was to crank the steering wheel to the lock and run the engine at redline until the fluid overheated and blew apart the lines, rack seals, or pump. When parts that survive Dubai heat melt away like butter in Glendale you have your first clue. But checking freeze frame data on the fault codes and seeing the engine rpm and steering angle are written proof. We had a fun one where a local shop was using a stun gun on the engine control unit casing. The manufacturer figured out by the burn marks inside the heavy metal case that they systematically did it to different places until they found the spot that set a check engine light but did not disable the car. All the cars after that came in with the burn mark on the exact same place. Here's a balsy one.. a car came in with almost every bushing and ball joint destroyed on the suspension and all 4 air struts blown out. We replaced it all under warranty, then it came back in 2 weeks later with the same problem. Thankfully we take copious digital photos of suspect cars before, during, and after repairs. The damaged "new" suspension had years of heavy corrosion, tooling marks, and oh... the manufacture date on the parts was 4 years older than the dates in the parts photographed at the end of the previous repair. They were swapping in old parts and eBaying the new ones. Normally a shop gets a suspect car once a year and you have to go order a special gel paint marker that handles engine heat, in order to mark all accesible connectors so you can see if the dried gell cracked when someone disconnects something. We ordered them regularly in cases at that dealer. It's fine to show the stored data that the signal failed when the car was stationary with the hood open when the failure started, but it's the nail on the coffin when you can show that a connector was physically removed. The best one though was a car that suposedly spun out without warning on the freeway, and the owner was screaming at anyone who was in earshot about how we were crooks and the car almost killed him. Once it was pushed up on the rack, the problem was obvious, the drive shaft had twisted in half in the middle of the tube like play-do. Now this was the most base model of the brand offered in this country at the time, with enough engine power to get dropped by a Toyota Corolla, not some performance spec monster. Most drive shafts break at the ends where a joint fails due to extreme wear, torque, articulation, or weld failure. You can find plenty of photos of drive shafts twisted up like a pretzel but they are from tractor trailers with engines larger than this car or dragsters designed to live life 1/4 mile at a time. Anywhoo... we did our due diligence and pulled apart the transmission and differential, checked all the ABS system functions, etc and there was nothing wrong, except the front wheel speed read 0mph during the failure. What we did find was about 4mm of dark grey epoxy paint embedded deep into the rear tires in lines along the circumference of the tread like racing stripes, and the foam absorber in the front bumper was crushed, but the plastic bumper skin was intact. The owner stuck the car against a wall in a shop with a mattress in between the bumper and wall, turned off the traction control, and did a burnout on the slick epoxy painted floor until the tires heated up and got sticky about the same time as the slick paint wore through to nice grippy concrete. The instant traction at high rpm snapped the drive shaft off. And this stuff happened every day. A good tech spends years of training, ungodly amounts of money on tools, and understands how vehicles work and fail. At a dealership, they have experience in a single brand making them experts on each model and variation so they have intimate knowledge on how and where these specific vehicles fail. That also means we can spot when something has gone well outside that norm. On top of that, we have the resources of a major multi billion dollar global manufacturer to dig further when needed. CSI eat your heart out.
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Jul 29, 2016 23:39
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IOwnCalculus posted:Also, what era of the '70s are you talking about for "similar sized V8"? A quick glance at Wikipedia seems to claim 210hp SAE gross from the most hopped up factory version, which maybe put it on par with a mid-trim Ford 289 or Chevy 327. My granny-spec '71 Nova sedan claimed 200hp from its 307 V8. One inch less displacement, similar power to the midrange tune on a Hornet 20 years before. The Hudson was ahead of its time with that engine, unibody, etc. No wonder they dominated NASCAR until the "modern" V8s (SBC, Ford Y-block) came out -- 40 of 48 AAA races in 1952, 27 of 34 NASCAR Grand National races in 1952, 22 of 37 in 1953, and 17 of 37 in 1954. Throatwarbler posted:I think the old engines had very archaic head and valve designs that could not possibly flow as much air as modern engines, so you could give it a modern DOHC head but then what would it have in common with the old engine after that. Yeah, I know at best it'd kinda look like the old engine and have the same mounts. You'd also need to do something about the tires, those 100% aspect ratio 7" (if that) bias-ply originals were scary with the stock engine. I'm just looking for a slightly more authentic hot-rodding experience than "drop an SBC in it." Speaking of heads, you can get an instant horsepower boost from the old AMC 258ci I6 by putting the head from the Mopar-Jeep 4.0L on it. Same as putting modern heads on an old SBC, I guess, but it's funny because Chrysler based their engine on the ancient boat anchor enough that the bolt holes line up. So with a similar modernized head swap (you'd have to have it custom-made, ofc) and modern innards (increasing compression to make use of modern gas, better valves and springs, etc.), you could make a Duesenberg engine where the crank snapping is the power-limiting factor? Neat.
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Jul 29, 2016 23:51
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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kimbo305 posted:And this stuff happened every day. A good tech spends years of training, ungodly amounts of money on tools, and understands how vehicles work and fail. At a dealership, they have experience in a single brand making them experts on each model and variation so they have intimate knowledge on how and where these specific vehicles fail. That also means we can spot when something has gone well outside that norm. On top of that, we have the resources of a major multi billion dollar global manufacturer to dig further when needed. CSI eat your heart out. I'd love to read more of this type of stories 
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Jul 30, 2016 00:55
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To add to the other reasons you couldn't make an ancient engine make lots of power - a lot of those old I-6s and I-8s were 4 and and 5 main bearing crankcases, AKA even though they don't share a crankpin, there would be two conrods and crank throws between each pair of main bearings. Plus crank whip / torsional vibration is a real issue on I-8s, and all the other already mentioned issues with crummy materials, lubrication, poor bearing designs, awful flowing heads (flatheads in particular), etc. By the time you fixed all the problems with the older setup it'd essentially be a clean-sheet design with the same outer envelope and bore/stroke/cylinder count. There were 9-main I-8s, for example some of the Buick ones, but they were the exception as far as I know. kimbo305 posted:Didn't know you had to be signed up. Here you go: I dunno, a lot of this reads like STDH. For example, the burnout story... with the wheels spinning like that, and the paint wearing away slowly, you'd just coat the concrete with burned rubber and keep spinning the tires. I bet the trans or engine would overheat (with no forced air cooling, just what the radiator fans could do through that mattress) well before you'd pop a driveshaft doing a burnout on concrete.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:25
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Delivery McGee posted:My granny-spec '71 Nova sedan claimed 200hp from its 307 V8. One inch less displacement, similar power to the midrange tune on a Hornet 20 years before. The Hudson was ahead of its time with that engine, unibody, etc. No wonder they dominated NASCAR until the "modern" V8s (SBC, Ford Y-block) came out -- 40 of 48 AAA races in 1952, 27 of 34 NASCAR Grand National races in 1952, 22 of 37 in 1953, and 17 of 37 in 1954. The 307 was always only a "base V8" engine, though, and never received anything approaching remotely decent heads or any sort of aggressive cam. The 327, 350, and 302 were already in production before the 307 showed up, since it was just a 327 crank and a 283 block. It may have had 15 years of development on the Hornet, but you're still talking about an engine that could be ripped out of just-above-poverty-spec cars in junkyards en masse in the '70s, which made about the same power as the Hudson engine (which I suspect would already have been quite a bit more rare and expensive in that build). Really, not all that different than a 4.8/5.3 Vortec is these days. "Put a SBC / LSx in it" may be overdone, but you can't say it's without good reason. It's a recipe for big power that nearly anyone can follow, and probably at one of the lowest cost-per-horsepower ratios you'll find on any drivetrain. The only thing the LSx doesn't have in its favor is there's not really much in the way of affordable overdrive manual transmissions that match up well with it. If you do a junkyard build, a T-56 / TR-6060 might cost more than the engine and everything else bolted to it combined. Delivery McGee posted:Speaking of heads, you can get an instant horsepower boost from the old AMC 258ci I6 by putting the head from the Mopar-Jeep 4.0L on it. Same as putting modern heads on an old SBC, I guess, but it's funny because Chrysler based their engine on the ancient boat anchor enough that the bolt holes line up. So with a similar modernized head swap (you'd have to have it custom-made, ofc) and modern innards (increasing compression to make use of modern gas, better valves and springs, etc.), you could make a Duesenberg engine where the crank snapping is the power-limiting factor? Neat. I suspect you might not even need that much in the realm of modern head design to kill the crankshaft on an old I8. Have to look at it all as a whole, not just the parts; the lovely heads weren't that much of a problem because you just couldn't make the engine live at high RPM anyway. An aggressive camshaft would need extremely heavy valvesprings to control all of the valvetrain mass, so you'd wipe your flat-tappet lobes out pretty easily. You'd have to address all of it. With all that said, the only real problem with trying to make some unconventional and ancient engine make big power by modern standards / using modern techniques, is that you'd probably be spending Nelson Racing Engines money for junkyard LQ9 power, and that might even be optimistic. As long as that isn't a problem for you, then gently caress it, build some monster out of an engine that most people have never even heard of.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:56
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IOwnCalculus posted:An aggressive camshaft would need extremely heavy valvesprings to control all of the valvetrain mass, so you'd wipe your flat-tappet lobes out pretty easily. You'd have to address all of it. OHC, motherfuckeeeeeeer!  Though that might be a bit too much stylistic departure to call it the same engine, and even with quote:probably... spending Nelson Racing Engines money and making a casting a modern block from the mold of the original and custom-forging all the innards, the block still probably wouldn't hold up. I've been reading about the drag-racing career of the Ford 427 Cammer (tl/dr: Ford built a SOHC hemi to beat the Mopar 426, Bill France said "nope, that don't count as 'stock' even if you do offer it as an option to suicidal nutjobs in dealerships," so they sold it to drag racers as a crate motor for a few years, but Ford stopped development of it and it was up to the drag racers to, as one article put it, "weaponize the speedway engine for the strip"). They could get hotter cams, aftermarket cranks, &c., but then the drat block fell apart. If Ford had kept working on it instead of dropping factory support for drag racing in '66, the Mopar Hemi and Chevy Rat may have been the footnotes in Top Fuel history. In completely unrelated news, I've always been captivated by Max Rockatanski's supercharger with an A/C compressor clutch -- obviously the Roots blower as shown in the movies wouldn't really work, but is there any inherent difference between blown and N/A engines that modern ECUs couldn't overcome, or any difference in fuel economy or whatever that would make it not worth doing? I'm thinking a turbo with a solenoid on the wastegate, or blower with similar cutout -- flip switch A to turn on the blower clutch, pull knob B to close the wastegate and seal the regular intake, and pulling knob B also flips a switch in the ECU to change to the other injector mapping/timing/whatever. Of course, the reason Miller did it in Mad Max was because nitrous wasn't A Thing yet, it was movie shorthand for "turn it up to 11," a predecessor to "Vtec just kicked in!" or a 150 shot of nitrous. Also, if valvesprings are a problem, you could always go the Ducati route and have it sound like a misfiring diesel. Ducatis have been described as sounding like "a Cuisinart full of clarinets", I can only imagine what a big V8 that that system would sound like. Probably awesome, especially with blower whine and straight-cut gears. 
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Oct 20, 2016 15:35
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Modern turbos have solenoids inline with the line going to the wastegates to make boost do various things, and Toyota did a clutched supercharger on the MR2 back in the 80s (probably others have done it since) so what you're thinking of is pretty much already a thing.
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Oct 20, 2016 16:10
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Mercedes has been sticking clutches on their blowers since the 90s.
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Oct 20, 2016 16:18
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Terrible Robot posted:Mercedes has been sticking clutches on their blowers since the 90s. And it works well, even with the big ones. I had zero problems with my E55's blower. It did chirp the belt sometimes when it engaged after I put the big 180mm crank pulley on, though.
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Oct 20, 2016 16:41
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After Muffinpox's SC belt shredded in his FR-S, he mentioned that some people regarded tensioning the belt as a tough design problem, especially for aftermarket applications. In most SC belt driven setups, the drive to the blower has all the bearings one on side of the belt. Does that cause any uneven load or binding on the bearings, especially if the belt is incorrectly tensioned? When it gets loose, what happens to the belt? Does it start flapping up and down on the pulleys? Vibrating side to side?
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Oct 21, 2016 18:34
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