Banks Turbos on the dyno
I had a pleasant surprise when I arrived at work this morning. It was the throaty roar of an obviously pressurized V8
emanating from the tall twin exhaust pipes attached to our gas dynamometer. It was singing.
Of course I had to go see what was making this good noise. I knew they had a mule motor on the gas dyno, and they had been
bolting some Banks turbo parts to it, but I had no idea it
would be ready to run this soon.
This is a big part of why I am here. Banks is going to be getting back into the hot rod twin-turbo V8 market again. I can't
pitch it to the hot rod press until it's actually on line, but I can tip you to what's happening here today, as well as
what's coming in the future.
Basically, what's happening today is that we are testing an engine very similar to the ones we built 15 years ago in order
to repeat power levels we know such an engine should attain. This is known as a baseline. From there, we'll see how much
improvement we can gain.
The big difference in the new systems, of course, is electronic fuel injection. Compared to a carburetor, this is a major
improvement that will make the new systems much more tunable and tractable.
Actually the engine is more than a mule. It started life as a 4-bolt main GM 350 that Gale used to sell as crate engines.
To this we added a steel Eagle crankshaft and Eagle forged H-beam rods. The pistons, for now, are Banks reverse-deflector
type as used with the old Banks turbo setup, but we will be testing other designs. The heads are Dart Iron Eagles that got
a lot of porting and polishing. There will be more experimentation in this area, too. In fact, the tentative plan is to
make our own cylinder heads once we've decided what works best.
But this is all tentative at this point. The big news is that we have a twin turbo V8 engine up and running,
as of yesterday, with electronic fuel injection. They're making horsepower, and everything worked properly. But that's just the
threshold. We're just getting started (again). Gale is talking engine packages with power numbers in four figures. But we
can't say anything specific yet. This is just a hint of what's to come. (from 08/09/02)
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