NASCAR Engine Pistons & Rods Evolution: Lake Speed's Vintage Ford C3 Gets Modern Technology!

that Ford C3 in there that we pulled out of Lake speed seniors garage like he was saying those guys had modern engines and all that he was way down in Horsepower compared to those guys with this old engine we could get that engine freshened up put it back in that car yeah and get you back in the car right now we're standing in the quality lab at CP Carrillo obviously that's Lake speed Junior you've seen him before at least I hope you have we got some really awesome piston stuff going on right now the old Piston from 20 something years ago versus the new piston we're putting in that C3 right now Brian here is going to tell us all about it because he designed the new one exactly he's the fisting Guru Guru so we had to we gotta find out so we got to get a lot of power so you got to come to the guys who make the horsepower piston guys so this was easy to try to pick it up and it was cool was that we had the original Pistons were CP Pistons so they already knew what we had and this is that old school of course I say it's his old school but really Brian for the time for 2002 this was that was state of the art right yeah attendance 2002 what made this piston so great over what was there in 1992. yeah I mean basically you know it's just the evolution of the part um a lot of it has to do with things that you may not even be able to see a lot of it has to do with the functionality of the machine work that is being done on the part uh the tolerances the way that you hold the part the the finishing processes and steps and how to finish rain grooves and all those little details yeah so if you really can't see just looking at me obviously you can see you can see the difference between them now for sure but back then you know it might have been a progressive step in the right direction you know but uh so nowadays you got your narrower skirts you got your tighter clearances you got ring Groove clearances or totally different ring packages totally different which you can evaluate on that um you got gas ported pistons and gas ported Rings we've got gussets and and support systems where it needs to be all the while it's still a rather small bore so the amount of opportunities we have with different forging design isn't as big as some of the common bore sizes in today's NASCAR engines but we make it work with what we have we could always go bill it we could do this we could do that but this worked out really well for you guys and what we did is we shortened the wrist pin okay in order to tighten up the small end of the rod keep the pin engagement where it needs to be so we're using the same connecting rods so this area here is wider than that area obviously you can see it yes and so this was a 2750 long pan this is a two and a half inch long pin uh but by narrowing the small end of the rod we'll still have a decent amount of pen engagement in the Piston even with a shorter wrist pin okay so what is that does that cut the the rotating weight uh yeah it does at the end of the day the the whole assembly weight of the package is whatever that is but uh what we're trying to do is on these forgings nowadays the way that they're forged in the design of them they're not going to accommodate the longer wrist pins right so in order to take advantage of the design changes everything's tighter everything's narrowed the rods are narrower the pins are shorter the pins are smaller in diameter this particular one is the same pin diameter and we're just going to narrow the pin into the connecting rod that you have because we're reevaluating the safety margin and making sure that it's okay to do so and there's ratios and certain calculations you do for that stuff and um it's like if we were using new rods not reusing the Old Rod I'd change the wrist pin size we'd make everything smaller the beam would be narrower and so on and so forth it'd be small and you probably have different forging opportunities at that because of that and uh and so on and so forth so now when you go to that narrower pin that makes the pen stiffer too right sure it's a combination of wall thickness as well as laying um but yes you're tightening it all up you're bringing it all down so it's not gonna not gonna be moving around as much especially as the key thing especially if it's a similar wall thickness but you can also play with the wall thickness of the material to to yield different results get that Springs back yeah because that wrist pin really is the backbone of the Piston yes yeah because it's the it's the strong part and all this and you want to keep it yes you want to make all this light but you still have to have the strength where you need it so that and if you look at the difference in the structures here this one is actually flexing in a different way than this one so the same wrist pin in these two designs wouldn't always work well the load on the Inside Edge of the pin boards are totally different because the forgiving part of this forging is not the same as this one right so now with this they call this a box style right yeah yeah it's uh so for us we we refer to it as an x-style or a box style okay uh there's fully boxed there's partially boxed uh and then you have round right so this is what we would call around yeah and then this is a box the the ribs here are cut down so that when the rod angle is at 90 degrees on the crankshaft your connecting rod doesn't make contact to the Box um but it still get it but it still gives it support and ties everything together and then you put your windows in there to lessen the weight and allow oil to move around and get where it needs to be so this so this design here is almost like a hybrid of the the old way versus the new way because you're saying that the the way they're made now like the current yeah it's NASCAR Pistons are totally different it's here as far as Dimensions yeah what we're doing is it's not only a hybrid because of the bore size but also because we're using the same Rod over again exactly so this is that happy medium of being able to utilize the parks that you have in the engine and still come up with something trick and new that is able to get you back where you need to be hopefully on the power scale and and make some improvements along with your ring package and all that stuff yeah because that's the biggest thing we did here right is we same board size essentially but 60 went from a 4060 to a 4065 to just clean it up and we had Rings available for that so we're going from this was an o43 1.5 millimeter three millimeter ring package and this is a 0.7 millimeter 0.7 millimeter two millimeter ring package so we've quite a different yeah and today's not so trick but tricks right oh yeah exactly yeah so yeah there's yeah there's some stuff out there today that's a little thinner than that a little more advanced than that but this is still pretty Cutting Edge yeah not too not too shabby actually no so looking forward to that and this was an old this was a duck the Molly top ring and this one will have a steel PVD coated top ring what's PVD mean so that's uh physical vapor deposition so the Molle type of ring is you spray on a Molly coating and what's cool about the Molly is it's soft but also has porosity so Molly because it's porous holds oil which means the cylinder finish didn't have to be as it could be smoother essentially and that's where you get your your Plateau that we did with the Greg Anderson home video exactly so with the steel ring with the PVD coating there's no ferocity it wouldn't hold any oil that's why we had to have that special Plateau hone so the cylinder has to hold all the oil when you go to a steel ring especially with PVD coatings on it so early even the gas and I try to bring is the same thing either gas nitride or PVD if it's a steel range there's no porosity you got to have the cylinder wall hold all the oil with the old Uncle Molly rings he held his own will so you could get away with a smoother finish the problem with that was being smoother it didn't hold the oil but with the Molly being softer it didn't last as long so those old these old Rings would be worn out in a 500 mile race and on the OEM side is that way you know the old school stigmas oh that car is 100 000 miles on the motor worn out where nowadays it's not like that because they're using different similar technology in the OEM worlds as well yep it makes a lot of sense the thinner steel rain the steel being a better material lets you make it thinner and you don't lose any strength that way or any ability it's actually more conformable it's got better tensile strength to it so Steel's a better material and then that PVD type of coating which think of if you've got a yellow drill bed at home like a gold drill bit in your drawer and you're like well that's titanium nitride that's a PVD type Coating in fact that's exactly the same kind of coating we're going to put on these Rings is a titanium nitride which is like 2400 Vickers hardness so that old school Molly Rings about 800 Vickers hardness this is literally you know three times harder so it should last three times longer which is what we typically see in a NASCAR deal right the old days that Molly ring would last about One race about 500 Miles it'd be worn out today's stuff we're running 1500 1600 race miles and it's still good yeah is that how those uh the Elmore spec engines work now how they can run multiple races on those things without having to change them all the time yeah those those are crns that's a chromium nitride it's not as hard as the titanium nitride but that's all things pvds are basically a a family of coating so DLC which we're gonna have on The Wristband is a type of PVD coating you got crn Which is popular on titanium valves it's using a lot of things we actually use that on our AP steel rings and then the titanium nitride is is also a type of PVD coating which again the drill bits and anybody that works in a machine shop that's used a gold insert cutting insert that's titanium nitride so it helps extend the life of the parts makes things better so really that's what's cool about this is we're taking this old school part which was Cutting Edge at the time but now we're updating it same bore size essentially but we're adding all the new technology to it and we're getting some compression buff too which is kind of nice grab too definitely doesn't hurt were you able to actually figure out what the compression was with these Pistons because every time I asked that question nobody has an answer for me well I think Dennis Dennis and I might have gone back and forth on it I can't recall at the moment exactly what it was but we can get into that and go and play with the calculator or something if we have to yeah we know the engine was a nine to one engine at the time yeah right yeah so it wasn't more than that I hope it wasn't a lot less than that you know but was neat is to see that evolution of Technology 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banking provided by evolve member FDIC future you will thank you is the the underground area here is that the weakest area uh or am I wrong on that you know I don't know if I would say it's the weakest it really just depends on what the cross sections are and how thick you can get away with less and something like that that's got more support but you know the mentality of it obviously you're not going to make gobs of power more than than you anticipated back then you know we're just hoping to get a little more with the Rings and a little more with the piston and a little more here and a little more there uh if it was making tons more power then it would be a different approach got it but for for just Simplicity the thickness under the underground basically based on the application yeah and it also depends you know on how that lays out with the forging you can see this one area is mold and the rest aren't trying to balance the part do some of the processes all in one on one go and not changing tools and and then you gotta follow the Contour of the pockets and all that stuff on the bottom where you didn't necessarily have the pocket on this one on the exhaust all right so one thing I've already seen that you did because we were back to the same rod link so we know the compression eye is the same but that top ring Groove height you've moved the top ring up why did you do that well because you're the area between the valve pocket and the ring Groove is that's one of the points that tells you where to put it okay if your reduced radial thickness is being used on your new piston then you can yield a similar thickness and move it up right and we already know that you know obviously this thing's gone a good long while it didn't hurt anything we have a pretty good idea of what we can get away with in that area and so that we were able to move it up because there's a little bit of horsepower there right by moving that ring Groove up sure you don't want to puddle any more fuel or have anything being left around the top or anything that doesn't need to be there so and also see that it's actually radius right there at the edge yeah where the old ones they didn't do that it may have had a radius on there or it might have been tighter somebody might have trimmed the top of this thing a little bit okay I really don't know um some sometimes that was calling back in the day they'd take tooth out the top or five off the top or whatever the radii on the on the edge of the Piston is a little bit bigger than it than it was before but we can adjust all that stuff it's literally just clicking buttons and moving parts and pieces in the computer to make whatever we want pop out on the CNC machine so let's see how you do that if you're wondering we are going to have a separate video just about the factory we'll show you what those forgings look like when they're raw and how they turn into what you see now but this video is for the technical side of Lake speed's particular engine Resurrection here so this is the file right here this is what you yeah this is what we use to design the piston for lake so you know no big deal 32 thousands between the top ring and the intake pocket right I mean that's something like that but but it's also what was that what was that but it's basically it's not much at all but it's almost double what we've run being totally comfortable in a similar application so uh and it's in one pinpointed area it's not like the whole side of the Piston right and that's kind of what we look at to determine where we want to put it and that's that's pretty safe um to be honest with you so as machine it looks like this look at all you said but that Machining process can put residual stresses and things in there so then sharp Phoenix and it takes those stresses out there's also there's subtle differences in the the actual part versus this as well since it's a solid model you know sometimes you got radii a little this and a little of that and I know that it's going to be safer than that by a couple thousand manufacturing so um but here's a look at you know the part cross sectioned in comparison to what it used to be so you you have a model on here the old one too yeah that's the one on this side over here how did you find if did you have to did you actually pull that up from 2002 you had a file I did and as you can see there's some things in there that I didn't realize were there that uh you know we could clean up but yeah um we have database and records for the whole history of the company so all we got to do is find the job and then we can build the thing and take a look at it and and uh compare and contrast the differences hmm so when you're when you start to make a file like this do you start with something else that's kind of closer do you start with the raw slug in it no we we here at CP Carrillo have actually created quite a bit of automation which is really cool because we have the database where we can go and we can grab the actual part that was we were referencing I can go grab something else that's going to be used on the 4G and I intend to use and when I first started yeah you would start with a forging and it would be nothing and then you would hand draw every single feature one by one and it might take me an hour or more to get a weight now we basically type a job number in and then we use all kinds of automation to go and grab the forging grab the data from the from the computer database put it into the design sheet and then it manufacturer well it cuts it on screen or models it on the screen and then it's literally just the touch of a button now so um but that's not done that's just to start with and then now I got to take all the information that yourself and Dennis have given me I got to run a compression calculator if I need to do that but Dennis says let's just make a flat top piston so we make a flat top piston and then I got to get the rod Beam with and swing it with the crank and make sure that it's not going to hit the ribs and start cutting and and whittling away at it and what are we going to narrow the pin into the rod to okay we keep doing agreement on that that's what we're going to make the width of the bosses with this much clearance shorten the wrist pan and then you just start dabbling through and until you get to where you want to be huh well if you're allowed to show us would you be able to compare Lake's new piston to a current NASCAR style piston to see where the compromise have actually been made I mean we have a variety of NASCAR piston like something that's in an engine today is probably not going to be you know shown or whatever but I have old stuff um something to illustrate what you're talking about with having to I mean compromise with the wrist pins like experimental stuff things to talk about we got some old Nationwide stuff um you know you can see the differences between the width what is this this is a total this is this is a trade show piston that's based on a NASCAR part and since it's not relatable to one particular team we can show you that and talk about it okay so that's why I'm grabbing that one um and it's very similar to uh something that would be used today I mean even this piston here is basically the same thing rods narrower I mean we can go grab the rods there on the other CMM but you can see the beam and all the differences and if you want we can go grab that and pop something off off of off of this and take a look at this because if we were going to try to turn like higher RPM like we're not really going to try to turn this thing to the Moon Yeah RPM wise that would be something we would have to address was the rod yeah well like we said a moment ago if you were just getting new rods period then we would change everything and it wouldn't necessarily be unsafe to do so we would make sure the safety is plenty fine and you would be more than happy with everything with smaller wrist pins and narrower rods but we're using the old…