Newbie for PDX Oregon

[tjwong]

Hi all! I am located in Portland, I am new here and was turned on to this site by a customer of mine. I just thought I would come in and say hey. My backgrounds starts out as being a hot rod car enthusist since I was a teenager, I put myself though college turning wrenches at the local Mopar, and GM dealerships. Later after getting married and hanging a peice of sheepskin I got from school on the wall, I spent nearly 25 years working in pulp and paper mills all over the world as a electrical engineer specilizing in process controls. Which means I design and programmed complex control systems that runs the process in the mills. Anything from a simple motor start-stop to complex paper machine quality controls ran through my department.

After a long stint in Southern Brazil (land of georgous women) I returned home. Realizing I still had to work to support my 3rd wife and now a new baby boy (9 mos old) I started up a dyno tuning shop back in 04 and have never looked back. The money isn't near as good as working overseas but I am home with my family here in Portland and I get to play with cars all day and meet a lot of great people. I center my work around GM cars and trucks, turns out that 90% of my work revolves around Corvettes and the rest is a mix of street rods, carbureted hot rods, trucks and other GM performance cars. Owning this shop of mine was a high school dream of mine, but as a dumb azz kid I had no idea what it takes to run a business and make it successful. Just the idea of being able to hot rod a car was enough for me back then. Now here it is 35+ years later, gotta great wife young enough to be my daughter a healthy baby boy and I am living my boyhood dream :)

Unfortunately I don't own a Pontiac G8 but I would love to have one especially after working on one this week. I do however own a C6 Z06 that is rodded up making 580 RWHP, a 02 GMC Yukon with a 8.1L and a large Whipple blower (tow rig) making 450 RWHP, I just sold my supercharged C4 Corvette, and I still own my old 77 K5 Blazer which has a serious case of metal mites.

[Devilish34]

Welcome

[GRRRR8]

Welcome! Thanks for stopping by. Excellent work on Dans car.

[08G8V8]

Welcome. Sounds like Dan is very happy with the work you did on his G8.

[NWOG8]

Welcome!

[MANOFSTEEL69]

Welcome!

[grandmacpubah]

nice to have you on the site TJ, can't wait to see Dan's car.

[-Ray-]

Welcome to the Forum.

[Cobra]

Hey TJ, glad to have you here. Dan and I have PM'd each other and he is very happy. I am sure his car is a beast even on 93 octane. Looking forward to your input.

[tjwong]

Hey TJ, glad to have you here. Dan and I have PM'd each other and he is very happy. I am sure his car is a beast even on 93 octane. Looking forward to your input.

Its too bad we don't have 93 octane here, what we got is watered down 92 octane because our "great green" governor mandated that we have 10% ethanol watering it down. The man is a total idiot with his rationality thinking that the ethanol will clean up our air. It seems that in his arrogance that he forgets that we loose a considerable aimount of fuel economy when using this crap, and that it takes a lot more energy wasted to manufacture it and even more emissions into the atmosphere to haul the crap because it can't be piped to the tank farms for mixing. Heck our leaders think that us Oregonians are too stupid to pump our own fuel and now with this new law that says we can't ask to top off our tanks was really stupid. Ugggh I can go on and on about those idiots sitting in Salem. I got one on them though....I went out and applied for and received a card lock account for commercial fueling. So now here in Oregon I pump my own fuel, although I did get some funny looks pumping fuel into my Z06 :lol:

If we had 93 available I could get a bit more aggressive with the timing maps. Plus one can mill the heads down to get some more compression to gain even more power. When one installs a camshaft we reduce the dynamic compression of the engine, to gain back what we loose one has to mill the heads. On a Z06 with a large cam this could mean as much as 20hp!

[GRRRR8]

When one installs a camshaft we reduce the dynamic compression of the engine, to gain back what we loose one has to mill the heads. On a Z06 with a large cam this could mean as much as 20hp!

Most do not realize this and get frustated when they put a cam in and think "man I would have thought it should have made 20 or more HP".

I think the best running cars always have combos that each part benefits from the others it has to work with. The guys that struggle usually have too big of heads with too small of a cam and too low of compression, not realizing they could have went with less port work, dropped duration down and bumped compression and they would have made more power and had better drivability.

[tjwong]

Most do not realize this and get frustated when they put a cam in and think "man I would have thought it should have made 20 or more HP".

I think the best running cars always have combos that each part benefits from the others it has to work with. The guys that struggle usually have too big of heads with too small of a cam and too low of compression, not realizing they could have went with less port work, dropped duration down and bumped compression and they would have made more power and had better drivability.

Exactly! The key to making power in any car is that all your mods must work in harmony with each other. Another point is when it comes to camshafts, for the most part bigger isn't always better!

I have a friend that "usually" lives by that rule. He knows the ramifications of having a cam that is too large for the application. Yet for some reason one day while building the street rod of his dreams he chose to go down the road of big and I mean HUGE camshafts. But in his case this engine is a 427 dart based small block with HUGE brodix 18 degree heads. The camshaft was something in the high 260 or maybe even a 270 something on the intake lobe and this thing was ground on a 108 LSA. The one thing that saved his happy butt was that his induction system is a Hilborn EFI with 8 throttle bodies with 2 11/16 throttle plates, that is a LOT of throttle area!!

Having 8 separate throttle bodies allowed this engine to idle at a relatively docile 1100 RPM sometimes even 1000 RPM. While this is normally a HUGE cam, it didn't sounds that way, but it still was a tuning nightmare for me. As this engine used a Delco MEFI 4B controller, the other bugger in the mess was that this thing had fly by wire throttle, and balancing 8 throttle plates was a mess to say the least.

Here is a picture of the beast:

http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i39/tjwong/40Ford.jpg

http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i39/tjwong/40fordenginebay.jpg

This thing made just south of 750hp on the engine dyno, on the chassis dyno it was a shade north of 610!

[Tate]

Howdy and welcome!
Tate

[xfactor]

TJ, welcome and good to see you on here. I stopped in your shop a month ago right when you were closing, even though you still stayed to talk a little, thanx. I have only heard great things about what you do. Your shop had quite a few Vettes in it, most of which were newer Z06. We need to plan a show & tune at your shop and get a few of the northern PNW guys down this way.

X

[G8GT721]

Welcome to the site Tj

[Punisher]

Welcome!

[tjwong]

TJ, welcome and good to see you on here. I stopped in your shop a month ago right when you were closing, even though you still stayed to talk a little, thanx. I have only heard great things about what you do. Your shop had quite a few Vettes in it, most of which were newer Z06. We need to plan a show & tune at your shop and get a few of the northern PNW guys down this way.

X

Cool! I am still swamped for the rest of this month and part of October. Maybe we can get something together before the winter rains start.

[r33pwrd]

TJ I hope to be visiting you in the next few months :) My car needs a cam really bad :)