NITROUS OXIDE ( nos / n2o ) advice forum

The original failures were due to;

1) The first failure was due to a big end bearing failure (due to age) not being picked up on whilst being dyno tested (due to the extreme noise of the exhaust) and being run for long enough for the piston to SERIOUSLY smash the hell out of the combustion chamber and valves.

2) The second was caused by my EX mechanic IGNORING my instructions about which pistons to use and instead of fitting the matched set of 4 that I instructed him to fit, he fitted 2 pairs from 2 different sets without my knowledge. The pair he fitted against my instructions, didn't have big enough valve cut outs to clear the valves at full chat, so although there SEEMED to be clearance when checked after the build, as soon as Dave gave it some big licks, the excessive clearance on the valve stems (due to age yet again), allowed the valves to rock and make contact with the piston, once again leading to serious head damage.

3) The third was caused by a mistake with the head gasket assembly due to the replacement head having been modified in such a way that the head studs were free to wobble about excessively. This resulted in the combustion ring sitting offset to the bore by ALMOST AN INCH which meant the head was lifted in the middle by the thickness of the gasket while the other side of the gasket ran across the bore of the cylinder.
Believe it or not, I think it was in this condition when it ran it's quickest times, so you can imagine what it would have done had it not had this problem.
However, instead of a 6 sec run we ended up with another wrecked head.

So there we were with ALL 3 heads WRECKED BIG TIME and desperate to get something sorted, so we had all 3 ‘repaired’ over as quick a period of time as possible.
Unfortunately, after a comment/observation Dave made about a CRACK in the head he was using (between the exhaust valves), I was 99.9% CERTAIN that melt downs that happened AFTER THE HEAD REPAIRS (which happened DESPITE the mixture being believed to be too rich), were ACTUALLY caused by the heads not being repaired correctly and/or the heads (valves) not being assembled correctly.

I never was convinced that such damage could be caused by being OVER RICH, ESPECIALLY BY A RELATIVELY SMALL AMOUNT and a cracked head with badly seated valves, is a much more realistic explanation.
Whilst the Lambda sensor was showing rich OVERALL, it is more than possible for ONE or TWO cylinders to run lean, due to cracks and/or leaking valve seats and not be detected.

Now some people will no doubt accuse me of trying to shift the blame away from the nitrous system but I’M the ONLY person who knows ALL THE FACTS and has the EXPERIENCE to judge the OVERALL run of events CORRECTLY, so **** em!!!

If I had ANY doubt about the above run of events and thought the REVO system was in ANY WAY to blame for ANY failure, I MOST CERTAINLY WOULD NOT be supplying a replica of the system to a TOP US Pro Mod customer, YOU CAN BE SURE OF THAT!!!!

Dave you can't take the blame like that, as our extensive testing on the dyno pushed everything closer to it's limits and left you with even worse parts to have to make do with in the first place.

Add to that the fact that the heads were cracked in a number of incidents and then not repaired correctly, you could only have been left handicapped and fighting the inevitable.

In addition to that all the points you make about the limitations of your situation (all of which I can vouch for) and then the fact that we were using a totally experimental system, that we were unable to be totally confident in as a consequence of so many unknowns and I'd say you/we did rather well to achieve what we did.

Now with some money and a support team it would have been a different story and as ONLY you and I know, we've been up against it more so than anyone else in the world of Drag racing these past 2 years and ONLY someone in Pro Mod could come close to appreciating what competing at such extreme levels involves. So there's NO WAY you should shoulder ANY 'blame' for any short fall in the results you/we achieved, as they were all primarily due to the limitations we were both under and the UNIQUE situation we went through.

If the level of business I've already experienced in the first week of the year is maintained, I'm sure I'll be able to assist you to some degree to improve whatever you need this year and hopefully we'll see the results we both know were only a whisker away last year.

Sorry, but i wasnt actually pointing the finger at Dave here, or indeed Trev albeit it was his spanner man that ****ed up, so p'haps as far as that Trev should have ensured that the guy was up to it,
Unfortunately you only discover someone is not up to their job when they make a mistake and up to the point mentioned, he'd built some decent engines for me but for some reason he decided he knew better than I did, when he IGNORED MY ABSOLUTE INSTRUCTION to fit a specific SET of pistons and screwed up Daves engine by fitting odd pistons instead.
His name by the way is Steve Martin (a long time Drag racer), who APPEARS to be a nice guy when you meet him but in actual fact is a wolf in sheep's clothing and is IN FACT, A LYING, THIEVING, GOOD FOR NOTHING PIECE OF SCUM, as I found out to my expense after I'd helped him out of a financial crisis, by lending him £15,000 that he then tried to avoid repaying me.

but also the dyno man shoulda picked up on the crank on its way out. Even with the noise, with the dyno man on the bike he should have FELT something wasnt right just with the vibration a failing roller bearing makes before it goes.
I can agree to a degree with you on that (and I actually kick myself for not doing the dyno rides myself, as I'd like to think I'd have done exactly as you suggest, especially as I have 1,000s of uneventful dyno runs to my name) but the bike is EXTREMELY noisy (especially when on a dyno in a large open room) and the guy had ear defenders on (something I wish I'd done more often for the good of my hearing, although the lack of them helped me stay in tune with the engine much better), plus he wasn't familiar with bikes of this level of power and when you're adding substantial amounts of nitrous power, this level of destruction only takes A SECOND OR TWO (as Dave can vouch for), so he wouldn't have had much time to react to any indications of an impending failure.

As a racer i fully understand the pressures in the pits of getting ready for the next run when things arent going right and parts are scarce and you have to make the decision of whether to go again and risk blowing it apart. The experimental side of things is not a prob either, it has to be done to carry the game forward.
The point is, any team is only as strong as its weakest link, and the cheaper option by the look of would have been to pay someone like Pip Higham to go thru the motor rather than rely on a guy clearly not up to it, there is a major difference between a motor of this level than rebuilding a stock engine to stock tolerances as we all appreciate.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but at the time my guy seemed more than capable of FOLLOWING MY INSTRUCTIONS, which as I've built NUMEROUS reliable race motors over the past 45 years SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALL THAT WAS NEEDED.
Why he thought that fitting 2 pairs of different pistons (albeit it very slightly different) was preferable to fitting THE SET I INSTRUCTED HIM TO FIT, I can't imagine.
Had he not made this STUPID mistake, I believe the majority of the rest of his work was more than adequate (apart from one or two minor issues he didn't make any other mistakes) and Pip would not have built it any better. Furthermore, at the time it was a MUCH quicker option to build it in house than send it out to someone else and I doubt we'd have made ANY races last year if we'd had to rely on Pip (or the like), because we had MAJOR hold ups even doing it ourselves, due to delays caused by Roger Upperton in getting head work done and parts supplied as it was.

In that respect thats what i call amateurish, i was shocked at what i was reading when the pistons etc were mentioned for a team (WON and Dave) who are aiming high to LET those sort of things happen.
It wasn't "amateurish" it was plain STUPID and entirely the responsibility of THE FOOL who did it AGAINST my instructions. What annoyed me most was the fact that he'd suggested doing it beforehand and I STRESSED IN THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE TERMS, THAT HE WAS NOT TO DO THAT AND TO FIT THE FULL SET. Had that IDIOT fitted the right SET of pistons, the failure that set us back would NOT have happened and last years results would have been ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.
Whilst it's NICE to have the best parts in an engine, I've REPEATEDLY PROVEN that even with substandard parts (so long as they are strong enough), it is more than possible to achieve GREAT RESULTS, as long as the engine is built CORRECTLY (as Dave proved in 2007), so I'm not a big believer of spending large sums of money when I've proven it's not needed.

The dyno set back (which was actually still worth the trouble for what we learned from it), would have been the only relatively unavoidable problem of last season and we would have made up for that later in the year, had it not been for the IDIOT with the pistons (because apart from the odd pistons the rest of the motor was in decent condition and built correctly), so the majority of last years problems stem from that one STUPID **** up.

For a first season out with experimental equipment i think you all did very well, and yeah, i know weather wise the season was poor for track time, so respect for what achievements were made where they're due along with best wishes for the upcoming season, but to be the best, sometimes you have to use the best too, which would be one reason to use WON gear to start with, but i think on both counts you have to use that philosophy a bit more in other areas to achieve the results the potential can deliver. As weve all found at some point expensive can be cheaper in the long run.
The INITIAL problem had nothing to do with how much money was spent on the engine (or trying to save money on it, although if I'd told the guy to fit a new set of pistons, no doubt he'd have listened to me more readily and followed those instructions and assuming they'd been machined correctly would have been fine), as the pistons I told him to fit were PERFECTLY OK for the job.
Later problems could have been prevented by spending even more money than we did to have bronze skulls fitted to the heads but we were ASSURED, that the alternative repair method (which cost £1,000s) would be perfectly OK, without resorting to that extent but unfortunately we didn't discover that was NOT the case until much later in the year.

This year the heads will be crack tested before use, to make sure the repairs are done correctly. I've also looked in to getting a head FULLY SKULLED for Dave in America, so that in the event that the repairs have not been a complete success, we have that option instead.

if you haven't seen the following video clip on the new REVO page of my website, then you should enjoy this and it's my hope that dave will be able to start the year with at least one as quick as this and end the year a good 0.3 to 0.5 quicker.

http://www.noswizard.com/admin1/videos/ ... %20Pod.wmv