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[Trouble Maker]

Love the sound of straight 8 engines. Also like triples (which at high rpm are similar to 12 cylinder engines).

Sound out of cars is an... interesting thing. Of course there is some base fundamental sound, based on the engine characteristics. But, it can also have as much to do with intake and exhaust as anything. I have a buddy how is a wizard with metal. He took his (C5, early 2000s) corvette and made a '180 degree' header for it. Flat plan crank engines naturally have exhaust pules coming in an order from each bank that allows them to be timed sequentially in the exhaust where cross plan crank engines have them timed to collide. This is why they sound very different. But, if you take a cross plane engine and design the header in just the right way you can make it sound much more like the flat plane engine.

BTW, he is also building a (Howe) tube frame road race car with a (widened) 68 mustang body on. You can see the chassis in the background of the first video and there are some videos on his YT about it.

 

[Twitch54]

I think the safest generalization regarding torque and horsepower would simply be the following:
As much torque as possible, and as soon as possible. As much HP as possible and as late as possible.

and to that I may add from my drag racing days, we used to say........ 'Torque off the line, HP through the traps'

 

[Promit]

That isn't that surprising when you look at their engine strategy of optimizing diesel engines from one side, petrol from the other and meeting at some 'ideal' engine somewhere in the middle. We are already seeing a blurring with for example petrol engines running DI, higher compression and leaner burns, and that starts to bring with it PM.... which sounds a lot like a diesel engine.

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/08/skyactiv-20110804.html
View attachment 60927

Yeah, fantastic and fascinating engine design work happening at Mazda. Pity they can't decide who the hell it is they sell cars to or what their goal is in the marketplace. Sure give the new 3 a dumber suspension design, change the 6 over to RWD for some reason, and refuse to put powerful engines in anything. Why not. Somebody's bound to buy one of em, right?

 

[Blumlein 88]

That's me...

Fifteen months later, 8469mi

Added a little air to the tires twice.

Washed twice.

Vacuumed twice.

Oil changed at 7,180mi - never added any, barely under the full mark.. 0W-16 oil. 5 quarts takes it just over the full mark, as it was when new.

16 gallon tank, biggest refill 15.490 gallons, and negative 2 miles to empty reported. It starts desiring fuel at 1/8 tank reporting about 50 miles to empty

Highest single tank miles 600.5 with 13.843 gallon refill. Cruising back-highways Palestine TX to Moss Point Mississippi, 43.7 mpg. reporting 57mi to empty. Estimated total range 694mi on that leg.

2.2 mi per day since last fill - Covid-19 reduced my reduced travel a little, I guess.

Silly spreadsheet:

View attachment 60895

View attachment 60898

Can you include a video letting us hear the exhaust note Ray?

 

[HammerSandwich]

Would you mind schooling a 'young' buck about your thoughts here, expanding a littler more than the technical reason or your philosophy on this?

Frank's simply stating that power, not torque, is the determining factor in how effectively something can be pushed at speed.

Suppose your car is one of these new-fangled turbo numbers that hits peak torque below 2000rpm. For best acceleration at 50mph, do you use 2nd gear or 4th? If torque determined the acceleration, 4th would be faster. It's not, because you make more power in 2nd, even though engine torque is ~15% lower.

To make a car accelerate harder at a given road speed, your could remove weight and reduce friction/drag. But if you're going to get more acceleration from only the engine, you must make more power. Use an engine with more torque but less power, and you go slower. More power means you go faster, even with less torque. Torque makes no difference by itself. You must make more power.

Why? Ultimately, you're looking for the most torque on the wheels. That's always directly proportional to the power. Ignore engine RPM, and use tire RPM to calculate power & torque. Do this for different conditions, and the light will turn on.

Easiest analysis? Look at the units. Torque (aka force) has no time factor, so a bare torque number says nothing about how quickly something can occur. Power takes torque/force, then includes distance and time. That extra information is what it's all about. More power kinda means you can apply the same force more rapidly.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Sound out of cars is an... interesting thing. Of course there is some base fundamental sound, based on the engine characteristics. But, it can also have as much to do with intake and exhaust as anything. I have a buddy how is a wizard with metal. He took his (C5, early 2000s) corvette and made a '180 degree' header for it. Flat plan crank engines naturally have exhaust pules coming in an order from each bank that allows them to be timed sequentially in the exhaust where cross plan crank engines have them timed to collide. This is why they sound very different. But, if you take a cross plane engine and design the header in just the right way you can make it sound much more like the flat plane engine.

BTW, he is also building a (Howe) tube frame road race car with a (widened) 68 mustang body on. You can see the chassis in the background of the first video and there are some videos on his YT about it.

Yeah, I have a C5. I actually prefer the note of the original over the 180 degree manifold, but both sound good.

 

[Soundstage]

2013 BMW 328xDrive

 

[RayDunzl]

Can you include a video letting us hear the exhaust note Ray?

I just use my imagination.

Voodn, Voodn!

(audible at 3:16 in this clip)

 

[Wombat]

FYI:

http://www.epi-eng.com/mechanical_engineering_basics/power_and_torque.htm

 

[carlob]

Power is not everything. You need to minimise the drivetrain losses, so you can gain quite a bit of power just from clever engineering and also suspensions, mechanical grip and tyres, you need a way to put the power on the ground. Also the power delivery curve is important if you want to go fast.

 

[MRC01]

Ultimately, it is power that moves anything. Torque only tells you how high you have to rev to make that power. Power is conserved (the same) at every point in the drive train. Torque is not conserved. For example consider a car whose engine makes 300 ft.lbs of torque and in 1st gear the engine crankshaft spins 12 times faster than the wheel (say, 4:1 from tranny and 3:1 from differential). This car has 300 * 12 = 3,600 ft.lbs. of torque at the wheel. The tranny gears it down 4:1 to quadruple the torque, the differential gears it down another 3:1 to triple the torque. But at each point, Torque * RPM is the same, and Torque * RPM is power. Gearing swaps RPM for torque but their product, power, remains the same. Minus frictional/inertial losses of course.

Archimedes said, "give me a long enough lever and I'll move the world". You can think of torque as the force applied to the lever and RPM as the length of the lever. It is their product -- power -- that moves things.

However, while Power is what moves anything, it gets misleading because we typically only quote peak numbers for engines, whether power or torque. For example, consider engine A versus B, where A has more peak power. It's possible that B actually makes more power over time as you rev through each gear, than A does. For example, if A has narrow power band while B has a wide one. Whichever car makes the most power over time is faster (assuming traction, weight, etc. are the same), and B might make more power over time even if its peak value is lower.

 

[Trouble Maker]

I had forgotten that Mazda came out with a petrol engine that under some conditions opperates in HCCI (CI=compression ignition, like a diesel), the Sky ActivX. The previous info I posted was an old road map and of course they are a little further down that path now.

 

[MRC01]

Even the standard Mazda Skyactive 2.0 is unusual, having a 13:1 compression ratio and with 78 ft.lbs. of torque per liter, among the highest BMEP in gasoline engines. One would expect such high BMEP would require high octane gas, but it doesn't. It does this on cheap 87 octane gas. Mazda uses unusual combustion chamber shapes and long tube headers (among other things) to achieve it. The stock headers on the Skyactiv look like they came out of a racing shop: equal length, constant radius curves, and long. It puts the cat a bit further downstream than other economy cars, so when cold it takes longer to reach full temperature.

 

[nemanja_t]

BMW 320i

 

[nemanja_t]

My other transportation:

 

[Wes]

 

[Twitch54]

Love the sound of straight 8 engines.

N/A, big block power, 462ci, 715HP, the only thing on it that was still 'Chevrolet' was the original LS6 block.

 

[Inner Space]

What I use at my UK place: 1977 Bentley T2. Cost less than a boutique DAC.

 

[Feanor]

Our two very, very boring cars ... '17 Nissan Sentra and '12 Toyota RAV4
...
.

 

[Twitch54]

Our two very, very boring cars ... '17 Nissan Sentra and '12 Toyota RAV4
...
.
View attachment 74967

perhaps something more exciting hidden in the garage ??