Black Smoke.....power or waste?

Most guys don't know how to drive a high horsepower diesel engine either.

You don't flatfoot it! You should roll the throttle on to adjust for turbo lag.
Rolling it on smoothly will get you much better fuel mileage numbers while still having the power when you need it and it will help your engine and drive train components last a lot longer.

You gotta love the idiots in their Dodge Ram Cummins Diesel pickups with their twin straight stacks puking tons of black smoke and making lots of noise pulling up next to you and flooring it in a vain effort (I guess) to impress you.

Noise and smoke do not equal power....It used to in the old 1693 CAT days but we have learned how to really make them run good now without all the smoke.

 

You may have seen me and others that have tuned ECM's with over 675 HP at the wheels and never knew it. Mine dont smoke any more now then it did as a stock 475 CAT.

My dad had a V12 Detroit with 2 blowers and 2 turbo's. Around 480~490 HP was the best that truck had and 3 MPG. In its day it was one of the power house motors.

See above post.

 

Those old Detroits with the blowers used the blower only for scavenging. If they had a blower and no turbo, they were actually "naturally aspirated". The reason is, being two stroke, they needed a way to force the air into the cylinder and the exhaust out. On a gas engine, this is accomplished by pulling the intake air through the crankcase. When the cylinder goes up, it increases the volume, sucking in fresh air. When it comes down, it compresses what is in there, so when the piston uncovers the intake port, the pressurized intake air will blow into the cylinder, and force the exhaust out. This is why you don't have crankcase lube in a two stroke gas engine, but instead mix your oil into your fuel. On a Diesel, no fuel is mixed into the intake air, so we can't lubricate things that way. Due to this, we must have oil in the crankcase, and with oil in the crankcase, we can no longer use it for scavenging. The solution was to bolt the blower onto the side/top of the engine to just blow air into the airbox.

That said, Cummins did do some supercharging way back in the day. Not sure about Cat.

And don't forget driving like idiots everywhere they go. I've been in the Diesel performance world for a number of years now, and nothing irks me quite like that crap. One moron driving around blacking out every intersection around, making as much noise as possible, and flooring it from every stop gives each and every one of us a bad name. This is one of the reasons that I refuse to sell EGR and DPF delete kits (besides the possible liability issues) and what can make a lot of smoke, I will try to encourage the responsible use of.

 

one time, when I had all new injectors put in, the shop turned the fuel up, or something. it smoked quite a bit more than before. but I had more power, dropped less gears, m.p.g. went up, so I was happy. everyone told me, black smoke equals wasted fuel, but with the no smoke, I got less m.p.g. less power & more gear dropping. a year after that, I had my inframe done, & I had more power before inframe, with the black smoke, though the shop that did inframe, did everything to spec. no lox codes, mine is a 95' detroit. I do remember while idleing & being on trailer, it was hard to breath the exhaust fumes, were really strong, after the inframe you could be 20 ft away & could not even tell if the truck was running & standing near the truck did not bother your breathing. truck ran real rich, or lean before. but like I say it worked out better for me. I wish I could get the power I had with out the smoke.

 

Thats because the most efficent way to climb the hills is as fast as possible. If you don't need to drop a gear means you get up faster with less fuel. Once you are up it take shorter time to come back to cruise speed = less fuel spent all the way. Simple.

But you would see even better m.p.g if got the same power without smoke.

 

Today you can have all the power of "turned-up" motors of 90's with no smoke on ISX with variable geometry turbo. It won't smoke one bit and if it does - it is sure sign you are loosing power and mpg. Ability to deliver big boost or big flow exactly when needed is where its at today. Most people still don't get it and all they want is big turbo / big PSI numbers - because most people don't acommodate changes very well.

Which is why they still want to buy CAT engine despite the very known fact that they are cr-p since MBN. Same with smoke

 

Thats exactly right, VGT turbos help after downshift as well - turbo 'closes' for a split of the second and starts spinning like crazy so it has to be opened to drop its rpm below its own speed limit but at this point boost is already so high we need the air flow. At least thats the way I get it after watching it on INSITE when fighting big grades.

 

Your right!! I'm looking to trade my 800 horse MXS Acert CAT in for a ISX Cummins.

 

Thats funny right there.......I don't care who you are....

Black smoke is fun.......