My $20,000 crate of new SuperFlow 902 electronics is here now, ready to be installed on my dyno system.

Then last Friday I picked up the engine intake air cooling system from our pal Wayne Stoutner, and that will be my first project. Some of that cooling system is sitting on the dyno table visible on the engine room webcam. The cooling tunnel on the table contains four walk-in freezer evaporators that act like intercoolers, fed cold refrigerant by four 150 lb compressors. Outside air is fed through the evaporators by fans, hopefully dropping temp by 60 or more degrees F into a plenum in the dyno room. Also water vapor in the outside air will be removed by the evaporators. The idea is to feed EFI engines with controlled, dry and cold winter-like air in summer to enable us to properly tune the engines for winter operation. Tuning EFI sleds for winter operation in 75 degree F air is useless. Because of that I've recommended all EFI sled owners wait for cold air before dyno tuning--so that meant a logjam of sleds to tune as soon as winter arrived. So having winter air for tuning regardless of the weather forecast will be a dandy thing, as we should see shortly. Expect this system to be installed and operating this month.

I've got several EFI/ turbo tuners waiting for 20 degree F air, and after I accomodate them I'll proceed with the SuperFlow 901/ 902 dyno conversion which will take several weeks. I wil have a mule engine on the dyno to baseline perfectly with the current system, and then make sure we get the same accuracy with the new equipment and electronics. 

2001 Yamaha Apex

Two weeks ago Woody's Performance Center from Maine (Woody's photo appears on the homepage with his mad Methanol Supercharged Apex) brought a perproduction 2011 Apex for assessment. This session was done on Yamaha's behalf, and as such they have requested the results be posted mid August. I can say that the variable EXUP exhaust creates a huge increase in midrange torque and HP compared to running the 2011 engine without EXUP (Woody figured a way to run it both ways!).

Nearly 20 years ago General Motors Powertrain rented my dyno to assess the then-new Yamaha EXUP system on a Japanese-only 400cc four cylinder sportbike. Steve Boehm was the GM engineer who brought the bike along with high velocity strip-chart recorders to measure and record intake and exhaust pressure, and his testing with EXUP operating vs fixed open showed how valuable this then-new technolgy was for increasing midrange in the high-revving 400. Now US Yamaha sportbikes have had EXUP for years, and it's surprising that it's taken this long to apply it to the four-stroke sleds.  You Yamaha guys are going to enjoy this data.