Nuke It!

This is what happens to cast pistons when you try too much nitrous. The carnage was actually quite mild. Had this happened at a higher engine speed, the entire piston probably would have exploded. We must live right. Note that the main bearing looks quite good.

This is the two-stage Nitrousworks plate system. With two solenoids for both nitrous and fuel, you can stage this system or just hit it all at once. The system is designed to flow enough nitrous to make up to an additional 450 hp--if your engine can take it!

With two stages, the jets are located upstream just after the solenoids, and one large jet is placed just before the spray bars in both the nitrous and fuel connections. To make this system work on our engine, we ran the tune-up through just the larger nitrous and fuel solenoids.

Here are the fuel solenoids mounted on the engine. Both solenoids are plumbed into a Y-block that then is routed to the plate.

To give our junkyard dog a chance, we added a set of Federal-Mogul forged flat-top pistons that we hoped would survive the massive cylinder pressures.

In addition to the Comp Cams 268 Xtreme Energy Nitrous cam, we also added new valvesprings to give our iron-headed engine a chance to succeed.

Steve Brule set the timing at 35 degrees total for the normally aspirated test and then pulled an additional 2 to 3 degrees of timing out for each 100hp tune-up.

Here's what happens when the engine goes lean and the flame shoots out the top of the carburetor. This is a Barry Grant Speed Demon 750-cfm that is now a candidate for new boosters. Luckily, the Demon boosters are easily exchanged. Amazingly, the fuel flow changed very little with their bottoms melted off.

We burned through almost three sets of plugs in search of maximum nitrous. These are just a few of the victims we sent to the spark-plug graveyard in three days of dyno destruction. Note the one where almost the entire insulator is missing--ouch!