2024 EMPI Engine Battle - Recap

What could have been, what was, and what will be. Sam is back home after what seems like forever after a vacation, a quick week back at the shop, then 8 days out in California. It all started on June 9th at The Prado Show and Shine. Then things really got cooking on June 11th when the engine that Sam spent so many hours on was started up to go for it's first dyno pull. Somehow, a small nut or metal spacer of some sort ended up in the #1 cylinder and made a mess of the piston, cylinder and cylinder head. Not one to throw in the towel, Sam (with the help of so many great people at EMPI including many of the other Engine Battle competitors) pulled the engine apart and got it back together to go for another attempt. That attempt was somewhat short lived as during the first run, the stock cooling fan (only meant to rev up to 5500-6000 engine RPM) decided it didn't like the high (7800+ rpm) revs the engine was turning. It flew apart in a wonderful display of sparks and an puffed up fan shroud. Fortunately, no one was injured by the flying debris, but the engine didn't seem to like the revs. So, once the engine is back home, Sam will go through it and bring it back to life yet again.

Video Transcript

All bolted to the stand, then to start warming up, we'll see what she does. The last engine put out 1641 horsepower, which is an insane amount of power out of such a little engine. I don't know if this thing's going to make 160 horsepower.

Well, that was short-lived. We started this thing up, and we instantly heard a clacking. We had eyes on this thing the entire time at the show, but it sounds like there's something in the top of this cylinder. So we pulled out the spark plug, and sure enough, looking at the end of the spark plug, something's bouncing around in there. We flashed the light in there, and we can see the top of the piston looks like it's getting hit by something, which is unfortunate. This means I got to pull this head off, and I can't dyno this thing. We'll see how it goes.

I'm going to try to make lemonade out of lemons. I've got a nut in cylinder number one. I've got Tyler and Adrian; we're going to pull this thing apart, pull that nut or whatever the heck ever dropped into this cylinder out, and put it back together. If we're lucky, maybe they'll let me throw the engine on there and see what it does with a slightly damaged piston. Hopefully, the head's not damaged. Anyway, we're going to pull it apart, see if we can get it back together and back on the dyno.

Well, we've got it apart. It wasn't as simple as just pulling the nut out because there is our damage, and it is, uh, I think it's done. And in the head, yeah, is the barrel okay? When it happened, it actually ended up cracking our barrel. The engine's real clean otherwise, but it took a nut right through the top of it and broke the barrel too. The nut is through the piston, and that thing is destroyed. It's not just pull it out and put it back together; it's pull it apart and put on some new parts. Man, this is a bummer, but we'll see what we can do.

None of that went as I planned or as I imagined it might. Friday, I worked on that engine, and this would have been, I want to say, Friday the 7th. I had the engine here in the shop tuning it. Air cleaner's on, and I probably ran, well, in total, almost five gallons of gas through that engine. Had that nut or whatever piece of metal decided to poke a hole in the top of a piston been in there at any point up to then, it would have made itself known. To all the guys at EMPI, from Adrian, Tyler, Henry, Anthony Chica going through and machining down the heads, all the competitors going through, and as I was rebuilding the engine, they came by in between their dyno pulls and everything else to make certain I had everything ready to go, offering assistance. All the guys behind the scenes at EMPI, from IC on the cameras and doing all the social media stuff, getting all the live stream set up, and all of his crew working on those cameras and computers, making sure it all worked smoothly. All the guys back in the shipping department, the packers, and the pullers—everyone at EMPI was super friendly. The guys in the machine shop in the morning, doing their stretches before going out, and I jumped in there, doing push-ups and jumping jacks with them. It was a bunch of fun. Everybody at EMPI was very awesome and accommodating. It was a great place to be.

In hindsight, I guess I should have brought along a videographer. I had to walk the line of actually living in the moment because, let's be simple, this is a dream job. I get to sit here and work on Volkswagens and show you guys how to work on Volkswagens, hopefully, or at least maybe give you some entertainment. At the end of the day, I'm just a hobbyist. I do this for fun, and it's also a job. For someone like me to be able to go out to an event like this and be in the company of engine-building greats, it's incredible.

I should have videotaped more, but I had to sit back and let this soak in and really live in the moment as opposed to filming the moment with my camera out the entire time. Sitting in the company of people like Rick Wright, John Benton, John from Powerhouse, Steve from Wolfgang, and just trying to absorb some of their knowledge. Pat from Tafta, the guy is an engineering wizard who builds a 400 cubic inch flat 4, so along those lines, I just want to thank everybody at EMPI. From Rob, Robert, Carl, all the sales guys—Adrian, Leonard, Joanie, Mike (who I often called Carl, my apologies Mike), Julio, all the guys running the dyno—Victor, Tyler, Chuck, Larry, getting in the way of shrapnel coming off my fan as it exploded, Terry—not his dyno, he did the best he could trying to get a handle on what was Jack's dyno and he got better day by day. At the end of the day, it's not his machine, and it's really hard to go into somebody else's art studio and make a work of art. I can't thank the guys at EMPI and all the competitors enough.

As far as the competitors go, Adam and Tanner from Seward Speed Shop won the entire competition with a 1721 cc engine. My hat's off to them for winning the competition. A 1721 cc put out 205 horsepower. John Benton, a 1641 cc, on the day of the battle, put out 154 horsepower. That's just crazy. During the prelims, right before my engine blew up, it was 164.245 horsepower. It was mechanical art. Every bit of everything on that engine was detailed to the nines. Later, going to his shop, John and his wife Stephanie opened up their shop to help all the other competitors. Virtually everything in their shop had that same attention to detail. Just absolutely beautiful, nothing out of place, and what gracious hosts to open up their shop, their race car, their dyno for other competitors to help them tune their engines. That's the Volkswagen community in a nutshell—people like John and his wife Stephanie and all the crew there just to help people in need. Thank God for people like that.

To get to meet Steve from Wolfgang International, Trina, and their dog Kora, a huge 187 lb Dane, Jim and Amy from Jim's Custom VW's, they were there and they were great. Just being able to sit in these people's company is something I'm forever grateful for. Another top performer, Damien and his son Nathan from D&J Auto, put out 205 horsepower again, I believe, from a 1915 cc. Rick Wright and Jesse from Wright Gearbox actually built the transmission for my 1971 Super Beetle that we did a couple of years back on the channel here. Another competitor, Doug's Bugs and Bunnies, came out at the very end. They weren't there for the competition; they had some prior engagements. Hank the son and Fish the dad put together a beautiful engine. With some more time and tuning, that thing is going to be a good little street motor. Like myself, they built a street motor. Our engines, specifically mine, to the best of my knowledge, were built to actually go in a car and move it down the road as opposed to going on a dyno and putting out the highest numbers. So a little bit more down-to-earth compression ratios. I was only at 10:1; I'm not certain what they were at.

Pat and Josh, I mentioned Pat earlier, the guy that built a 400 cubic inch flat 4 engine with his own foundry. The guy's got a foundry; he's just an absolute genius. They came out with a monster engine and just couldn't get the tuning right. They're going to get it figured out, I'm sure. But meeting them and getting to hang out with them and everybody else was great. It was an honor to be able to spend time with these people. All the competitors that were there and the guys that were in the contest but didn't necessarily compete, Tom and Tucker from Twin City Euro, they had some problems last minute with getting the engine running and just couldn't bring their engine to the competition, but they still showed up. They were still there to help all the competitors and cheer us all on. I've been in contact with Tucker this entire time, even up until just yesterday when he and his girlfriend decided to, instead of flying back, bought themselves a 1971 VW Bus out in California after the show, and they're driving that back to North Carolina. They rolled through yesterday; I helped them swap out a starter because the original starter just didn't want to click over off the solenoid. We got him some other parts as well that he might need for the journey home, and he and his girlfriend are going to make an adventure out of this whole thing. My hats off to them. Godspeed to them on their journey, and I'm going to be in contact with him, I imagine, for quite some time. We've become good friends, and that's what Volkswagen do—they just bring people together.

Our engine is on its way back to us from EMPI currently. We're going to pull it all apart, inspect it, see what needs to be replaced, and rebuild it to make it better. We're going to put some different heads on it that don't require as much work on the intake manifolds as far as getting the intake manifold matched to the cylinder head. I think we're going to go stage three heads instead of the D7000 heads. Instead of doing the thick wall 92 mm pistons, I think we're just going to go with the 94 mm pistons since they actually fit the head much better. Hopefully, they will fit the case. I'm pretty sure those cylinders are 94 at the case, not 90.5/ 92 at the case. Hopefully, that's the case—no pun intended. We'll probably have to replace the connecting rods because of the damage that one connecting rod took from the debris that went into the engine. We'll rebuild it, and that's going to go in a car. That's a great little engine, basically 150 horsepower and 150 ft-lb of torque. That's nothing to shy away from. Because it's that little horsepower compared to some of those other big numbers those engines at the competition put out, it's not a lot of work for that big of an engine to put out that little bit of a number. So that should be a cool-running and reliable engine that can go in a street car and drive enjoyably and safely down the road as most of us like to do, as most of us aren't driving down a drag strip all the time. Stay tuned, we'll see what the future holds for that engine. In the meantime, thank you for watching. I hope you've enjoyed this series on your end as much as I've enjoyed it on this end, even with all the timeline and time crunches and all the literal shrapnel and sparks. Like I did at the competition, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you broken engine parts, make some art. This is Sam at JBugs.com saying thank you all.