Why a "Bench" ???????

[fIEROWISEGUY]

I recently purchased the great Smoky Yunich autobiography/ racing / technical book set. What a life!

It's great reading, especially the technical stuff.

Now, one of the pictures showed a 4 cylinder Pontiac motor, (which I happen to race) on an engine stand. What was startling, was the large hole and hose flange in the oil pan, and I realized what it was. It was a complete flow bench!

Just think about it. Take a scrap block (it could even be cracked), remove the crank and pistons, cut a hole in the pan and braze or weld (or glue?) a piece of tubing on, the same size as the hose to the blower.

Put the head or heads on, intake manifolds, carbs, exhausts or headers. Now it becomes a matter of opening each individual valve.

Hmmmm. Maybe you could put an electric motor on the cam, and rotate it to measure dynamic instead of static flow. I wonder if there's any valvue to such a test?

Oh well, I'm going to build it. Thanks, Smokey. We miss you!

For what it's worth,

fIEROWISEGUY

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[bnelson]

If you read further in some of Smokey's stuff you will find that he did in fact motor the engines with a bunch of the internal components while having them connected to the flowbench. He goes on to say that they never found any benifit to doing that after much testing. If you look in some of the pictures of his flowbench you'll notice a wet flowbench along side it. This I would love to know more about. If you go to his website you'll see some pictures of it there too. I think it used the same vacuum source. Not sure what he used for fluid in it or how he trap the fluid once it went through the device he was testing. I thought I heard one time that wet flowbenches use some kind of dry cleaning fluid, since it has a similar specific gravity........but not sure on this. For me the fluid with similar s.g. and low or no flamability is the $64,000 question. Anybody have any ideas??

[bruce]

No doubt its a way of flow testing. But you will also see that he connected the block to his flowbench if I recall from pics I have seen. If you used only the one block then you would only be able to test parts that fit on that one engine and nothing else ie bigger engines or smaller ones, fords, chevy, imports or carbs. So basically you are limiting yourself for testing anything else?

Never stop thinking "outside the box" though . . .

[bnelson]

I think Smokey had lot's of blocks on wheels that he used for testing. I also think that he had a mounting plate on the bench itself for mounting a single head. I look at the website yesterday and the pictures of the bench are no longer up.

[MakingChips]

New guy here getting my feet wet so bare with me. The concept of flow testing with as much of the actual induction system is a great idea as long as useable information is obtained in the end.

The wetflow testing I have personally done to date is crude but it does show some interesting trends. I at some point this winter will be diving deeper in wetflow (no pun intended) and thought of going as far to put a carb on the intake with the bowls full which I feel would be as real world as it gets.