Van Dyne Engineering of Huntington Beach, California keeps it local when looking for valve springs to fit their big block Chevrolet engines used for offshore racing.
Building for the American Power Boat Association’s (APBA) Super Cat two-time World champion and 11-time Western Division titleholder 36-foot The Renegade, driven by Garden Grove’s Craig Ferguson, Stewart Van Dyne II and Stewart Van Dyne III (Tres) specify Tool Room valve spring material by Isky Racing Cams from nearby Gardena, CA. Read more…
One of the problems faced by race car designers is the conflicting requirement of keeping a low centre of gravity for the engine (and transmission), whilst keeping the driveshaft within acceptable values. Whatever the chosen method of coupling excessive angularity will lead to increased power losses and ultimately, failure of the joints.
In racing we rely much more on machined components than our counterparts in the arena of series production engine design - we need to make parts quickly, we need the flexibility to make swift design changes and we want to take advantage of the improved mechanical and fatigue properties that high quality wrought materials offer us compared to castings etc. Whilst we all want to save money, especially in these straitened times of financial recession, we have less financial constraints than companies who have to produce hundreds of thousands of the same 
As many might know to your cost, the cylinder head gasket is high up among those engine components to suffer the greatest stress. Often a weak point in some of the best engine designs, its unenviable task is to provide a robust seal between the cylinder head and corresponding crankcase for the combustion gases, oils and coolant, both between each other and the outside atmosphere. If that were not difficult enough, the component also acts in distributing the dynamic loads between the head and block and as a consequence, has a considerable influence on the forces 
The UN summit meeting in Copenhagen, COP 15, has come and gone. A meeting whereby 192 or so countries met together to fudge some kind of global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions yet again attracted that section of the environmental lobbyists who seem to be determined to press their cause via mayhem and violence. It is little wonder therefore that the authorities seeking to maintain law and order, and according to journalist types, threw a ‘ring of steel’ around the venue to safeguard those present. The connotation to all this is clearly one of strength and 
“Any time we need a 3/8-inch diameter pushrod with a 0.120 wall, we go to Manley Performance Products of Lakewood, New Jersey,” state Stewart Van Dyne II and Stewart Van Dyne III (Tres) of Van Dyne Engineering in Huntington Beach, California.
One benefit to building a maximum 510-cubic inch big block Chevrolet engine for American Power Boat Association (APBA) offshore racing, is the cooling. Because cold water constantly throbs through the block and cylinder head, there is very little fall-off in performance and very little micro welding in the ring lands to deal with.
Rather like the blood circulating around our bodies, the lubricating oil in an engine is fairly critical to its well being. For most of the time we don’t give it a second thought but it is only when things go wrong that people start paying attention. And for most of these the first thing they will notice is a reduction in oil pressure.
As an engineer and a power unit engineer at that, many might say that I have little need of a dictionary. And in truth, since the vocabulary of engineering terms tends to be so exact and rarely found in all but the most comprehensive of lexicological texts, for very many years I have simply done without. But it was while thumbing the latest version of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) - the concise version I hasten to add, and a present given to me only recently, when I came across the word ‘Siamese.’ Defined as ‘a native of Siam (now Thailand) or an old fashioned word for Thai, 
The continuously variable transmission (CVT) as used by Flybrid, is mounted between two clutches within the KERS unit. The clutches allow for disengagement of the CVT from the flywheel and the vehicle when not in use, and therefore minimises losses.
