Richard Mead of RPS Diesel was tired of adding horsepower just to blow up another cast iron block and started looking for a solution. He helped design a 5.9-liter billet cylinder block that could achieve this goal and built this three-turbocharged billet 5.9-liter 12-valve Cummins engine, which is one of the fastest diesel engines in the northern hemisphere.
Diesel by this week
Along the way, north of Montana, outside of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is a small, under the radar, ultra-high level, innovative engine workshop named RPS Diesel. The engine design shop owned by Richard Mead is actually located in Sturgeon County, Alberta, but Edmonton is a city most people know.
Richard’s store, RPS, representing Richard’s performance solutions, may sound the alarm for the diesel crowd because he has been associated with Wagler competition products because both stores use the Street Fighter brand-RPS has Street Fighter engines, and Wagler has Street Fighter levers. According to Mead, the two stores are planning to host a diesel race between the United States and Canada in the near future. In addition, you may also know RPS Diesel, because the shop has one of the fastest diesel cars in the northern hemisphere.
"I have always been a fanatic, whether it's driving a car, a truck or a snowmobile—anything," Richard Mead said. "About 2002, a few years before I founded my own company, I started to help my partners play with things like old Cummins engines and pickups and improve their 12 valves.
"By 2004, when I started the company and quit another job, I was already a twin-turbo Duramaxes. I had one of the first EFI Live tuned twin-turbo Duramaxes in Canada, as early as 2004. After that, we have just begun to gain more and more big-name customers. We did 9.6 seconds with the common track in 2009, which was unheard of at the time. We have been participating in the competition for a long time, and then it just From there it snowballed into my own trailer for NHRDA and tractor traction."
The RPS diesel engine occupies 3,000 square feet. Family business. It is composed of Chief Technician Richard, Richard's wife and his son. Although small, RPS will be suitable for all three large diesel platforms-Duramax, Cummins and Powerstroke. This shop specializes in super high-volume street construction. Over the years, Richard said they have grown from a 500-horsepower driver per day to a 700-horsepower driver per day, and then to a 1,000-horsepower driver per day. Now they work with 1,400-1,500 rear-wheel horsepower drivers every day.
"We have many such companies, including Duramax and Cummins," Mead said. "Our focus is on the Street Fighter series motor, which is a wet block. Our latest version actually has a capacity of 2,000 horsepower."
Unlike many large new diesel companies that have a machining background and are designing engines on site, Richard is a professional engine designer and outsources almost all machining.
“I have a CNC workshop on the road that can produce all my blank parts,” he said. "I have an engine workshop in the city, responsible for all my work. The only thing we do here is design, test and assemble everything. I am an engine designer first. I am not a mechanic. I hired very A mechanic who is good at work."
Regarding the test, Richard said that RPS does not yet have an engine dynamometer, but the shop is building one. He said that because of 2,500-3,000 foot-pounds, they have historically not had an engine dynamometer. The torque produced by his high-horsepower diesel engine-past engine dynamometers couldn't handle it.
"We use a chassis dynamometer for testing," he said. "However, our favorite way to test is to use time intervals."
One of Richard's ultimate engines is a three-turbocharged, billet, 5.9-liter 12-valve Cummins, currently used for drag racing under the hood of his 32 Bantam modified funny car. After finally getting tired of blowing up cast iron blocks, he first started developing this engine in 2014.
"Going back to the NHRDA Super Street era, we had a heavy four-wheel drive truck, and we were tired of blasting a cast iron engine in half," Mead said. "When we started pushing these things above 1,500-1,600 horsepower, you separated a cast iron block and things got scary."
In order to repair the bombed block, Mead flew to Detroit to meet with LSM Engineering, which had a rough Cummins billet platform, which they might manufacture for the military.
"We made some design changes for the competition, modified some things, and we finally made a steel billet for 5.9 liters Cummins to get rid of many of the problems with cast iron blocks," he said. "LSM manufactured the module, but we made most of the design changes to the oil cooler, cooling system, and oil injection in 2014."
There are many unique aspects of Cummins construction, but one of them is the hybrid CP-Carrillo connecting rod/piston assembly.
"We have a very long connecting rod and a hybrid piston with a shorter compression height, so what we can do is have the lever ratio of the deck motor," he said. "Many pullers will build a deck engine. They will raise the engine by an inch to get a longer connecting rod to increase the connecting rod ratio. CP-Carrillo has built a hybrid piston and connecting rod assembly for us. Use super strong forged pistons, such as Top Fuel cars, and smaller pins than Cummins, but it allows us to run longer connecting rods, so we can install the entire package into the engine with the same deck height, which is very, very advanced .
"The rod is 8.415˝ inches. The pistons are hybrid forged with PVD rings, which absolutely changed the rules of the game. The compression ratio we are currently running is 13:1. We also designed wrist needles, and Trend made them for me. This is their H11 tool steel wrist pin with DLC coating. The wrist pin has a diameter of 1.358˝ and a wall thickness of 0.500˝."
Although the assembly of the piston and connecting rod is clever, Mead said they still use aggregate cranks, but this year he installed Winberg billet cranks.
"We have never encountered a crank problem, but the billet crank is slightly lighter. I encountered one, so we have to try it," he said. "We also run the Barnes dry sump refueling system, which is definitely the most important upgrade we have made to the car. For several years, this car has a wet sump. Every time we make the tires rattle, Will damage the motor. When we switched to a dry sump system, our bottom-end reliability problems were zero. There was no harmonic balancer on the engine—never."
For the cylinder head, RPS Diesel uses Hamilton 12 valve after-sales castings, which the factory has completely remodeled to truly optimize it through transplantation.
"We install our own super alloy intake and exhaust valves into the engine, customized by Ferrea or Victory," Mead said. "Then, we have our own PAC racing spring pack. This is actually a beehive with an ultra-light titanium retainer. We have Harland Sharp roller swing arms. They are really good to me. The putters are from Manton. We use Series 5 9/16ths exhaust putters and 1/2˝ intake putters. They are .188 wall putters. They are huge and very durable putters.
"Jesel made our lifts. Those are the Jesel keyway .937 roller lifts, they are incredible. We have put them in the car for four seasons, and we haven't even sent them for remodeling. They are not. Real. We also use custom M2 tool steel camshafts. It’s still a standard 55mm cam channel, and we have a custom billet Steed Speed exhaust manifold. It has the most advanced valve mechanism."
Speaking of the fuel system, Richard told us that he is using Dynomite Diesel injection pumps and Dynomite Diesel 5x.025˝ injectors, which are very small by today's standards, but RPS makes up for this in a clever way.
"The fuel system is based on a 13mm P pump," he said. "We have some real red necks, high-tech shit. The first thing the people at Cummins said is that you can’t generate as much power as we did with 13 mm-this is absolutely true-but it is broken. It has the advantage because we have to be cunning. We use so-called reactive compression ignition, which is where we mix methanol based on the mapping compared to rpm. It changes the reactivity of the fuel charge and adjusts our timing. We can Add a lot of fuel at higher speeds, and this is how we can generate so much power with such a small pump.
"For many years, I have been using this strategy. In the past, we used to be crazy about getting alcohol in. For many years, we have been playing with supercharged diesel engines and various billet parts and engine overheating and things like that, and we started mixing alcohol. , But we can never get it to work properly.
"In the past three years on my car, through a lot of research and development on dynamometers and traction belts, we have gradually used solenoid valves to control alcohol, just like a nitric oxide controller. I actually used my nitrous acid controller A map was constructed on the computer and a channel was operated-one for nitrous acid and one for methanol-they were adjusted according to the speed. This is a chemometric event that adds a lot of energy. We are currently using 600 horses of alcohol Put it on top of the diesel engine. This is how we reach our power level with such a small pump. This car has alcohol, nitrous oxide and diesel."
Mead said he will conduct additional reactive compression ignition tests soon and plans to rely heavily on it. In fact, there is a ratio between how much alcohol you can consume and the total amount of diesel. According to Mead, in the end you do encounter a platform where it blows out because the alcohol is too cold and you get too much stuff in there. If you cool the cylinder too much, then the diesel will not Will break again. Mead said that he basically uses diesel as a liquid spark plug for alcohol.
While creative solutions like reactive compression ignition help RPS a lot, so does the 5.9-liter Cummins triple turbo setting.
"Our turbocharger has three turbochargers-two BorgWarner SXE 480 atmospheric turbochargers to power the high-pressure turbochargers," he said. "Based on our quarter mile time and something like that, we can easily provide 1,700-1,800 horsepower for tires.
The billet Cummins engine is located in Richard's top fuel funny car with a modified body, which he purchased in the United States from 2015 to 2016.
"This is a funny car modified by the '32 Bantam, completely rigid," he said. "This is a clutch car. It has a two-speed Lenco and we run a four-disc pedal clutch customized by Crower. It has a Strange Ultra Case with a Toms differential. They actually call it 10 inches Ford, but it’s based on a 9-inch 40-spline 2.9 ratio, but they call it 10 inches. It’s like a nostalgic Nitro car differential."
Due to a large amount of ingenuity and a large number of test, data recording, measurement and quality components, RPS Diesel has gained huge benefits with this diesel setup. Richard said that this car often runs a quarter mile in 6 seconds. Now this is fast!
This week, the diesel engine was sponsored by Amso. If you have an engine you want to highlight in this series, please send an email to [email protected] to Engine Builder editor Greg Jones
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