[DeTomaso] Viper & others

[JDeRyke at aol.com]

The Viper engine has some little known peculiarities. A Chrysler enginer gave 
our Pantera chapter a talk on the car when it first came oiut. Someone asked 
how they got the V-10 to run smoothly, being an inherantly unbalenced engine. 
He said they programmed the EFI computer to inactivate a couple of cylinders 
once per firing, so the poor crankshaft thought it was a V-8. Above 1500 rpm (I 
think), this deactivation stops and you get full power but then, running 
loads from the chassis tend to mask the unbalenced shakes. I'm curious if they 
still set the computers up that way.
That was a more elegant solution than Buick came up with for their carbureted 
V6: no matter what the engineers   did at idle, the thing shook and frothed 
gasoline in the float bowls so it often stalled. Their final fix was super-soft 
motor mounts, oversized float bowls, lowered floats and let the sucker shake! 
Problem solved- as long as you didn't look too closely at idle with the hood 
up. The word "Buick" on the air cleaner was blurry and hard to read.... J 
Deryke


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