Lavon Miller, the owner of Plain City, Ohio’s Firepunk Diesel, has been building and testing engines for years now, but he never had one blow up on him like this six-cylinder diesel did on Thursday, which he got up to 2,200 horsepower before things went south. He’s still investigating exactly what went wrong.via(jalopnik).
source: jalopnik / image : Bruce Wilson
The triple-turbo, 6.7-liter Cummins is about three years old, and has gotten around 140 psi of boost, Miller told Jalopnik, and has, “seen a good bit of abuse.” But that doesn’t quite explain the explosion, Miller said.
“There was something that happened inside the engine right before it came apart,” Miller said, adding that he and his team at Firepunk are looking at the video frame-by-frame. One early suspect? A firing failure that could have ignited a companion cylinder.
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Miller says they’ve cracked a block before in engine testing, but, “We shouldn’t have had a block failure.We’re just glad this happened in the controlled environment of a dyno room, and not out on the road or at a drag strip event. Can you imagine the mayhem that flying engine block would create?
