Third Party Testing: Crawford Billet Power Blocks (BPB / Manifold Spacers)

[nelsmar]

Hey guys!

So I had talked to crawford after they had posted on facebook showing gains with their intake manifold spacers and I had "called them out" on their claims. Shortly after the owner actually contacted me and told me he would send me a set at a heavily discounted cost and told me to try them out my self and prove him wrong. I like it when a company directly tells me to prove them wrong. Just to keep things clear I asked if Crawford would like the results back before posting to see if they wanted to make any additional tweaks in the event they wanted to further refine, but made it clear that I would be posting regardless good or bad. However Quirt told me nope, test them how they sit and just email him the dynos so he can see them and post if they are good or bad regardless and that he feels that they will do just fine. This sounded like they were A) Naive, or B) Quite confident. This was all dsicussed before I purchased them, and we were both on the same page that nothing was going to be thrown under the rug.

However after the testing today I am actually quite happy with the product. They did exactly as claimed, I saw the exact same results they did (within reason) and after doing some tuning the gains didn't dimminish.

Before moving on I want to make it clear that I did run out of time on the dyno as the install took longer than I had expected so I really only had 2-3 revisions on the tune and I know there is still more power on the table and as I was paying out of pocket for the dyno time and the car was being borrowed from a local its hard to justify forking a ton of cash out on something that I wont be using, once I saw the gains were real we started to clean up as the owner of the car was coming back for a full on tune with a header in the next few weeks so I felt that just simply finding out if the product was real was more important than finding out the exact limit of what they would give.

So lets start off with some small dynos. I forgot to plot the OEM AFR without the blocks but I can post the logs or overlay the logs for visual charting later this evening and have limited time to post this!

Testing Enviroment
The testing was done on a MAHA dyno. This dyno read incredibly low but is incredibly consistent. it is very common for stock cars to dyno 125-135WHP on this dyno. However I wanted to use it as I like this specific dyno for tuning reasons and even though it reads low the % difference is really what matters. So dont go rambling into the next thread saying "Oh they only made xxHP" because if I did thsi on a dyno jet you would get people rambling the exact opposite saying they made way more power than they actually will show on average for other dynos.

Most of the dynos were plotted in a way that gave 5HP / 5WTQ blocks. This squishes the dyno but makes it easier to read how much gain / loss per region. The final dyno was stretched to give a proper view of actual gains / losses.

All dynos are plotted using SAE J1349 corrections to compensate for the temperature throughout the day. The car was removed for install in the event the dyno was going to be needed however it was not touched, and we did not re-calibrate the rollers. So the event of having the HP skewed / tq shifted due to invalid calibration is not possible. This happens more than you think with dynos, if you sift through plots with people making low / high numbers and notice their max RPM you will see what I am talking about.

Baseline Testing
Now what I do for baseline testing is take the factory rom. I then open the rom and set the cam tables for low & high detonation to the same value. This will force them to stay consistent in the event of knock, or improper warm up. Our ECU has a number of timers and the ecu will use alternate cam profile maps depending on certain conditions. To keep things consistent run to run I put both maps identical to the higher powered one. This makes my gains typically lower than other peoples but I believe in proper data not bullshitted data. As I don't make money from doing this and I am doing it strictly to contribute to the community I could give less of a damn to make it look better than it really is. Not only that I disable the long term fuel trims for high load so that way during the actual dyno pull the fuel trims are deactivated and the ecu will run consistent from pull to pull. This rules out any "auto tune" that would cause the car to gain / lose power as we kept making pulls. I did this on both the tuned and untuned results to make sure things were consistent. The advanced multiplier was set to a 1.0 starting so full ignition advance was used right off the bat. 91 octane fuel from shell was used. I filled up shortly before the dyno to make sure the fuel was consistent.

Stock tune vs Stock tune + blocks
The stock car put down 130.2WHP at around 6500-6600RPM. The blocks put down 139.8 @ ~6550PM. So peak for peak we saw 9.8WHP, or 7.4% gain. The tq dip also saw noticeble gain averaging 2-5WTQ.

Lets compare this to crawford. They saw their largest gain @ 6359RPM. Their baseline was 187.88WHP (Corrected) and their post install was 206.11WHP. This is roughly 9.7%. Now I don't know what their testing method was but regardless of the fact I still saw a pretty substantial peak gain.I didn't verify my values at that exact rpm but I expect them to be at the 7.4-8.4% range which is still fairly close to their claims which to me says they weren't "fluffing" as much as people thought they may have been.


Edit: NVM found the plot of the baseline. You can see that the BPB actually ran Richer than the stock baseline by a hair. Typically false gains are given from running lean. This is a good sign.


Adding in tuned results
I tuned the stock car a bit on the street before the dyno the night before, and then did a few small tweaks in the dyno. The actual tuned + bpb is not as fine tuned and still has room to gain more throughout the power band. The gains in the lower RPM were shockingly close to my own tune up until high RPM and then it falls off considerably. As you can see with tuning nearly all of this fall off was removed and you were able to make very nice gains.

Lets look at the results @ 7300-7400RPM:
BPB w/o tune: ~116WHP
Stock: ~119WHP
Tuned: ~143WHP
Tuned with BPB: 140WHP

So untuned BPB vs Stock we were looking at ~2.5% loss. from the BPB
And once we re-tuned the car we netted ~ 140WHP.. This is ~ 20.7% gain from tuning @ 7,400RPM. I highly recommend getting a tune if you can afford it with this mod as it will really wake the car up at the top end post-tuning.

So pairing this mod + a tune really smooths it out quite a bit. I also know with further tweaking of the VVT I am confident i can get a hair more out at 6800+

Thick Solid: Tuned with BPB
Thin Solid: Untuned with BPB
Small Dashed: Tuned w/o BPB
Large Dashes: Untuned w/o BPB


Completely stock vs BPB + Tuning
The car baselined at 130.2WHP @ 6560RPM vs tuned + BPB @ 148.6WHP @ 6720RPM. So the total max HP point gain was ~14.1%. The largest gain was at ~7300-7400RPM at ~[b]16.6%[b] total HP gain.



Here is an alternate view of Stock vs Tuned vs BPB + Tuned to give you an idea of the gains / losses overall vs a stock car:


Closing Thoughts
Overall I am actually quite impressed with these. I almost wish they were a hair shorter to let me sustain the power band to redline but in reality the average gain due to their current height extension is actually quite wonderful. The average HP/TQ gain is quite impressive. Especially for untuned cars If someone isn't going to tune their car these gains are pretty much the best bang for the buck. Once you tune it the mid power band gains are not as substantial but it still adds up to giving a more balanced power band vs just all at a narrow RPM. After driving the car my self today and doing a quick tune I personally would use these on my own car if i wasn't FI, and would recommend them to people looking to get a more enjoyable NA experience. Just be careful when installing as you can easily drop something into the intake port of the engine. I wouldn't recommend this as a "first mod" if you have never held a wrench before. And it is also recommended to get an extra set of hands.

I felt the package came with everything nicely done, it wasn't smothered in logos or anything like that and looked subtle. You can barely tell they are installed. I will get some pictures during day light tomorrow to try to show you them installed but its really quite hard to see. The only thing I would say that I feel the kit needs is something for the rear block vent as the vacuum hose is a tad short for the reach and is stretched after install.

Also a big thanks to Crawford for taking the time to properly R&D this product. I can tell from the power gains that they must have spent some time dialing in the height and by just how much clearance you have for install it seems like this really wasn't a just "wing it" sort of deal.

Also I want to give a big thanks to Goodspeed Performance up in Scottsdale for lending me the dyno for the day. They don't typically operate the dyno on weekends and were just trying to help contribute to testing. They went out of their way to help and were in and out of the dyno room as they were busy working on cars but wanted to lend a hand to see if the product would really work and would just slip in to do a few pulls here and there between jobs. Thanks again!


Update: apparently there is a group buy going on over on Facebook ending April 4th: https://www.facebook.com/events/277229732435324/

[nelsmar]

Also the owner of the car is picking up a set of headers this week and will be back on the dyno for testing. So for those of you that were asking for paired headers with a catless header I will revise this post once I get it back on the dyno. Thanks @Lyzak for loaning me your car for the day!

[OmarGC]

Thanks Marin, you're the shit.

[protpibe]

Awesome info, thanks for taking the time to do this. I wasn't sure if the power blocks were just snake oil or not

[kmbkk]

Thanks for the testing! Why wouldn't you use them on an FI car, though?

[Luis_GT]

Awesome job @nelsmar

Theres a small typo though

Thick Solid: Tuned with BPB
Thin Solid: Tuned with BPB
Small Dashed: Tuned w/o BPB
Large Dashes: Untuned w/o BPB

Thin line should say Untuned

[FrsDuke]

I'm gonna have to wait for oft tunes for this, but it's very exciting. Thanks @nelsmar.

[captain_jack]

So why not use them on a fi car?

sent from your mom

[Captain Insano]

Originally Posted by nelsmar

Also the owner of the car is picking up a set of headers this week and will be back on the dyno for testing. So for those of you that were asking for paired headers with a catless header I will revise this post once I get it back on the dyno. Thanks @Lyzak for loaning me your car for the day!

Thanks for testing. Which headers for that next round of testing?

[FrsDuke]

Probably because the gains become negligible in a FI application.

[TwinturboCamry]

Alright who's going to make these outta plastic and shit for 99.99

[Turdinator]

What is with this forum and people asking for cheap knock offs? It's like you want Tony from FA20club back.

[Lonewolf]

@nelsmar

I know all this took quite a bit of your time...thanks for doing this

Glad to see Crawford back as well..

[StormTrooper]

@nelsmar I'd quote the issues I'm having reading your post but I'm on my phone and don't want to quote all of it or mess around.

Where is the 116 and 119whp coming from if stock is 130whp?

Some of your numbers don't make sense.