This is it. The leather seat grips your back as hard as your hands grip the wheel and the tires grip the road. The pavement is your playground and nothing can break the connection you have to its twists and turns. Your mind is calm, but calculating, guiding the wheels through every turn with finesse as the headlights cut through the darkness. Smooth is fast, and this car is certainly smooth. When you finally coax yourself to go home, stepping out into the cool night air, you think to yourself, “This is it.”
When early man wanted to cut something, he beat two rocks together until one of them was vaguely pointy and sharp. I imagine there were probably a lot of smashed thumbs and whatever the equivalent of cursing was to a caveman. Over thousands of years, humans developed new ways of cutting materials (and themselves). The Egyptians created copper saws, early Europeans learned how to harden iron, and the advent of steel led to stronger, more efficient saws. Then, in the 1880s, George Clemson perfected the hacksaw, and bike thieves all over the world rejoiced.
When the designers at Chrysler were creating the Jeep Wrangler, they spent hours tweaking and finessing every line: the proportion of the headlights to the iconic seven-slot grill, the height of the bumper from the ground, and the curve of the fenders. Everything. The amount of passion that was … Continue Reading ››
There’s nothing quite like hearing the roar of an engine mixed with the whir of rollers spinning under your wheels, all while you watch the line on the graph climb. Running a powerful car on a dynamometer (dyno) is the epitome of instant gratification for gear-heads. Here at Mishimoto, we use our dynos on a daily basis. From all-wheel-drive (AWD) hatchbacks, like the Ford Focus RS, to the high-horsepower, rear-wheel-drive Chevrolet Camaro SS, and even trucks like the Nissan Titan XD. Almost every vehicle we bring in … Continue Reading ››
Internal combustion engines are essentially controlled bombs; air and fuel combust to drive pistons and crankshafts. One byproduct of this violence is power, but there are darker horses to contend with. During combustion, high pressure on the top side of the piston pushes combustion gasses, as well as droplets of oil and fuel, past the piston rings and into the crankcase. This mixture is known as “blow-by.”
