Rod's using never break under compression. It's usually the reciprocating weight on a one stroke that is not firing where the Piston weight and pin weight has to be overcome brought to a dead stop and pull back down the cylinder. The rod brakes under pulling this weight load down the cylinder after stopping it and then accelerating it back down. That's been my experience over many years
@@jimross1980 yes it’s amazing how some of these engines can turn the RPMs that they do when that piston and Rod has to come to a dead stop then and go in the opposite direction it’s truly amazing
Without a doubt it was a metallurgy issue. At least for that hp level. It reminds me of working at my steel mill. When we started running high carbon steel and the chemistry was off along with our coiling temps for that grade the strip would shatter like tempered safety glass. Watching 60,000 lbs of steel shatter like glass is sight to see. It looked like that box of rod shards you were holding.
Do you think it could be a combination of metallurgy and harmonics? I wonder if it hit a weird frequency that caused them to vibrate plus the metallurgy issue.
Love the no bull shit test. And the NO blame game on the other rods. They can not handle the power and that is it. Live and learn. That is what makes a person a man or woman. As we say in the north salt of the earth. It is not about the money it is Steve’s integrity that counts. Keep it up steve.
Had the pleasure of meeting Mike (MGP) and toured his shop back in the day when he was starting out, great guy. When we were broke we would put over 100 passes on his rods in a 632 nitrous engine, never one issue.
I've never seen aluminum shatter like that. There has to be a manufacturing screwup. It shattered like magnesium are a flawed cast rod. Thanks Steve for all the information and time you spend videoing and editing.
The amount of spring back that rod had when you released the tension on the press was impressive!!! And I’m sorry, but I saw that coming with the hammer, and couldn’t help but laugh 😂
thank you for going into such detail about the rod failure. I'm with the guys saying it was a metallurgy issue.. someone had a bad day at mill and added the wrong metal or something along those lines
Nice job Steve. I agree that the material used to make your rods is a superior material to the one that you tried. Hopefully that Rod manufacturer will improve their material down the road. I’m learning and that’s a good thing.
I don't believe that you have to justify to anyone the rods that destroyed your last motor were not up two the task. You are a premier engine builder and your content is greatly appreciated.
Almost broke a wrist and press in one vid to prove its not a me (Steve) problem 🙏🙏🙏🙏✊✊✊✊ truly dedicated to the craft of quality products and services...... absolutely the greatest doing it right now and much appreciative of the knowledge you kindly share 💯💯💯
Years ago I work as an engineering tech. One of my tasks at the time was to do destructive testing. We had several machines that were very effective for testing tensile and compressive strengths of many different materials. The sledge hammer test wasn't one of them..... lol We had a Rockwell hardness tester which, of course, measured material hardness on the Rockwell scale. One material of interest was BILLET ALUMINUM. Starting with the material as it came straight from the foundry as the base test , and recording successive predetermined test points as the material was heated , cooled etc. The aluminum ALWAYS became more brittle the more it was heat cycled. Tensile strength in most cases wasn't effected as much as hardness was. Not a linear curve as we first thought would be the case. thanks for the vid. Steve 💪
Its good that you explained that the connecting rods that disintegrated are NOT the same brand that you use in your other / customer motors. I do hope that you share the details of the metallurgy report before you put this subject to bed. Enjoying your informative videos.
The biggest problem with the mechanical breakage (locking up)) theory is that that very unlikely scenario had to occur in all 8 cyls within a few milliseconds in order for a simultaneous failure to occur. So you take the odds of that happening, we'll say 1000 to one, multiply that by eight (because we need 8 failures) and then we try to factor in the odds of all eight failing exactly at the same time- and we end up with a scenario that makes winning the lottery, getting struck by lightning (and surviving unscathed), and hitting 18 holes in one all on the same day look like an absolute cakewalk. Yeah, there are millions of things that in theory could happen, but you have to look at the odds of those things occurring not only once, but eight times simultaneously. That being said, I still plan on buying a lottery ticket.
Honestly man, I think you've explained it plenty. If people don't understand after the first videos. Let them re watch. Lets get back to making motors and engine dynos. Love your work man! Your one of the engineers that make me strive to be better! More Powa Baby!
He’s building a channel. Finding things to make content with. Lot of money in RU-vid! I know he’s been at it before.. but he’s had a big influx of subscribers and he is trying to capitalize on it!
@@nsboost totally understand that. But how much can you beat a dead horse. I would hate for him to become the blown rod guy. He explained it way plenty. Let's move on to bigger and better things. Sweep the rods into the dust pan. Or get them shipped off already.
that type of catastrophic shattering of 8 aluminum rods you defiantly pushed the material beyond its capability... cool as hell brother... keep up the great work....
Steve you make and build phenomenal engines and engine parts alike so anyone who has the time to throw any shade at you needs to get a clue. I'm not a professional mechanic by far but I do know quite a bit about turning wrenches and do know a bit about building engines. I work with hazardous waste/substances which entails knowing intricate chemical properties of the materials so I know for a fact that the materials you use when designing your parts and engines from a huge block of BILLET aluminum are top notch. Let them talk and hate because they are just envious which is one of the greatest sins🤣. Oh well, I love watching all your videos especially because I always learn something new. Keep em coming! 👌🏼💯🇬🇺
@@kensmith8832 true but I think OP meant cast into the shape of a rod, as apposed to cast into a sheet of aluminum and then CNC machined finished into a rod. Both are cast, but probably have very different metal densities. But Zak is right there are parts of that rod where it looks like it was cast in a mold, and doesn't have a great deal of uniformity.
@@DodgyBrothersEngineering You are right about cast to shape vs a block, but both generate a ball shaped grain that allows for this kind of failure. If the rod was machined from an extruded bar, the grain structure would be elongated.
Hey Steve. You've got that thing loaded with 60,000 pounds. You might not want to put your fingers in there. If it let go those bearing plate would jump up and smash your fingers.
Its understandable, being an engine builder, to explain vendor product failure that could impact business. Good job. Admit nothing and deny everything is common with producers of products that fall short . Every result is a result especially during cost/fail analysis....live and learn .
Shuda called it Can I break my wrist. Gotta suck when your own junk goes out the oil pan for all to see. Good job explaining the failure mode and figuring it out. The shredded AL tells the story.
Hopefully you talk about the metallurgy report when that comes in. Thanks for the in-depth detailed explanation. Appreciate the videos and your work. Thanks
I have seen pictures in old text books of a rod in a vice where a pipe in the pin hole could twist the rod 90 degrees. There is a lot of science in different rods for different engines.
Right on what I was thinking the cause of failure was. I posted that somewhere in the second video of this series. May not be bad rods, but not enough rod for this SMX. Shanks for taking us along on the journey Steve.
The materials remaining of the failed rod looks exactly like a cast/pot metal which is never going to have the strength needed for rods period.... a billet grain structure and proper heat treating is a must...
An over hardened rod will have a higher tensile strength than a properly hardened rod, but the toughness will be much lower. Glass is incredibly strong but very brittle.
As a former Thermal Spray Operator I’m stoked to hear you’re getting metallurgy done. I believe you’re correct with the hardness issue. Are they doing a full cut and polish?
When did the explosive rod manufacturer decide the HP capabilities for their rods? I don't think if they gave you specs to show the rods would not handle the power in your engine you would use them just to prove their point...
the guy claims steve's 4k hp engine was the most they've ever seen. from what i can tell they sell sub 2k hp rods a lot. this was a beta test for them. the guy is hating this negative exposure, btw. posted a huge response on their facebook. i'm not going to name names, but you can tell the brand from one of steve's earlier vids.
@@jerrycann6374 He wasn't unsuspecting. Steve went into the test eyes wide open. It was an experiment and the experiment failed. Now they go back and analyze what happened and fix that issue and try to break the new ones. That is the whole process of racing. You don't get from a model T to Formula One without breaking tons of parts. It just so happened that this failure was very dramatic and highly visible.
@@TheKajunkat if Steve knew he was installing rods that would not survive then why was he surprised at the outcome? You do install parts in an engine that you know will fail, then install that engine in a car and then head to a track to race. If you watch the build Steve chose those rods due to the availability of the rods he usually ran. The "new" rods were also more expensive. Steve never stated or implied he was testing those "new" rods.
@@jimmyneal1988 he’s said the brand multiple times in videos before it got to the point that he had to watch what he said to avoid it being possible to consider it bad mouthing the company by saying the name when talking about the poor quality
The rod manufacturer may have received a batch of rods with a dodgy heat treatment. I really doubt the manufacturer would attempt to heat treat them himself (if they did, they were truly to blame). He either machined them and sent them out for heat treatment or machined them in the heat treated condition. Either way, I wouldn't be so quick to crucify the manufacturer without the facts.
Darn, that is impressive! Getting all those fragments, sure seems like low grade cast (aluminum) alloy, getting lots of microcracks, and then just letting go. Scary, not sure i would like to have such in my engine.
Even low grade cast aluminium would still bend _some_ but this stuff didn't. This really is high-end material, but completely the wrong choice for the application.
@@Hydrazine1000 Agreed. It probably has great fatigue characteristics for an aluminum rod, just not fit for 4000hp @ 8500rpm. And to be clear the manufacturer doesn't claim they are. They have a good track record at 2000hp apparently though.
For everyone saying those rods were brittle due to quenching, alluminium doesnt work like that. Contrary to steel, if you cool it while it's red hot it gets softer and squishy. Nontheless all those shards looks like a brittle material. Probably it was not pure alluminium but some sort of alloy easier to mold like zamak or similar, that are in fact pretty brittle.
Pure aluminum would make a very lousy rod....too soft. Any aluminum tough enough to work as a connecting rod is for sure going to be an alloy of some sort. My only question about the broken rods are did they shatter under compression or tension? People saying a rod is rated for 'XXX' HP would depend on how that power is being made. NA motors rely on displacement and rpm...and it's the rpm that normally hurts the rod at the end of the exhaust stroke when the piston needs to be stopped then pulled back down with no compression pressure pushing it. Supercharged motors don't need to rev nearly as high to make the same power....so the tensile forces on the rod will be less while the compression forces much greater. To actually compress a rod would take a LOT of pressure..but on Steve's crazy motors maybe that is the higher force? For sure the rods that failed were too brittle for the job at hand.
They were definitely heat treated and alloyed, just not the quench and temper treatment typical of carbon steels. Alloyed aluminum alloys are typically age hardened (precipitation hardening, either artificial or natural). The designation for the type of heat treatment used is the "T" in the alloy designation (6061-T6 aluminum material is the most common aluminum alloy, I'm not saying that was what these rods were made of). My guess is that the alloy used was age hardenable and spent enough time above 240F inside the engine to continue to harden and lost ductility until they were no longer able to withstand the system stresses. Either that or they were over aged and just got to their ultimate tensile stress level on that particular run. No way to know unless Steve discloses the alloy and heat treatment used in the "brand X" rods.
@@TheKajunkat Brand X (though you can figure out who they are by looking at the rod markings visible in part 1 on the wagon engine rebuild video) used "a proprietary alloy" which they claim has a 35% higher yield strength than the competition. With "a strength-to-weight-ratio on par with titanium". That isn't typical for precipitation hardened aluminium, that suggests severe cold work hardening. The latter would nicely explain the brittle fracture mode too. So-called overageing can happen with precipitation hardening alloys, and that does reduce the ductility somewhat, but it does not make the material fracture as if it were plain cast iron.
Hi Steve, thanks for the awesome videos! You may have covered this before, but just wondering if you have tried titanium rods? Obviously lots of pros and cons... cost would be astronomical, and if something ever did let go it would probably do some severe damage to the block. Super strong and lightweight though etc. Thoughts?
Thanks for showing what a FANTASTIC rod looks like!! That is a VERY well made billet aluminum rod!! I cried breaking a nice rod when I could have put that in my old school small block Chevy!! HAHA!!
i still think that harmonics had a big part to do with the rods exploding, like for example with glass and a note, it does the same thing and its also happens suddenly, i know there are balancers for this but when a product is stressed beyond its limit, it blows
Sorry, it's not harmonics. The natural frequency of an aluminium rod that size is about 15 to 20 kHz. 8000 RPM is 133 Hz. Off by at least a factor of 100.
On a crystalline or microstructural level, aluminum is way too "squishy" (even the highly alloyed and heat treated varieties) to allow that type of failure mechanism. Also, as stated in other posts, the natural frequency is way up there and you would have to maintain it for a much longer period of time at a steady frequency to build enough amplitude to cause a crack to form. The engine was accelerating so the frequency wasn't stable (it was rising). Good thinking but not in this case. This failure was due to a heat treatment issue, such as over aging, which will be revealed in the metallurgical analysis.
@@TheKajunkat If anything, this material was probably cold worked to within an inch of its capability, hence the high yield strength (it _did_ survive 6 full passes) and brittle fracture mode. This wasn't some production error, I think, this was the wrong material for the application.
@@Hydrazine1000 I would agree if they were forged but I think he stated they were billet rods (in which case the cold working would be really shallow under the milling tools). You would also expect the cold working to be concentrated in the areas with the greatest working and see most of the failures there. These rods had failures initiating all over the place and fragmenting into tiny paritcles. The material was embrittled throughout not just in the cold worked areas (if they existed). They were probably over aged (common and easy to do) or less likely, the chemistry of the alloy was off (really difficult to do with today's super tight manufacturing processes).
Steve, would enjoy learning more about your background and journey with high performance racing engines, where you started, who you worked with, why you decided to open your own shop etc. Love the vids. thanks
On the grain structure: It depends on the orientation of the material in the machine's fixture prior to the machining (manufacturing) process beginning. We can load a block of AL in the machine to cut the part at any angle to the grain structure's orientation, including zero (in alignment) orientations of L-T, T-L, T-S, S-T, L-S, S-L... Interested in what the FEA metrics state aside from the obvious being the load exceeded material design parameters. It would have been nice for the rod manufacturer to tell you that, "Oh by the way, don't go anywhere near the 3000 HP level with these or they'll fail catastrophically" before you installed them in the wagon's SMX. We live, we learn. Keep up the great work and give the doggo a solid belly rub for us! Cheers! 👍
The exploded rods look like they where made out of old Hyundai and Geo engine blocks and heads you know the ones that look like aluminum styrofoam. They must have made them with the slag that you scrape off the top when you melt aluminum lol. I've never in 53 years seen a engine eat every rod in it and have just crumbs of shards in the pan.
Hello Steve, you definitely have a valid point that due to the revs continuing to smoothly climb before they all let go & exploded, that a possible rod clearance issue/jam under the piston crown is not the reason. I agree entirely that this is a material grade issue 100%. Those MGP rods a super tough 👌....Great video & content. All the best.
It would be virtually IMPOSSIBLE for all rods to grenade at the exact same time due to over powering them. You could try to make it happen and it wouldnt happen in the time remaining in this universe.
100% the rods that shattered were more than likely heat treated and then immediately quenched from high temperatures. Causing them to be extremely brittle. I'd be willing to bet if you tried the same test in your press with a rod that shattered it would fracture under load not bend
Correct, but they are aluminum rods, and you don’t heat treat aluminum. Those are 6061 AL rods. Bought the only thing you’d do is nitrite treat them. If you heat treated them, they’d just be molten AL
If you heat aluminum and you don't exceed transformation temperature of alluminum and subsequently quench the material it will harden. And yes they do heat treat 6061. By multiple processes. Have at the internet. Good day
Great series of videos thanks Steve, much appreciated. When you did bend that good old rod, something that really got my attention was how much spring or elastic strain it had in it as you released the press. That is obviously an incredibly strong alloy and still capable of being bent (not breaking) if enough force is applied.
Well the math is complicated, but speed of movement the downward force heat vibration etc.. and muddle it up in a muddler and start writing out LARGE on a napkin. But nothing compared to a top fuel engine detonating rocket fuel on top of the piston and making 2-3 times that.
@@Scootermagoo I was impressed when I calculated that a small 75mm piston, making 180 psi of compression while cranking is puting 0.5 tons of pressure on the rod and the same pressure into the head, and head studs.
The "other guys" now require you to tell them your estimated hp before they will sell you rods. To be fair, the other guys have been in business for quite a while without issues, but to a much lower hp market.
Still tend to believe they saw a frequency.. resonant condition that caused them,,all 8,, to shatter at critical speed for that rod material. Thanks for sharing available info.
I think it was some type of heat treat or material issue. Those rods were crazy brittle. I have never seen a rod burst. The whole point in aluminum rods is to take shock.
Good stuff Steve! Irrespective of what anyone thinks about either of the brands of rods, this type of content is just super interesting to people who like to build engines.
Those rods are some bad mother truckers!! The rods that shattered might have a lil to much nickel in them ... I would stick with the bad mother rods!! Enjoyed it Steve!! 💥💥👊💥💥
wow after as nice as you have been about those rods trashing your motor and their failure.. they say that too you...they knew what hp you run ...they had to.. otherwise they would not have offered those rods up to you.. they wanted to be able to say "Hey!! Steve Morris uses our rods.".. man .. i would tell all the racers out there.. never use them because that lack of class and not taking responsibility for their defective product.. if anyone knows what rod manufacturer that is please let me know.. i do not want to do business with them ever. that was metal failure at it's finest(worst?)...Steve I will one day buy a motor for my truck from you.. just because of the class and patience you have shown with these disreputable people. my thanks for all the info concerning this failure and my thanks in general for all of your content. this old dog has learned a few new tricks. be well and be safe.. cant have you breaking a wrist now LOL
MGP makes a great set of rods. I have used them in customers builds before. 300 to 600 runs before noticeable need to replace. A shirt order will be coming soon from me. Great video
Only difference is the force applied by the press took a few seconds. The force applied to the rods in a running engine were applied in a single multi thousand pound blow in milliseconds..... Multi ton blow to be more precise. In addition it might be vibrating at the same time. I'm a flooring installer and my comment is a total guess. Nope, didn't sleep in a Holliday inn either. 😁 Love to see you take a brand new rod from the blown up engine manufacturer and put it through the same experiment on the press.
That is super impressive there, Mr. Morris! The issue w/ the other set most definitely seems like a metallurgical one. You owe us nothing, btw, but the fact that you are willing to go to these lengths speaks volumes, man. Again, great vid. Hope your wrist is okay. God bless!
Thanks for going the extra mile. I think you can tell who the nerds are sir from the comments. Agree with others the metal urgent would be would be interesting, And thank you for doing that. I wasn't expecting you to go that far. Again thank you for doing all of this.
The manufacturing consistency of the brand X rods is pretty impressive. For all of them to go at the same time is crazy consistent. Probably really good rods for s smaller build.
I think most of us figured out on the blow up video that it was bad rods at this level. I would say, on any level with the way they shattered like glass.
