Quote Originally Posted by winfred
i'll only say **** happens when it happens, i've seen detonation mulch cast pistons in stock na motors in bmw volvo and mercedes, kinda like no2, it's not if something fails and it runs lean, it's when and all the sudden the oilpan has holes in it or you blow the valves out the tailpipe. didn't pat p run well over 20psi on a couple hundred thousand mile stock long block? as long as it gets all the fuel oil and water it wants it'll tolerate much abuse, it's when the wife fills up with piss water or you get a bad tank of gas and a sensor goes **** up in the wrong way that a safety net no mater how small can be a life saver. do not take this as any kind of attack or bad press, it seems that this has gotten personal on both sides of the argument, both sides have good points
The thing is, Winfred, that if a sensor goes bad or you get a bad batch of fuel, etc. at the first sign of detonation you remove load from the engine.
A friend of ours who built his own system did plenty of failure testing for us(whether he knew it or not) in that he (knowingly) pushed his E28 535 hard, with sustained detonation, over and over. Finally a ring land cracked and he had the incentive to install the newer engine he really wanted in the car. I have had my engine detonate many times for seconds at a time while going through the process of tuning. This was with a Saab APC system installed. As I stated before, these knock control systems need to be tuned to the specific engine. You need to put some real effort into damaging an M30 with detonation. Yes, things can happen. You can easily burn valves on an NA engine if you run it too lean. You can break pistons in a turbo engine with sustained detonation. You drive into a bridge abuttment if your steering fails. Your perfectly tuned/maintained, garage kept E34 turbo can get hit by a meteor. Sometimes life just hands it to you.
The kit does what it was designed to do very well. Can more stuff be added to enhance it? Sure. It is up to the customer to decide how far to push things.