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Singh Grooves

32K views 69 replies 12 participants last post by  BogiesAnnex1 
#1 ·
I have read a few posts on here about "Singh Grooves". All of the posts I have read are people talking about them that already know what they are. What I would like to know is when they should be used. Are they used to lower compression by running a larger quench area? How are they cut? What are they cut with? When should they be used? When they should not be used? Any suggestions or comments on them would be nice.
 
#27 ·
cobalt327 said:
If "fire slot" is in reference to the slots put in the domes of pistons- who runs domes anyway? Unless the domes are huge, there's no real need for fire slots, period, IMO. They are not there to do what the S-grooves do, anyway- the idea in the fire slot is to keep the chamber from being divided by the dome configuration and to allow a pathway for the flame to propagate through.

BBC pistons often will have large, flat "domes"- those are not what I'm talking about here. Think 12:1 small chamber SBC pistons.
I've seen them on flat top pistons too. But they are most common on large domes, extending away from the plug location as you have described.
 
#28 ·
Fireslots are used to prevent separation of the chamber by large compression domes near TDC, they aren't there to "squirt" A/F mixture at the spark plug which is what the Singh groove is supposed to do. Besides unless you have some huge compression ratio with a large dome no one requires fireslots on their pistons, its simply not required and is a bandaid fix for large compression drag engines from the sixties.

I find Singh's recommendation to run increased squish clearances a laugh particularly since essentially thats what his grooves are doing, I see no mention of how increasing the squish clearance improves mixture turbulence or increases burn speed...I guess because it does the exact opposite. :rolleyes:

Maybe we should all go back to running flat head engines with huge squish areas and 6:1 compression and join the fan club in India just to see his performance increases. :p

Here's his website BTW, apparently his grooves will solve global warming also...someone kill me now. :drunk:

http://www.somender-singh.com/

P.S. I would copy and paste some quotes from the website but they are so ridiculous and nonsensical they could be construed as spam. Read at your own peril...what a nutjob.
 
#29 ·
4 Jaw Chuck said:
Fireslots are used to prevent separation of the chamber by large compression domes near TDC, they aren't there to "squirt" A/F mixture at the spark plug which is what the Singh groove is supposed to do. Besides unless you have some huge compression ratio with a large dome no one requires fireslots on their pistons, its simply not required and is a bandaid fix for large compression drag engines from the sixties.

I find Singh's recommendation to run increased squish clearances a laugh particularly since essentially thats what his grooves are doing, I see no mention of how increasing the squish clearance improves mixture turbulence or increases burn speed...I guess because it does the exact opposite. :rolleyes:

Maybe we should all go back to running flat head engines with huge squish areas and 6:1 compression and join the fan club in India just to see his performance increases. :p

Here's his website BTW, apparently his grooves will solve global warming also...someone kill me now. :drunk:

http://www.somender-singh.com/

P.S. I would copy and paste some quotes from the website but they are so ridiculous and nonsensical they could be construed as spam. Read at your own peril...what a nutjob.
Henry Ford was a nut job too- doesn't mean his manufacturing idea wasn't a good one...

The extra quench distance doesn't make sense to me, but the groove idea could hold some water IMO. BUT as I already said its nothing an optimized chamber/piston combination wouldn't already have taken care of.
 
#31 ·
automotive breath said:
Nice work, did you get it running? Results?
Oh yea, I've had it running for most of the second half of this summer (it turns out it had other problems that caused it to blow the headgasket besides the obvious problem with the head, also realted to crappy assembly/machining practices which I fixed also).

Right now I have the best running "6.75 peak torque" Briggs L head powered lawnmower that I've ever seen. It was obviously different from the first start, where the governor couldn't keep the rpm down to anything that I felt was reasonable and had to bend the spring bracket to lighten the tension on the governor spring to keep the speed down.

It starts first pull every time, it runs much more smoothly than it did before, has much more power and I get more work done from a tank of gas.

To give an example, now I can run it full steam into overgrown (and I'm mean overgrown, the first run was after the mower was down a few weeks and it was 8-10" high and drizzling at the time) wet grass at it's fastest self propelled rate without it bogging down, what used to take 1:20-1:30 to do I typically get done in :45-:55min and before it took about a tank and a half of gas, now it takes 2/3-3/4 of a tank.

Honestly, the improvement overall is so dramatic that I'm really giving numbers on the conservative end of what I'm seeing, I'm not sure that I'd believe what I'm seeing if I wasn't tinkering with it myself, but part of the deal here is that those engines run all the time in the RPM range that these changes make a big difference in. The nice thing with doing it on a lawnmower is that I can make bigger changes faster on it (it takes only a few minutes to pull the head... there's only one cylinder...) so it's much easier to experiment with and figure out what works and doesn't quickly and get actual numbers (I measured, cc'ed, IR temp gunned everything which could have taken days on a car engine if this was my full time job, and weeks or more "just tinkering"). This lawnmower engine (as much as I absolutely hate them) taught me more about this stuff than messing with a dozen or more car cylinder heads.

I'm actually tempted to get another head for it and try to take this all a step further, since I'm THRILLED with the results and what I've learned from it, and now I'm thinking about what I could have done differently and how to test that/wonder how much gain there still is to be found. If for no other reason because I've found some much better inserts for the cutting head that I used to mill the head with that I want to play with (OTOH, I just used it to modify the supercharger for my brother's car...)
 
#32 ·
turbolover said:
Or at best you gain power and economy, at worst its a waste of time...
For the most part, NA, that is a safe way of looking at it (unless you cut into a water jacket or something, measure first), but it's nowhere near that simple on a turbo setup. I _still_ don't have hard numbers here (I think I promised AB that I would try to get them years ago... oh well, life gets in the way sometimes). It messes with the energy available in the exhaust to drive the turbine.
 
#33 ·
automotive breath said:
This is not meant to start an argument. My positive opinion is based on 6
years experience with this modification, have modified in excess of 100 sets
of heads and used this on my race cars and tow truck for the duration.


4 jaw chuck, what is your opinion based on?
You know, at this point I think I've been tinkering with this for almost as long (but not as extensively, haven't had time since I stopped working at the speed shop) as you have and have come to the conclusions:
- it definitely does something
- Singh's description doesn't seem to work, and I don't really think he has a clue why it works. This leads to some of the doubting by some people. Based on my initial reading and few exchanges with him I was not impressed either (honestly, I think a few of us here in the US that have experimented with it have a better idea at this point of what and why it works, but I'm not sure that anyone has posted an explanation that has covered everything that we've seen)
- the people that seem to have a problem with it are those that aren't going to try it, or if they do only care if it will do something in a range that it doesn' do anything in. I don't think that you're going to see any improvement that 4 jaw will be happy with at >5000rpm.

For me, experimenting with this, I don't find what you've seen with the assorted drag cars that you've posted all that interesting, OTOH, what you got on your suburban (which it seems like you're not all that excited about) is some of the most interesting stuff done with this that I've seen documented in any form on the 'net.
 
#34 · (Edited)
Silverback said:
...Right now I have the best running "6.75 peak torque" Briggs L head
powered lawnmower that I've ever seen.
Your critics will tell you that the porting and milling alone are responsible for the
improvements in performance. Many people feel that because you are
fooling with something they feel is controversial and unproven you should
have done a before and after test with the grooves only.

It really doesn't matter, nothing you or I could say or do would change the
opinion of those that know it won't improve performance. Even if you provided
decisive A/B test results, the validity of the test would be questioned.

Anyway what you have done was 1. Easy to do. .and. 2. Improved
performance over OEM. Isn't that what's hotrodding is all about?
 
#35 ·
Silverback said:
... what you got on your suburban (which it seems like you're not all that
excited about) is some of the most interesting stuff done with this that I've
seen documented in any form on the 'net...
As I posted many years ago the simple A/B test I did with my suburban was a
huge success. The reason I'm not excited about it is the benefits only show
up when I drive the truck un-loaded. When I hitch up my >7000 lb enclosed
trailer the benefits are no longer there. I can only guess as to why. The
problem is thats all I use the old truck for.

I'm disappointed in myself that I never took the time to modify a daily driver,
that may change soon.
 
#38 ·
automotive breath said:
Your critics will tell you that the porting and milling alone are responsible for the
improvements in performance. Many people feel that because you are
fooling with something they feel is controversial and unproven you should
have done a before and after test with the grooves only.
Yep, one step at a time, something like this:


and this:


;) :p

Yep, the other nice thing about using a briggs lawnmower engine is that I found that I can get the "good" headgaskets for $3.60 at the local Ace hardware... Cheaper than a $100 set of cometecs...
 

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#39 ·
automotive breath said:
Anyway what you have done was 1. Easy to do. .and. 2. Improved
performance over OEM. Isn't that what's hotrodding is all about?
You know, people seem to think you've gone too far if you hotrod your lawnmower (BTW, my old mower engine was 'rodded also, when the mower fell appart we found that my "little" push mower engine has enough power to make my brother's lawn tractor do wheelies even though it originally had less than half the hp rating that the original engine did).
 
#40 ·
automotive breath said:
As I posted many years ago the simple A/B test I did with my suburban was a
huge success. The reason I'm not excited about it is the benefits only show
up when I drive the truck un-loaded. When I hitch up my >7000 lb enclosed
trailer the benefits are no longer there. I can only guess as to why. The
problem is thats all I use the old truck for.

I'm disappointed in myself that I never took the time to modify a daily driver,
that may change soon.
Yea, actually I thought you had decent at least light towing numbers from it. Either way, you're fighting basic physics (hooking a big box weighing 7K lbs is going to hurt MPG no matter what you have), and second, that extra load and if I remember right you were still running the stock chip, took you from a good spot in the stock engine ECM tuning to a crappy place that doesn't play nice with the emissions devices.

I would bet that some simple replumbing (mostly he crappy egr setup on that engine) and a custom chip would change your mind there. Turning on "highway mode" in the tuning would really make a difference (GM built a leaner than stoich mode that used extra timing to compensate for the loss of power from the leaner mixture into the 80's and 90's ecm's that they were never allowed to turn on I suspect because they didn't play nice with NOx emissions. It can be sketchy and touchy with a stock engine, but I've found that a grooved setup is much more tolerant of not getting it quite right)
 
#42 ·
crussell85 said:
I guess my largest interest in singh grooves was to increase the quench area to reduce compression, in other posts they are saying that the grooves are decreasing the risk of detonation, is any of this true?
I'm not sure if you said it earlier or someone else, but I don't get "increase quench area to reduce compression." Depending on how you're defining it, grooving the quench pad either doesn't change quench area or decreases it, and if you increase the distance as Singh suggests you'll further decrease the effect.

Second, yes, groves seem to make the engine less detonation sensitive (that is where my 10% increase in compression on the briggs idea came from, generally those briggs L-heads do not like compression increases and almost never show any positive effects from it but I knew that I'd be safe based on previous experience with groves), but there are loads of other ways to skin that cat. I've run as high as 11.8:1 compression on an iron headed SBC with 87 octane without groves and without detonation problems. My DD in college was at around 10:1 (again, iron headed SBC that by the time I was done with it could average 35-37mpg highway, still crappy in the city though), and much of the time I didn't have the money for better than 87 and that thing ran reliably like that after some tweaking.
 
#43 · (Edited)
Closest thing to an actual dyno run I could find on the web, completely wrong type of load cell/device however and extremely inaccurate way to do any kind of testing...but he did it anyway...got to give him credit for that. :rolleyes:

Pretty meaningless output changes as a result.

http://www.herningg.com/singh/

Test report PDF;

http://www.herningg.com/singh/Engine%20Running%20Tests%20Analysis.pdf

How anyone could draw any kind of conclusions from a test that uses the incorrect type of load cell is beyond me.

Best quote I could find of Mr Singh's groove testing is this from a Popular Science article;

In November 2002 Singh actually received one such permission from a manufacturer to test his modification on its engines. The manufacturer was Briggs and Stratton, and the engines were two 149cc side valves. Singh borrowed $3,000 and drove the 500 miles to the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) test facilities in Pune, but day after day, his test was delayed. He waited in a cheap hotel for two weeks, pacing, smoking, burning money. “It was a very frustrating experience,” Singh says, wringing the tension from his graying temples with permanently grease-stained fingers. “Sometimes it was like a bloody test of will.”

Finally he was allowed to bring his engines and hook them to a Benz EC-70 dynamometer with a five-gas analyzer and a Benz gravimetric fuel-measuring device. A week later, he got his results. According to ARAI, at between 2,000 and 2,800 rpm, Singh’s modified engine used between 10 and 42 percent less fuel than its unmodified twin, with no appreciable losses in torque or power. And, as he suspected, it ran cooler too—as much as 16°C cooler.

This, it would seem, represented success on a massive scale. With record-high gas prices at the pump and intimations of global warming encroaching on the front page, the world’s auto manufacturers are investigating every option to simultaneously comply with federally mandated fuel-economy standards yet continue to feed the market for ever larger vehicles. This spring GM and Ford announced a joint investment of $1 billion to develop their own version of a six-gear automatic transmission already popular in Europe, to achieve perhaps a 4 percent increase in fuel economy. Singh’s invention, in contrast, offered five times that fuel savings.

Unfortunately for Singh, Briggs and Stratton wasn’t interested in fuel economy—it wanted better emissions. And according to the test, Singh’s modification made emissions slightly worse. Things looked dire: Singh had lost his only sponsor and blown his money on a test that was essentially useless.

“The problem is, it’s a side valve,” explains Steve Weiner, a 35-year Porsche race-tuning veteran and the owner of Rennsport Systems in Portland, Oregon. “Nobody’s been using those things in our world since the 1950s. Not even on lawn mowers. They’re hugely inefficient and dirty.”

According to Weiner, what Singh needs to prove his concept is a standard, scientific A:B test, on a standard engine, “preferably something mainstream—a high-efficiency ****box even—and dyno testing with a five-gas analyzer. Then he needs to take one of his modified cylinder heads, swap it out on the same engine, and dyno test that. A to B. Even if the emissions don’t go down a whisker, if there’s an increase in fuel economy—my god, that’s a win. If you can even find that, the world’s your oyster. Whether it’s valid in the U.S. or not.”

In short, what Singh needs to prove his ideas to the world is a test he can neither afford nor gain access to. It’s a simple fact, simple enough to diagram on a child’s chalkboard, and it’s driven him to the point of mania. He screws the green ring round and round his finger, then grabs himself by the face. “This bloody country,” Singh spits. “We have millions of dollars and millions of people for puja [a Hindu festival], but when one bloody inventor wants to get a simple engine tested . . .”
I suggest we redesign all the engines produced today back to side valve design engines to take advantage of this revolutionary technology, think of the savings! We could improve the fuel economy of a side valve engine up to 42% (caveat: in a 800 rpm range), what a concept!

The reality of course is we are into multivalve engines now with pentroof chambers and the output and fuel economy increases have doubled or tripled over side valve technology but who cares...we need grooves!

In case your wondering, grooved heads were tried in the Texaco TCP stratified charge engine in an attempt to get the lean mixture burning by using the groove to spread the flame front across the combustion chamber, this was patented in 1949. You can look it up, SAE has the drawings available. The patent wasn't really developed due to high emissons...mainly due to the grooves providing cool zones in the combustion chamber where excess HC accumulated and the burn rate was only controlled over a low range of engine speeds.

I will say this, if your interested in making your flathead Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine from a 3.5HP to a 3.55HP engine by raising compression and adding grooves to compensate for the increased tendency to knock...have at her...Mr Singh will be very proud and you could mow with ever increasing speed!

Oh wait...I have an overhead valve Honda engine in my new lawnmower and it uses half the fuel of the B&S flathead engined mower it replaced to do the same amount of work, has more available power, has bearings in the wheels that make it easier to push plus large rear wheels, is way way quieter and my eyes don't sting from unburned HC while pushing it...and cost the same $180 I paid for my first B&S flathead engined model back when I first got married 20 years ago?



Dang foiled again! Damn you modern technology...damn you! :drool:
 
#44 ·
Silverback said:
Yep, one step at a time, something like this:


and this:


;) :p

Yep, the other nice thing about using a briggs lawnmower engine is that I found that I can get the "good" headgaskets for $3.60 at the local Ace hardware... Cheaper than a $100 set of cometecs...
You can't take data from a flat head engine and transpose it onto an overhead valve engine. Flat heads have very serious issues with burn time and spark plug location. What the Singh grroves do is provide a burn path into the squish/quench zone of these type engines which somewhat defeats the purpose of this area by allowing the flame front to penetrate at a faster rate in the grooves. This reduces general squish/quench, but may be of some benefit from providing an aim of the squish specifically at the spark plug
rather than the more general squish more of less aimed at that side of the combustion chamber in hopes that something gets by the spark plug. I will admit that they seen to imporve idle quality in cammed engines, but that's usually not a feature we care much about and can solve that problem with multi-strike ignitions, albeit, that is the higher priced solution compared to grinding some grooves in the head.

Frankly, I went thru a period of playing with these things years ago and didn't see anything on the dyno nor felt anything in my sensitive butt that would cause me to view them as a useful exercise. I also don't see that they do any harm from the same data either, so I wouldn't discourage anyone from messing around with them. But all the data I hear about is touchy/feely, I haven't seen anybody back that up with numbers and as a PE, I'm looking for numbers.

Bogie
 
#48 ·
Silverback said:
I'm not sure if you said it earlier or someone else, but I don't get "increase quench area to reduce compression." Depending on how you're defining it, grooving the quench pad either doesn't change quench area or decreases it, and if you increase the distance as Singh suggests you'll further decrease the effect.

Second, yes, groves seem to make the engine less detonation sensitive (that is where my 10% increase in compression on the briggs idea came from, generally those briggs L-heads do not like compression increases and almost never show any positive effects from it but I knew that I'd be safe based on previous experience with groves), but there are loads of other ways to skin that cat. I've run as high as 11.8:1 compression on an iron headed SBC with 87 octane without groves and without detonation problems. My DD in college was at around 10:1 (again, iron headed SBC that by the time I was done with it could average 35-37mpg highway, still crappy in the city though), and much of the time I didn't have the money for better than 87 and that thing ran reliably like that after some tweaking.
do you mind sharing any of these tips/tricks/secrets on running that high of compression? If you don't want to post them public you could pm me.
 
#51 ·
I would certainly be interested in how you could run 11.8:1 compression in an iron head SBC using 87 octane gasoline running standard timing and get 35-37 mpg at highway speeds with a similar engine at 10:1 compression with 87 octane. What kind of vehicle, 1/2T truck, Camaro, full size Impala, Fiero with 2.23:1 gearing + overdrive?

Tell us the secret, special cam, carb, manifold, header? Please don't tell us the highway portion of the mileage test was all downhill?

Perhaps a Smokey Yunick type device?
Smokey Yunicks Adiabatic Hot air engine.

Inquiring minds want to know.
 
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