Sunday, November 23, 2008

Musings of an Uneducated Man

I barely escaped from high school. I took no algebra, no science classes, no foreign languages. Just shop, necessary classes for graduation and various yoyo courses. I may have ended up with a "C" average, but I doubt it. All of this in spite of the fact that I was tested in grade school, because of some unusual talents that I displayed, and was found to have a higher than average IQ.

I digress.

I was watching the Speed Channel this morning, eating my bowl of "Count Chocula" and listening to some guy telling me how performance can be improved by painting the underside of an intake manifold with white paint. According to the expert, white reflects heat and keeps the incoming air/fuel charge cooler, therefore, denser and as my Hawaiian buddy sez, "Mo bettah, brah."

Nice try.

Firstly, colors refect or absorb radiant heat, such as sunshine. Put a black object and a white object in the sun and it's easy to see that the white one will be demonstrably cooler than the dark one. Put the same objects in the oven, set it at 350 and check them in an hour. They will both be 350 degrees. In an engine, the friction, and combustion heat will transfer to all parts of the engine regardless of their color, just like the oven. Some areas will, naturally, be hotter than others. The exhaust manifolds will be much hotter than the intake, but not because of their respective colors. Additionally, colors do not exist in the absence of light. The inside of an engine is black. You can paint it pink if you like, but in the complete darkness of a lifter gallery, it is still black.

Maybe you know something that I don't, but for now, I believe this to be pseudo science, like concrete sucking the life out of a battery.

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