Dodge Challenger Forum

Pistons are one of the hardest working components of an internal combustion engine, where temperatures inside cylinders can reach over 1,800 degrees F. Early pistons were of cast iron, but there were obvious benefits for engine balancing if a lighter alloy could be used. To produce pistons that could survive engine combustion temperatures, it was necessary to develop new alloys such as Y alloy and hiduminium (high-strength aluminum alloy), specifically for use as pistons. A few early gas...

It’s a fact of life- cars make noise. Inexplicably, there are those in this world who build houses next to major freeways and then complain about the speed of the vehicles going past. There are those who build houses next to airports and complain about the excessive noise. Just as there are those people, there were those who decided that cars were too loud and needed to shut up! This presented car companies with a problem. Their engineers were telling them that for maximum efficiency,...

An engine control unit (ECU), also commonly called an engine control module (ECM), is the brain of your car. It is the main reason that we are now in the second era of muscle cars, despite restricting emission regulations. The ECU controls a series of actuators on an internal combustion engine to ensure optimal engine performance. It does this by reading values from a multitude of sensors within the engine bay, interpreting the data using multidimensional performance maps (called look-up...