Tag Archives: Tech Stories

Making Formed Carbon Fiber Parts At Home! This Is Super Cool And We Want To Do It!

Mar 21, 2021OTHER, TECH, Tech Stories, Videos

Making Formed Carbon Fiber Parts At Home! This Is Super Cool And We Want To Do It!

We’ve featured Carbon Fiber fabrication videos from Street Bandito before, but this one is cooler yet. The process for building this small part can totally be replicated for something bigger, and other than the materials there are no special tools you can’t acquire pretty easily. This part is small, more decorative that structural, but ends up really nice and strong and is the first part he ever built himself. I dig it, and this video just makes me want to try it in my own garage. I’ve already been thinking I need an oven for the new shop in case I want to powder coat small parts or something, but this just cements the idea that I need it. An oven, a vacuum pump, and some materials and you are good to go. This is fun looking stuff and with the availability of resins and materials nowadays you can make virtually anything from Carbon Fiber.

What do you think? Would you try this at home?

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DIY Vice Grip Hack: Bet You Didn’t Know You Could Have Three Hands Did You?

Feb 07, 2021Hack of the Week, Tech Stories

DIY Vice Grip Hack: Bet You Didn’t Know You Could Have Three Hands Did You?

 

Customizing tools has been a part of my life since I was a little kid. Between my Dad and Grandpa, there was always some wrench being modified for a particular use, or some scrap being made into the one off tool you needed. My Grandpa was a welder, a mechanic, a builder, and a Jack of all trades, so he often had a job to do without the specific tools needed to complete it. Somehow he’d always have 90% of them, but the other 10% he’d either figure out how to live without, or make. It’s no wonder then that my toolbox has several wrenches, pliers, and other tools that have been customized to perform a specific task, often times for a specific vehicle in fact. For me, it was not only a matter of needing a tool right then, but also the fact that the specialty tools I made were usually too expensive for me to shell out good money on. But taking on old wrench out of the misc wrench drawer is cheap, relatively immediate, and arguably more fun.

So you can imagine that I tend to like seeing other tool customizations, or hacks, so I can file them away into my database of fun tool projects for later. In fact, I have a whole pile of them I want to try out when I get the new shop space done and I’ll be sharing all of those with you guys too. But I digress. This video is of particular interest because it is so simple and yet so useful. Vice Grips, or locking pliers, are super useful but this hack can make a pair even more handy than before, no pun intended.

Check out the video, it is short and sweet but will have you nodding as you see in your head how you’d use it.

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LT Asks: The Actual Cost of Turbocharging a Big Block 8.1: Should I have built an LS instead?

Feb 04, 20211320 Engine Tech, 1320 Spotlight, 1320 Tech Story, 1320 Videos, Apex Engine Tech, Apex Spotlight, Apex Tech Stories, ENGINE, ENGINES, TECH, Tech Stories, Videos, XL Engine Tech, XL Spotlight, XL Tech Stories, XL Videos

LT Asks: The Actual Cost of Turbocharging a Big Block 8.1: Should I have built an LS instead?

I’m a big fan of LS engines, and they are all the rage, but some people can’t stand them because they ARE so popular. Some think there is no other engine on earth that can compete with them. I happen to be a fan of horsepower, so I know there are a lot of great platforms for making it out there. With that said, I’m a Chevrolet guy to the core so I tend to lean towards Big Blocks, LS, and small-block Chevrolets. I own all three, in different vehicles, and I have plans for building at least one of each in 2021, including a possible turbocharged big block for a tow rig build. So you can imagine my intrigue when I saw that LT had a new video out with details on the costs involved in his turbo 8.1 build.

Keep in mind, that this project is a work in progress and that this 8.1 has had very little upgrades to the stock engine, as it will come out later and be built to make 1,000 horsepower to the wheels. So don’t confuse this with a build designed to see how much power you can make before it breaks. This is not that, and in this iteration it has very low boost.

Here is the description from LT. Watch the video and see what he thinks.

Everyone wants to turbocharge their car or truck, right? But the real question is what should it cost. If you can buy a turbo kit for your car or truck, the answer is simple, but if you have to build a one-off kit, the answer can vary widely but in this upload, I’m going over the real, out-of-pocket costs that I spend on Uglytruck. The second part of the discussion is should I have stuck with the 5.3 LS that was under the hood originally or was it worth my time to swap and turbo the 8.1?

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NHRA Insider Podcast: Rumors, Scoops, and Top Fuel’s Newest Team Owner