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Swamp’s: Who We Are, What We Do |
Swamp’s Diesel Performance is a
partnership between Jonathan Ryan, aka “Swamp Donkey” and Dave
Armstrong, aka “Golfer”, with our “nicknames” being our user names from
The Diesel Stop web site.
In short, we are gear-heads to the core. Neither one of us has a degree
in engineering, any ASE certification, or any type of Ford factory
training. We are just two Power Stroke owners who started building
hard-core performance parts for our own trucks because no other company
was making the things we wanted and needed.
We first got to know each other on-line on The Diesel Stop forums in
September of 2002 when I posted a series of three articles on how the
7.3 Power Stroke injector worked, and how to modify them yourself.
During this time, I lived in southern-most Texas near Brownsville, and
Dave lived near Nashville, Tennessee.
In August of 2002, at the beginning of a lengthly illness that left me
unable to work for close to three months, a forum member in Oklahoma,
“rwoody”, gave me an injector and said “Take this home with you and see
if you can take it apart and see how it works.” So I did.
For over two months I sat in my apartment with a micrometer and a
notebook and (as much as my illness allowed) studied that one injector
until I knew every last detail of what each individual part did, how
they worked, why they worked, and what could be done to make them flow
more fuel. I measured every part down to the last 1/10,000th of an inch
and made 1:1 scale drawings of most of the parts; measured the travel or
movement of every moving part; calculated the spring rate of each spring
and how that affected the injector’s operation; calculated the
relationship between the piston and plunger surface area and the high
pressure oil and fuel injection pressure, until I could say that I knew
as much about the injector as the engineers who designed it did. Later
on I took a milling machine and made a cut-away of the injector so I
could study the internal parts that I couldn’t see inside of.
After 5-6 weeks of this, I wrote the first article and posted it on The
Diesel Stop, and followed that one with two more over the next 3-4
weeks.
Dave read this article and became very, very interested in my findings
and long after the thread had fallen by the wayside he kept sending me
PM’s and asking me questions and bouncing ideas off of me.
Now, let me say that I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of ever
making modified injectors or starting an injector shop or anything else
like that, and when several people who had read the articles asked me to
make them a set of injectors, I said as much and suggested they contact
Hypermax!
Dave and I kept exchanging PM’s about injectors from October through
December or so, when we decided to go ahead and try modifying one
injector to make sure our ideas would really work, and then do our own
injectors so we could save some money.
Dave bought an injector tool kit from Dipaco, a major diesel injection
parts supplier, and got another injector from rwoody and took it apart
and started studying it too, and sent me his measurements for
comparison. Then he took the injector to a machine shop that was willing
to work with us and had that injector machined to our specifications to
increase its flow rate from 98 to 160mm^3. It cost almost $400 to modify
that one injector!
After machining, Dave reassembled the injector and took it to a local
diesel shop that had a flow bench and had it flow tested. It flowed
98mm^3. We were stunned. After going over every detail of what we did
and not finding any reason the injector shouldn’t have flowed 160mm^3,
Dave went back to the injection shop and asked them what the pulse width
was that they tested the injector at. The tech look at him with a blank
look, “Pulse width?”. Their flow bench had no adjustments or anything—it
tested that injector like it was a stock injector. Dave then located
another shop that did have a fully adjustable flow bench and re-tested
the injector; this time it flowed 160mm^3 per shot, or 160cc per 1,000
shots. We were ecstatic!
When we saw what it cost do that one injector we realized that there was
no way we could pay a machine shop to do the work. Also, by this time
more and more people were getting wind of what we were up to, and we
were getting more and more requests for modified injectors, so we set
about figuring out how we could do it ourselves—with Dave in Tennessee
and me in Texas.
Our first plan was for Dave to take care of the actual disassembly and
reassembly work, the machine shop would do that end of it, and I would
act as a “consultant”, but at $400 per injector we decided that was out.
Then we considered Dave sending me the parts to machine, but that was
too complicated in terms of shipping and such, so we decidid to try me
doing the work and Dave handling the business end of things.
By now we were into April of 2003 and I was running a remodeling job
restoring some apartments that had been damaged in a fire. I saved up
every dime I made for 3 months and bought a milling maching and the
tooling we needed to do injectors, and on July 1st, 2003, I quit my real
job and started learning machining so we could do our own injectors.
Shortly thereafter, Dave called and made me a proposition (this was the
first time we actually spoke to each other on the phone): he was a
partner in a construction business, and they had a vacant 1200 sq/ft
shop that had a year left on the lease, so why didn’t I move to
Nashville? I could work full-time in their cabinet shop that was less
that a block from the vacant shop and we’d do injectors after work in
the evenings or on weekends. It sounded good to me so after arranging to
trade another member of The Diesel Stop (cbuttrey835) a set of modified
injectors in trade for hauling all my stuff from TX to TN, I arrived in
Nashville near the end of September, 2003.
By this time we had done 2-3 sets of injectors, and we had arrangements
with 4-5 other people to be our testers before we would do anything
“publicly” with them, so I set about doing them, with Dave working his
regular job and coming to our shop after work. By October 1st we had a
business phone and DSL in the shop and the phone started ringing—I never
even went and worked in the cabinet shop one single day, we were so busy
with injectors.
By December we needed a full-time secretary/bookkeeper. By January of
2004 we had a full-time employee. In March Dave left his construction
business to work full time in our shop.
Neither one of us had the slightest idea where this was all going to
lead to. After making big injectors, we found where the limit of the
factor fuel system was so we designed a fuel system. Then we found out
where the limits of the factory High Pressure Oil Pump were so we
designed a custom HPOP using a hydraulic pump. The first time Dave put
the pedal to the floor the head gaskets blew so we pulled the engine and
started building an all-out race motor and designed our own head
gaskets, and head studs to replace the factory bolts. Now the H2E turbo
on Dave’s truck was too small so after locating a turbo shop that was
willing to work with us we built our own turbo kit. When it was all said
and done by October of 2004, we had 550 horsepower at the rear wheels on
diesel and 680 rwhp with nitrous on a truck that started out at 170, and
we exceeded the dyno’s torque capability of 1200 ft/lbs, but
extrapolating the curves indicated around 1350 ft/lbs or so.
When a conneting rod broke a few months later, we began investigating
the effects of tuning, timing and stress from cylinder pressure on the
engine and in February of 2005 we began doing custom tuning for our
injectors using timing tables based on cylinder pressure analysis and we
were able to reduce the stress on the rods from 40,000 lbs to just under
30,000 lbs with no loss of horsepower or torque.
So, what’s next on our list? We have no idea. We never ever imagined
where we were going to end up when we took that first injector apart!
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