For those considering the SDCE hat be aware. Theses pics were taking after a lean backfire on my car. These were taking on a camera phone, I will take better pics tonight probably. As you can see the hat cracked where the two separate pieces are joined together. I contacted SDCE to ask about a refund and all I was offered was a discount on dyno time or another hat a discount. WTF????? Why would I want another hat, if my car backfires again I'm out even more money. If I known there was a possibility of this happening I don't think I would of purchased the hat to begin with. I was told the reason I couldn't get a refund of ANY SORT was because the hat was not designed to be in those conditions. I was told there hat and Gordon's hat was made of the same material, but I've had backfires with the EV hat and nothing ever happened. I'm pissed about this because if I owned a business I would give the $210.00 back to make things right with the customer. Another thing that bothered me was we I called to ask if I was going to get a refund Chris (SDCE up here) kept telling me the details would be in the email he sent me. Why send an email if we're talking on the phone???? If any of this is not true I'm sure Chris (SDCE) will chime in. I'm keeping this short because I'm beyond pissed off right now.
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WOW, thanks for the heads up. I was talking to him through pm's and was about to buy one, since the testing was taking forever. I was questioning the hat and he replied with "I've put out all kinds of data on how ours flows; we're not liers, we have a 13yr reputation to uphold. " but then you go around and not refund someone for this? i think 13yrs of reputation isn't worth 210 bucks. I guess i will stick with my trusty csu hat for now. (another thing, you mentioned they are made from the same stuff as ev hats, but wouldn't there be a lot less pressure on the ev hat since its much smaller? shouldn't the build it with some thing stronger for its bigger surface area) any who, thanks for the heads up and good luck

 

What conditions were they talking about? How were you using it outside of its intended use? I thought they were using these hats as BT Carb Hats. I guess I am lost, I never read the other thread..........

Sorry about your problems. Good luck getting everything figured out.

 

The backfire is considered the condition it shouldn't be used in. Uh'¦'¦. yeah like I want my car to backfire. Just to think I volunteered to bring my car from CT to RI so they could do the hat test comparison. Hope I never deal with another company that handles these kind of situations like this. I got the hat on the 21st and this happened the 28th. SDCE said the car had to be running in the 17-19 AFR range for it to backfire, eventhough my wideband was read high 14's. Kevin has been helping out with the carb issue.

 

...so much for testing....

 

How was it running with the EV Hat....... I thought this hat was to make it better, better distribution, better signal to the carb, etc...... All those things should of made it run richer. Maybe the hat caused the lean problem, causing the backfire.......I am going to guess they wanted to take no responsiblity for anything from the sounds of your conversation.

Amazing how they know what was going on with your car? Can you say TPC all over again?

 

This is exactly what was said to Rich:

Rich-

I dont want this to end badly, so hear me out.

Our honest opinion is your issue is more involved than the carburetor or hat. Kevin is usually in the ballpark with his carbs, and as you and I both agreed on the phone our hat was the result of your underlying issue not the cause of it. You countered we should have made the hat stronger to withstand backfiring. If we make our hat stronger to withstand backfiring, how does that fix your problem??? It won't. You'll still have the backfiring issue and ultimately something else will fail. No hat is meant to take the kind of pressure created by an intake backfire. For a carb to backfire under full throttle you are looking at EXTREMEMLY lean a/f readings. Who knows - maybe one or two more backfires on the EV hat and it will come apart at the weld like our hat. His hat is made at the same foundry out of the same material as ours. They are both similar in thickness.

You have been having the backfire issue for a while with both hats and both carb tunes from Kevin. There could be serious damage done to your engine already. Bent throttle blades, bent intake valves, fatigued rings, weak pistons, etc are all things that can happen as a result of severe intake backfires. Keep that in mind everytime it backfires!! You mentioned your buddy has a dyno. Does he have an air fuel meter? If so, did you try running your
car on his dyno to compare if your AF readings are the same as his to maybe see if your meter is faulty? Backfires severe enough to explode a hat are in the 19 - 20 range, not 14's.

We'd love to help but we can't do it over the phone. You'll have to bring your car here so we can utilize all the tools we have to determine the underlying problem. Our normal rate to dyno tune is $85 an hour. We're willing to match your local dyno's rate of $50 an hour just to help you out. If your car is worth not breaking, then it should be worth a little extra effort to work with someone who has the knowledge, tools and experience you need. What's a few hundred bucks compared to the price of your engine???

While we can't refund your money back for the broken hat, we'll give you a new hat at cost. Send us the broken hat back for assessment - if we feel we can repair it for use as a demo, we'll extend some kind of refund.

We really do want to help you - we feel you can benefit from our services and our hat. Our ultimate goal is to get you past your underlying problem to make power safely and reliably.

Let me know what you want to do...
-Chris



I'd like to make a few additional points.

We have only had ONE other hat failure and that was on another setup who suffered a catastrophic intake backfire that broke his carburator, his hood, as well as starting a small fire. As in this case, the broken hat was a result of an engine problem, not the cause. This other customer's car ran out of fuel during a race, and he stayed in it, pedling the gas tring to keep it running.

Rich is having some SEVERE fueling issues, with multiple intake backfires everytime he puts his foot to the floor, and running lean in general under boost. Carburator backfires of the magnatude reqired to blow a hat apart are NOT part of a normal tuning process. He said our hat survived a couple of backfires before breaking...if ANY vehicle pops on our dyno while we are tuning we take 100 steps back to re-evaluate the situation...we dont just make a small change, hope for the best and put it to the floor again; that is just not proper tuning. Rich, by no means am I trying to insult you here, but just trying to make sure everyone knows what is really going on here... SOMETHING is bound to fail if you keep going down the path you are on...our hat just happened to be the weak point there.

Lets say someone goes to Wilson and orders a sheetmetal intake manifold that blows to pieces under a nitrous backfire that their Victor Jr has withstood before...how is that Wilson's fault? They aren't going to refund $ because the customer put their manifold in a criteria well outside it's design.

I wanted to send the e-mail before talking to you on the phone because it is alot of information to get across and I wanted to give you time to think about it before we spoke.

We are more than willing to help him out, and as you see in the above e-mail we will give him a new hat at cost, as well as a partial refund on the broken hat if it can be repaired for our in-house use. We are also willing to chop $35 an hour off our labor rate just for him to try and figure out what is going on with his car before it blows up.

PMR- We gave Rich the strongest version of the hat we have...you are 100% correct that there is less pressure in the EV hat due to smaller surface area, and ours was reinforced as a result. We have had backfires before....who hasn't, but look at the carnage, this was no ordinary tip-in sneeze.

Tim- He was having backfire/lean issues WELL before he put our hat on there. We will damm well take responsibility when it is our fault, but the broken hat was just a result of his pre-existing engine issues. Who is this TPC guy?....I've seen him mentioned (as a joke) in a couple other threads, but cant find anything about him.

 

Ummmm, tested ?

 

Chris,

Reading everything you said, I understand your point, and I am not getting into a pissing contest. It is in my opinion, very limited it is, and with shitty pictures at that matter, your hat split on a seam, seam joining the two halfs together, a weak area in the design of the hat. Stand behind it and you will do much better then standing on your write or wrong decision.

What gets me is you first say no. Then you say send it back for evaluation.....should he spend his money for you to evaluate the hat in a real world situation. No where did you say you would evaluate it and if it was weak in those areas you would refund his money. But you will offer him a credit if you can fix it. I am sure this was not the first, as you stated, and will not be the last to be in a backfire situation.

Maybe I missed it, if you were aware of his issues before you sold him the hat, did you mention that this hat, though well deisgned will not take a backfire? Sounds like up to this point his EV Hat was doing ok, or was the hat considered a part of his problem, and now it is everything but the hat.

As stated before I have not read all the other stuff on this hat. It does look like a lot of thought went into it, but not everything is perfect. It takes time to make it perfect.


Edited to add below comments:

TPC was a carb company that screwed a few guys, one really bad. We ran him off the board and he has never been back, as a matter of fact he was run off a lot of boards. It was a joke and it was uncalled for, I am sorry.

 

I've never been here for a pissing contest, but i'm always down for an intelligent debate or discussion.

We do stand behind our product, the other mishap that I spoke of was of the earlier version of the hat with Gordon's original welds. After that incident, we disassembled every hat we had in the building, ground the angles steeper, and re-welded them with gussets in the sidewall, so the seam is now a zipper, not just a straight line. Believe me, that seam is VERY strong, and it takes ALOT of pressure to do that to it.

I was not aware of his backfiring issues until today, all I knew was the car was "lean up top"...I never knew a number, or exactly what was going on with it. I only knew Kevin was trying to fix it with the carburator. I never meant to fix this problem with the hat, and never sold it to Rich as such. As I said before, the hat is designed to take the normal pops and sneezes that come along with carburators, but not full throttle backfires of this magnitude. Yes, the EV is smaller, and holds up better on this particular criteria, but the fact that it is small (which makes it stronger) is the same reason it doesnt distrubute air as well as ours. Its hard to make something that works perfectly in all arenas, ours is damm close though.

 

This is an A B conversation, I will C my way out of it. LOL

I will say it again, after that one has to make their decision and stand behind it:

Stand behind it and you will do much better then standing on your right or wrong decision.

 

I was just wondering ..could a bov on the hat have prevented this ?..Ron,,

 

Was this hat from the first batch or this improved second batch? Because it does not look like it broke from any zipper tipe weld area, it looks like a straight weld to me, but then again the pictures are shitty, and we will have to wait for updated/better pictures as he promissed.

As for me, i am now definatly going to wait and see other testings (both from the dyno, and others real world testing), and looks like it will take much longer for it to happen after RTC1970 testing is off. I liked the design and idea alot, and was going to try it, even though my csu hat hasn't gave me any problems so far, but i am not going to piss money away for something that is not tested and tryed (do not mean by your compnay, but by blowthrough people).

 

It is tested and tried by blowthrough people....just not by intarweb blowthrough people. I've had testimony from three customers in the other thread....two I didnt even solicite...everyone else just isnt a forum person. And like i've told ya in the past, it comes down to "does air go into a carb more evenly from a 90* bend, or from a velocity stack?". But we can save this discussion for the other thread.

 

Kinda what I was thinking. You would think the pressure spike would push the bov open or blow the intake piping off before the hat split open.

 

Thanks for answering,,I was starting to think it was a stupid question

 

Please help me understand what you mean by this, before I respond?

 

Give him his $$$ back & stop beating around the bush.

New combos need to be sorted out, some of them WILL backfire for whatever reason.

That POS hat broke at THE WELD, you know, where its supposed to be strongest. There is no testing, no checking, no evaluations, nothing.....just a carb hat in 2 pieces. Put in gussets, maybe weld a whole plate inside...who cares.

Make it right. EXTREME VELOCITY carb hat here, no spacers, still got the divider in it. Backfired a few times unfortunetly....no problems.

I cant BELIEVE that you would even try to run around a VERY CUT & DRY situation here.

-Carm

 

I think he meant blow-through people that arent ever seen at the track nor in any high HP cars....and we are "intarweb" e-thugs without timeslips & mild combo's.......thats my take of it. In a nutshell, "people better than us"

-Carm

 

Quote:

"Give him his $$$ back & stop beating around the bush"

Agree

Quote:

"New combos need to be sorted out, some of them WILL abckfire for whatever reason."

Agree

Quote:

"That POS hat broke at THE WELD, you know, where its supposed to be strongest. There is no testing, no checking, no evaluations, nothing.....just a carb hat in 2 pieces. Put in gussets, maybe weld a whole plate inside...who cares"

I disagree. Here is why. SWT Andrew is a damn fine welder. I remember he built an inter-cooler for Brent. He did his best work at the time. It Failed. Andrew might have tested the thing but I don't remember. Andrews Inter-cooler was not a POS. It just needed more work. Typically things break right next to the weld in reality. The actual weld typically is fine.

Quote:

"Make it right. EXTREME VELOCITY carb hat here, no spacers, still got the divider in it. Backfired a few times unfortunetly....no problems."

I agree totally with the "make it right" deal. Andrew I believe took the inter-cooler back and did a lot of extra work to "make it right" for Brent. Same deal should happen here. Personally I think the man is unhappy, give him his money back, and move on. You just happen to be on the receiving end of some other issues that the man has not figured out but all he cares about is his car is not right and your Chit broke.

Quote:

"I cant BELIEVE that you would even try to run around a VERY CUT & DRY situation here."

I don't think that he looked at the situation the way I am. Not a run around so much as not understanding that sometimes you try and help someone and it blows up in your face. You say why in the hell did I get involved in this Chit? Because you were trying to help.

As soon as you sell someone something, offer to help someone, or stick your nose into the deal you have to expect good and bad things to be said about you. That is my opinion.

Give the guy his money back, write off the bonnet as "Durability Testing" and move on. You
have been posting on this bonnet deal for days and days. Now is the time to prove there is more to your company than just selling bonnets.

Tom Vaught