Hey Oppos! I thought I would introduce myself. I've been a long time reader of Jalopnik, but like I have read here and agree with, it seems to have been going downhill so I read it much less than before. In one of the comments there I remember someone posting about Opposite-lock so I decided to check it out and have been lurking here for a few months. There have been a few topics I've wanted to comment on, so I finally decided to join.

A little background: Did not come from a car family, so I got into cars a bit all by myself. My first car was a 1998 Monte Carlo Z34. I loved that car and did some modifications including a (hot air) intake, high ratio rockers, and new PCM. Took it the drag strip with an owners club and IIRC ran a best of about 14.2. Also took it to Michigan International Speedway and got to drive it on the track. Hit the ~105 on the back straight. I had it from 52k miles to 180k miles. Later I had a 2007 Sierra and then got a 2014 Sierra and currently own a 2013 Optima. The Optima has been an abject disaster literally since the day I bought it. I'll write about that later.

I worked at GM for about 8 years doing development on the Duramax, so if any of you have/had a 2010-2015 D-max I had a least a small part in your truck. Lived in Germany for a year when I was sent there to work at Opel when it was still owned by GM - one of the best decisions I've ever made.

After listing my cars and not showing one Malibu I'm sure you're wondering about my name. Well, it's for Malibu boats. I'm a huge fan after my parents bought a Response LX for the family new in 1997. Since then I have had a 1993 Echelon, a 2001 Response LX and now a 2003 Response LX. All direct drives. They are like a Corvette on water.
Anyway, it looks like you guys have a nice shi...bus here and I look forward to contributing.

...my job. For a new one!

I've been searching for a new job off and on for about a year and half. So this is a bit of a relief though of course it's a change and you never know what's going to happen.

I was offered the job from the interview I had a while ago so today is my last day at my old job. I start on Monday, but in the mean time I have a long planned family vacation up north to go skiing. It ended up working out well to have a little break between the jobs.

The new job will be a little bit more engineering I hope so it should be a little more stimulating. Plus it's nearly a 50% raise (which still isn't saying much, but it helps), and the benefits are great. I've been going without insurance for last 2 years and with all the sports I play it's a bit risky, so I'm glad I'll have insurance. Plus, the 401(k) is good, which I need to start contributing again after an 8 year break.

They have a hybrid work schedule, so once I'm trained up I should be able to work 2-3 days a week from home which will be nice and will save me some time and money, plus when I do have to go into the office it's 6 miles closer and on my side of town so I'll miss most of the traffic I deal with now. Maybe on the days at home I can take a ski set at lunch

At least at first I may not be on here as much during day while I learn the ropes of the new job, but don't worry, I'm not leaving.

Oh, and with the increased income I've built one of these multiple times. If everything is still good in the fall, I may pick one up.

So I managed to talk @DSM_OR_DIE @derp @KITT222 @Roundbadge @ranwhenparked @Taylor-Martin (EDIT and @Urambo-Tauro - sorry) out of harvesting my organs, and in the meantime actually had a lot of fun.

It was really nice to meet everyone and put a face to names. I usually do enjoy taking pictures, but not when it's people I don't know as well, so this is the only pic I have

I have to recommend @DSM_OR_DIE 's home brews. Both the Pumpkin Spice and the raspberry lemonade were delicious. The lemonade is especially dangerous because you'd never know it was alcoholic.

The party at @David-Tracy 's house was a lot of fun too. Reminded me of an old college party I met some cool people there and met David himself. David, if you're reading this, I really enjoyed talking to you for a few minutes, and you seem like a real genuine person. I wish you best in California.

I had never been to a junk yard before. That was in different experience and it was actually cleaner and more organized than I thought it would be, though I'm pretty sure it's a Superfund site. It would have been nice had the wind not been blowing 20mph and it being freezing cold.

Overall, 10/10 would recommend.

So, I'm super bored at work, so I figured I would write this.

Edit: Hey, I got included in the Best of Oppo!

This is a while back when I was working on the 4.5L V8 diesel (LMK) that was supposed to go into the GMT-900 1500 trucks. My specific job was the cold start calibration. Basically my job was to calibrate all the engine parameters to get the engine started at all temperatures (despite being called "cold start").

Our official limits were down to -29C at sea level and mid-altitude (~5000ft) and -20C at high altitude (all without a block heater). My unofficial record for a Duramax (when I was working on those later) was -36C at sea level. One of the biggest issues that keeps us from starting lower is battery power. Even with 2 batteries and 0W oil, we would only crank at about 50RPM at the coldest temps, and the system voltage would drop under 5V during compression events. The lights on the dash would fade in and out as I was cranking. In fact, the vehicles systems are only required to function down to 5V for a short time, but I remember seeing ~4.7 occasionally and it would still crank. I tried doing a start at -40 just to see if I could do it, and the starter just clicked. Even with full batteries, it just couldn't turn the engine.

If the engine was started when the coolant temp was above about 15C the emissions calibration would take over immediately after the engine start. If it was started below that then I would control the injection timing, boost, rail pressure and other things for a while until the engine warmed up and it went over to the emissions cal.

My co-worker that was doing the LML and LGH calibration and I would always travel together to do our testing. In this case we were in Colorado doing mid and high altitude testing. In Denver we leased space from a testing company that had a cold soak room as well as emissions testing capability. At high altitude we had very high-tech cold starting facilities up in Silver Plume, CO just off of I-70 at an altitude of about 9000ft. By high-tech I mean, reefer semi-trailers. Dug into the dirt. At the edge of a borderline ghost town. The truck barely fit into the trailers and you could always tell which development trucks were the cold start trucks because they always had some scratches on the passenger side. It was just impossible to go in and out of the trailers that many times while trying to bias the truck to one side so, you know, we could actually get out, without scraping the side. They have since moved them, but for a long time we would base out of Denver (and do testing at "mid-altitude", and run up into the mountains everyday to do our testing at 9000ft.

One day after a test my colleague came back from a drive and said that he blew the transmission in his truck. It would idle and move the truck on level ground, but that's about it. It didn't have the torque carrying capacity to accelerate or even go up a slight incline, so there was no way he could drive it back to Denver. We called up a flatbed tow truck and when he eventually showed up we slowly drove the damaged truck to the base of the tow truck, but it wouldn't drive up the sloped bed. For some reason this tow truck didn't have a winch or even come-alongs to load our truck so we were stuck.

Except, I still had my (actually another colleagues borrowed LMK) that ran perfectly. I was still fairly new at this point, but my colleague said we needed to get this truck back down to base so he told me to use mine to push his truck up onto the flatbed. At this point the tow truck driver is in the damaged truck and I line up behind him, put it in 4 wheel drive and start to push. After a bit of wheel slip, we started moving. At first the bumpers lined up and there wasn't a problem, but as his truck started up the ramp his bumper rose up and started smashing in my grill. I stopped for a second and he just said "Go!" so I kept pushing as this bad crunching sound was coming from the front. The whole time I'm thinking these trucks are development vehicles that are hand-built and cost a hundred grand and I'm just smashing them up like it's nothing.

Once we got his truck where it needed to be I backed down and the tow truck driver jumps out of the truck and was astonished. He was like "I've seen a lot, but I've never been a part of something like that before!".

After that the LMK basically had no grill left, and I felt bad having to give the truck back to the colleague I borrowed it from for my testing. Luckily we had enough old trucks laying around that the mechanics were able to sorta swap in a new grill once we got it back to Milford.

That is certainly not the only truck I damaged during my testing, but it is the only one where I did it intentionally!

Best of Oppo

@Shop-Teacher said in Cadillac Is Back:

@Bandit Yeah, but are they actually going to build this one? Nobody wastes an amazing show car quite like Cadillac.

@Bandit said in Cadillac Is Back:

@ash78 Why buy a Cadillac Sixteen when you could get a Yukon Sixteen https://gmauthority.com/blog/2022/07/gm-once-built-a-gmc-yukon-powered-by-a-v16-engine/

Ok, so I'd been thinking about writing this for a while, but just hadn't gotten around to it. But I figure this is the best time since it's been brought up.

So @Bandit is right, GM did build a V16 Yukon...and I rode in it.

So the guy that headed up GM's special vehicle operations lived on the lake with me and we went skiing together so he took me into the building at the Milford Proving Grounds (where I also worked at the time) where they built all kinds of freak cars including the Beast, an LSX B-body Impala and many others. Including the V16 GMT800 Yukon.

At that time they were getting ready to put that car into the museum, so he took me for a ride in it and told me the story of how it came to be. There is a very good chance I was the last person to ride in it during a full run.

The story begins with the Cadillac Sixteen concept. When GM rolled that out at the autoshow circuit, like @Shop-Teacher mentioned, they were being criticized for building concepts that didn't run, and getting sick of hearing that it came down from on top that they were going to build a running V16 engine.

I had actually seen this thing driving around the Grounds now and then and it looked weird. I couldn't exactly put my finger on it, but it was just odd. My friend told me what it was. They took a Yukon body and put it on a Yukon XL frame, but put all the extra length under the hood (the back of the body sat where it normally would at the back of the frame). They custom made all the front bodywork to make it look effectively stock, but with a really long hood and fenders. Inside it was effectively stock, but the gauge cluster was had all custom "racing" (for lack of a better term) gauges.

The engine was made by effectively joining two 6.2L (or 6.0L I can't remember) blocks and a custom crankshaft. The crankshaft was actually made so that 2 cylinders would fire simultaneously, so to me it actually sounded just like a V8. GM didn't have an engine controller that could control 16 injectors, so they actually used two controllers for a V8 and had them work together. I can't remember what transmission they used.

Like the article said, my friend estimated that it made about 1000HP and it was fast. There is a 16% grade at the Grounds that many people use as a mini uphill dragstrip. When I was working on Duramax's I would pin it going up that hill with a running start. I would usually hit the bottom of the hill at ~50mph. The fastest an LML would go is about 72-74 MPH by the top of the hill. Even if the hill was longer it wouldn't have gotten much faster. The hill is so steep it just didn't have the power to keep accelerating. In this Yukon, we started on grade completely stopped. At the top of the hill we were going over 100mph and still accelerating quickly. This thing was a beast.

I loved seeing all the crazy cars on the Proving Grounds and there are a few others I got to experience that I will write about later, but I do think the V16 Yukon might have been the best.

I meant to post this earlier, but I had a job interview today. I have a decent feeling about this one. I actually interviewed for 2 jobs, so that doubles my chances of getting one of them.

It was a different type of interview than I've usually had. It wasn't very technical, but rather more "how would you fit into our culture" type questions. Usually I prefer the technical type because I'm good at talking about that, but in this case, I think the culture questions were good because I have no technical experience in this area. They knew I had no experience when I first applied, and they said it wasn't an issue.

I hope I get it because it should be a decent bump in pay, but really just as important is much better benefits, and also a more flexible hours, closer to my house, and a hybrid work from home schedule (2-3 days at home and 3-2 days in the office).

This would be really nice.

So I came into the office this morning and what do I find on my computer...

Lord UppU's cousin. Why is he there? Because a couple of weeks ago I wore my UppU shirt to work and a co-worker saw it and liked it and made it for me.
But that's not all...what shirt am I wearing today?

It was divine intervention!

So @RacinBob 's https://opposite-lock.com/topic/63882/cold-start-stories/23 post about cold start stories got me thinking about my old job at GM where my job was to calibrate the Duramax (and a couple of others) to start at cold temps. Here are some of the stories.

First I worked on the 4.5L V8 LMK that was supposed to go into the GMT900 1500 trucks. It never made it...

After one start in Denver at about -5F I did a driveaway to make sure the engine would work well beyond just idling. Well, about 1 minute into the drive we heard a loud bang and the engine died. I pulled over and tried to start it again and it just cranked really fast showing there was no compression. We never found out exactly what happened to that engine because it was right before the canceled the program, but we assume the timing chain jumped and bent all the valves.

After the cancellation of the LMK I started to work on the LGH and LML - the 6.6L Duramax. We had cold cells at the proving ground that we would stick the truck in cool it down to whatever set point. Usually the starts were uneventful, but the driveaways is where the fun stuff happened.

At -21F we had to start the truck and slam it in gear and do WOT driveaways as fast as possible. One of my jobs was to protect the turbo during these events. Well, it didn't always go as planned. We tried to limit turbo speed to about 100k RPM while cold, and we did this mainly through torque limiting and some engine speed limits. While dialing that in I hit about 110k RPM and spun the bearing and it made a nasty noise. But after that it seemed to run fine, so I kept testing and driving for several days after that. What I didn't realize was the turbo was now leaking oil into the engine and it finally got to a point that I was blow tons of smoke out the back, and eventually the engine ran away to over 4000RPM (red line while fueling is about 3300RPM. I jumped out of the truck, popped the hood and tried to rip off the intake and stuff my shirt in, but luckily it burned itself out before I could do that. All said and done there was only 1.5 qts of oil left.

When driveaways go as planned, it's almost comical how slow these trucks are. Starting at -21F and doing a WOT driveaway the 0-60 is about 20 seconds. That comes from the torque limits (normally about 765ft-lbs) we would limit to ~300-350. Plus, the engine friction was incredibly high, and the Allison transmission would start in 2nd gear when that cold. One day my buddy who worked on the diesel vans which were normally severely derated to like 260hp and 520tq raced me while we both did -20F driveaways. He won.

Up at high altitude (about 9000ft in this case) we also did WOT driveaways. The coldest we could start up there was about -10F. We just couldn't get it going lower than that. But the funny part was due to the high friction in the turbo bearing due to cold oil, and the low density air, doing a WOT driveaway you could literally walk next to the truck for about 10 seconds before it would finally build boost and take off. I know this because I would do it with my colleagues. We'd talk while one was driving away and the other walking next to the drivers window.

One day I was doing testing in Denver, doing WOT driveways again. There were some service people there working on the building who witnessed our testing. One guy stopped me on the way back and in said "you guys drive those trucks like you hate them. I have a 6.0L [ford powerstroke] and I know I'd blow that shit up if I did that". Lol.

Our requirements were to start at -20F at sea level and at Denver. Once I had most of my cal done, I tried to see how low I could go. My record at sea level was -32F. It was a bit ugly, but it ran. I tried a -40F start but even with fully charged batteries it wouldn't even crank - it just clicked. Even at the -20F standard we'd only crank about 50-60RPM (the requirement was always 80RPM, but we never met it). The lights in the dash would go dim during every compression event and the system voltage would drop into the 5V range. If it dropped below about 4.8V then it would drop out and we'd just click.

Last story for now. This one is a bit embarrassing. After doing a cold idle inside the cold box I left the truck running while I looked at some data and closed up the box to prepare for the next test on Monday. Well, after doing all that I forgot to shut off the truck. Like, for the weekend. So I come in on Monday go in the box, the truck's not running and think to myself "this smells kinda bad, but whatever". I hook up the computer and go to start the truck and notice the key is in the run position. Weird. I turn it off and back on and the truck is completely dead. Then it dawns on me that I had left the truck running all weekend. I open the doors to start airing it out and warming the truck up. By this time my eyes are burning due to all the hydrocarbon in the air. After about an hour of charging the battery and warming up the truck I finally get it started. I drive around the track and because of all the unburned fuel in the exhaust I start POURING white smoke out the back. I mean, the most smoke you've ever seen. I don't think there was an insect left alive within a half mile of that track. Well, after the smoke slows down the DPF gets hot enough that it lights off and it start getting extrememly hot. It pegged all my sensors at 1000C. I was half expecting pieces of the exhaust to start falling off the truck. While all of this is going on, I have the windows down, but the fuel in just saturating in everything to the point I can't even keep my eyes open, so I finally just lean out the window Ace Ventura style to try to get fresh air.
I finally take the truck back up to my building (and get a car wash on the way to try to reduce the smell. At this point I borderline sick from the fuel permeating everything. I walk in the building and as I'm walking people at their desks starting asking "what is that smell? Is someone idling right next to the building". It was me. Everything on me smelled like diesel. I ended up going home at about noon (it took me 4 hours to get the truck started, cleaned up and get everything taken care of). I went home threw all my clothes (including my shoes) straight into the washer and I took a shower.
The next day I had to clean up the cold box because it smelled terrible too and my friend and I took a truck with a water tank down there and washed the walls and floor and everything the best we could, but it you could still notice the faint smell for several months after that.
Then to top it all off, I no longer used that truck, but a few months later a colleague did, came back in and said "there is something wrong with that truck, it's leaking gas or something". He didn't know that was the one that bathed in it's own exhaust for a weekend.
I estimated the truck burned about a 1/2 tank (~18 gallons) while idling and it finally died about Sunday morning probably due to lack of oxygen.

Oh, one last little bit of information.
The LML's (and others) had intake air heater (also called grid heaters) to warm up the incoming air while the engine is cold. These things took an immense amount of power. After starting really cold you'll still be discharging the batteries for up to 5 minutes because it's drawing about 100A and at idle the alternator can't keep up. We actually did a test where we kept it on extra long just to see what would happen and we actually got a dash warning to "service charging system" after the running system voltage dropped to about 10.5V.

I have so much more information about this stuff, but I think this post is already long enough.

I was trolling around Jalopnik and saw the post about GM killing the rumored turbo I6 gas engine and HHFP made a comment about the LMK would have been an amazing engine that was killed late into its development, and I had to respond, but I don't have an account there and thought this community would like to hear it.

I worked on the LMK for several years until it was killed. While there was some nice tech there, it really wasn't going to be a great engine. Or maybe it could have been okay, but there were many issues some that could have been corrected, some that couldn't.

First, being that I was the cold start guy, they didn't design the injector-glow plug relationship correctly. I was never able to get it to start reliably below -25C. Sure, maybe most people don't need that, but it was a requirement to start at -29C in under 3 seconds. This could have been corrected by clocking the injector a bit, but that would have increased the particulate emissions, which brings me to...

Secondly, we weren't meeting emissions, or if we were, it was extremely close. At the time we needed to be in Tier 2 Bin 5, and we weren't really there. During some emissions tests we were running with a battery charger connected to reduce the alternator load (this was also to increase fuel economey - see below). They also asked me to reduce the intake air heater duty cycle to reduce load. Sure, maybe with some work that would have gotten better, but it would have taken more than just fine tuning, despite how late we were into development.

Third, we were still having mechanical issues. We had broken several crankshafts in half during calibration testing. Literally days before the engine was canceled I blew up an engine (and may have contributed to its cancellation). We think the timing chain jumped and bent all the valves, but we actually never got a full inspection on it due to the cancellation. Sure maybe those issues could be rectified, but again, we were having those types of issues later than you'd expect in development.

Fourth, the engine would get hot. It was GM's first attempt at a Hot-V, with the turbo in the valley between the cylinders. Since the engine was going in a half ton truck, there wasn't much room under the hood so airflow was a huge issue and the engine, and specifically the turbo got hot. Under normal driving it wasn't an issue, but while towing heavy it wasn't meeting performance targets.

Fifth, fuel economy wasn't there. It was too much engine. The numbers we were going for in 2010 were about equal to LB7 (first gen) Duramax about 310hp and 500tq. In a half ton that was just a bit much at the time. Even the new 3.0L inline 6 they eventually went with in 2019 targeted less hp and torque (277/460) than the LMK ten years earlier. Because they were going for so much power the engine was too big. Still 8 cylinders, so minimal benefit over the 6.6L. Also, it was a DOHC engine, so the friction losses of spinning 4 cams vs a single cam in the 6.6L further reduced the FE benefit. Then on top of all that, to cram the engine into the smaller engine bay, it was a 72 degree bank angle which required a balance shaft, so there was now a 5th shaft to spin further increasing friction losses. Many times the LMK and LML calibrators would compare FE numbers, and the LMK was not a universal winner.

So overall the engine was fun to drive, and it had a relatively high redline and sounded like it had a super charger when you wound it out. But it had a lot of issues pretty late into development, including some that really couldn't be fixed due to being issues with the base design/requirements.

Damn I miss my GM job. I just started my new job today and honestly all I could think of is how I wish I could be back at GM doing engine calibration...

So my dad bought an HP wireless printer with the ink subscription. The printer/ink actually knows if you have the subscription and if there is an issue with your account it disables printing.

Let me repeat that. I bought the printer, it has ink (that we did pay for back when the subscription was working), it has paper, and I have a connection, and it won't print.

This is F-ing infuriating and completely unacceptable.

My dad tried to get into the account and couldn't figure out how to update his information. I went on to HP's support forums and there are ton of people complaining about this and can't figure out how to update their account. Sure, you can buy "regular" ink and doesn't need a subscription, but it costs twice as much, and I'm sure it will continue to increase in order to force you into their system.

HP can burn in hell. I would rather buy some CCP printer (and if I have the option in the future, probably will) than support this company at this point.

We as a society need to push back on this.

@dogisbadob people just need to stop going. The problem is if they lower ticket prices then someone will buy them and resell them and make an absurd profit. Limiting that would help.

Also, people just need to stop paying that much and prices will come down. Sure,car prices are also high but for the most part you need a car (maybe not the fully loaded suv but some sort of private transportation is needed). Seeing a concert is not needed in the least. Same with sporting events. The reason prices are so high is because there are 50,000 seats and 100,000 people who want to go.

@ttyymmnn ha! I’ll admit I haven’t put a ton of time into it, but with all the random letters DG, OS, HSM etc being used in the model name many times they aren’t all listed in an ad or picture or even review so it hard to know which version is being referred to.

@HFV_Junkyardin it’s nice but I can’t spend that kind of money on a watch.

@ttyymmnn good point. I should have said if I replace it with another Canon. I do think some of the tampon and sigmas are good. But they’re naming convention is so convoluted I can’t figure out which ones are the latest and greatest and which are older versions.

@Just-Jeepin Damn, that was the best site for lens and body comparisons, as well as other info.

Because of that site I ended up with a 6D (over a 7D because of the high ISO performance). I also bought the Big Sig 150-600 because of the comparisons on that site. They also influenced me to decide when I upgrade my 70-200 F4L, it's going to be 70-200 F2.8 II or nothing.

@UpCreekwithShitPaddle I missed the last one, so I am definitely driving to Ohio to check this one out. Based on your experience it looks like I should start looking for a place.

@tae Just what we need more bank consolidation...

@fintail said in Capitalism and health care are a dubious mix:

A chart showing per capita American healthcare expenses and life expediencies vs peer nations says it all for me.

While our healthcare system could be improved it's way over simplification to link healthcare costs and life expectancy. There are so many more things that go into life expectancy than healthcare.

And the US as a whole is extremely unhealthy. We're very sedentary as a society, we eat much more unhealthy than other nations. Our violence statistics (murder and suicide rate) are much higher than other countries. This all effects our life expectancy, as much as, if not more than pure healthcare.

@HFV_Junkyardin The CURV is cool. I like the blue and the chrono dials.

@azw123 That is beautiful! I can't wait to get out and do some biking, though it won't be as beautiful as that.