After Game 3, it was the way he defended (or didn't defend) Ryan McDonagh at the point prior to the Rangers' game-winner by Derek Stepan.
Now, after Game 4, it was his effort (or lack thereof) in trying to stop Stepan's second game-winner in a row.
Following is the goal. You decide if Alex Ovechkin's defensive play deserves to be ridiculed this morning…
Finally… the monkey is off the collective backs of Matt Ryan and Mike Smith with a strong win over arguably the hottest team in the NFC in the Seattle Seahawks.
As the Falcons prepare for the upcoming game against the San Francisco 49ers though, I have more questions about this win than answers. More on that later.
For now, enjoy a montage of gif action, compiled by AF.com and TheScore.
Love this play… The Real Beast was Jacquizz Rodgers on this play running over Earl Thomas
The win was uncharacteristically sloppy in regards to penalties, expect Mike Smith to clean that up before the NFCCG.
One of my favorite sequences was this one, featuring Richard Sherman and Roddy.
This guy has talent, but he’s also got a huge mouth and zero class.
Sherman made a few key plays during the game, especially on the deflection on an early game Roddy White target in the endzone. Matt Ryan delivered the ball late, allowing Sherman to catch up to the play and deflect a sure touchdown.
Sherman let Roddy have it, talking trash the entire way until this play.
notice Sherman “falling down” as ball arrives…
Of course… Roddy being Roddy, made sure to tell Sherman that yes, indeed he had caught the ball.
Love it.. you are down 20-0 just gave up a huge touchdown and you do the golf clap. #dontgetit
Sherman didn’t impress me much, he was abused several times by Roddy White.
The 5 yard touchdown to Snelling. Notice the Julio Jones decoy.
A look at the 5 yard misdirection shovel pass by Ryan… I really do love the fact that DK uses Julio so effectively as a decoy, but maybe it’s time to use him a little more than that?
Gonzalez with the huge touchdown in the 1st quarter. So happy for TG.
Unfortunately, Abraham re-injured his ankle early in the second quarter and did not return. He’ll need to get healthy quick to help a subpar pass rush, although with Colin Kaepernick coming to town, pass rush may not be as important as it is with traditional pocket passers.
containing Kaepernick is crucial
I’ll be back later with more preview of Falcons – Niners, and hopefully the Falcons heading to NO for the Super Bowl.
Rise Up.
Choosing performance cams can often seem like a difficult task for many, considering the many variables that can apply to any one camshaft profile or application. I’ve seen too many cars with the wrong cam profile struggle on the dyno or even worse make their owners struggle with just driving.
Before choosing a cam however, don’t forget to remember what you are choosing the cam for; drag racing? road racing? any daily driver usage?
Let’s begin by tackling each term and what it means.
What is valve lift?
How far the cam opens the valves, when increasing lift you increase the length the valve opens, which will produce positive gains in airflow. Be careful when selecting your cam, as too much lift may cause valve float as you will see many manufacturers list recommendations for upgraded springs, retainers or guides.
What is duration?
The amount of time that a valve is open, regardless of intake or exhaust and measured in degrees of crankshaft rotation for that period. What does this mean to you? It tells you what the cam’s potential is within a specific rpm range. Shorter duration cams provide low end torque, while longer duration cams allow for more top end flow.
For all the SOHC ninjas 
What is overlap?
The amount of time that both exhaust and intake valves are open in any one cylinder at the same time. Usually this is close to Top Dead Center as the piston stroke begins down the bore and the exhaust valves must stay open until the piston pushed the gases out.
What is timing?
Enthusiasts most commonly mistake this term “timing” to ignition timing when it comes to valvetrain events. Trust me, this happens way too often to make any sense.
What is camshaft timing? It’s what you can adjust when you have an adjustible cam gear, that will allow you to alter the timing events.
When you advance the camshaft timing, you are making the intake valve open sooner which will give you more low end torque. As always, when advancing or retarding the camshaft timing you must be conscious of the safety window in piston-valve clearance as to avoid a “catastrophic” event.
Retarding the camshaft timing will delay the intake closing and keeps the intake valve open for longer. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book for turbo Eclipses, Talons and Lasers in the mid-90s by selecting just one exhaust cam and retarding it to -5.
By retarding the one exhaust cam you could sacrifice idle quality for some terrific top end by holding the intake valve open to move the overlap higher in the powerband.
This is a shot of my old 1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder, before AWD conversion, retarded negative -5 on the exhaust cam and putting down 395 to the wheels @ 22 psi on 91 octane, extremely reliable.
Of course in today’s age of variable valve timing in everything, many of these older tricks are not needed to generate huge amounts of power without sacrificing idle and start response. In the mid 90s however, you weren’t doing that unless you had a turbo VTEC motor, which had it’s own set of problems in that era.
Increasing the duration is increasing the amount of time the valve is open, therefore helping the engine effectively fill the cylinders and produce power. Many camshaft profiles maximize flow by opening the exhaust cam extremely early in the cycle, increasing exhaust output and increasing the exhaust valve fully open when the exhaust stroke begins. During the power stroke, the burning fuel has used about 80 percent of its available force on the piston by the time the crank has turned 90 degrees.
The bottom half of the power stroke actually provides very little in terms of engine power, and it can be better used to help exhaust the combustion chamber so that there is more efficient cylinder filling on the intake stroke.
Meanwhile a more aggressive profile with higher lift velocities will shorten the duration which will help power, but narrow the powerband.
What is LSA?
Lobe separation angle is the number of degrees between the centerlines of the intake and exhaust lobes on any one cam. The lower the LSA, the more overlap you create while increasing the separation decreases overlap.
Remember to avoid the most common mistake, and that’s going with the most aggressive cam available only because “It sounds so badass” An overly aggressive long duration cam may sound cool at idle, but will give you a very top heavy and small window of power in the rpm range.
Add to that equation the idle, emissions and starting issues, and you can quickly see how a mistake in cam selection can ruin your enjoyment with your car. Which isn’t the point… right?
In the end, choosing a cam that’s right for you is a big part of your performance equation. If you have any more questions, feel free to shoot me an email or post below! As always, if in doubt ask your nearby tuner in your area!
Happy shopping!
Many people ask me questions about dyno tuning their Hondas, both in N/A and boosted applications. With the advent of affordable engine management in this day and age, it makes sense to see many people taking the power of their PCM into their own hands.
As with any dyno session, your car should be in perfect running condition and with all fluids, wires and hoses checked. A dyno should be NO LESS dangerous than if you were to go WOT down the street yourself, always remember that.
Here are my step by step processes to dialing in your VTEC Honda.
A. Dial in your VTEC crossover point.
If you have a Hondata or VTEC Controller, now would be a good time to set your VTEC switchover point to redline, or close enough to it.
Make one dyno pull in third gear, and determine the highest rpm in which the hp tails off without the engine entering VTEC. Set your VTEC crossover point to 300 rpm before this point for your optimal VTEC engagement point.
We take a look at our Project Fit’s dyno plot for a close look at what we are talking about.
Using this example, we set our VTEC engagement point to 300 rpm just before the hp begins to fall off. Some use torque as a better starting point, the preference is up to you of course.
B. Move on to Low throttle settings or STFT
You can opt to do one of 2 things here, either do the mathematical equation for injector sizing and dial down the fuel map accordingly, or do it on the fly.
I prefer to set a baseline using the injector sizing equation, and then dialing it in on the fly from there. With a stoichmetric mixture as a target ratio, 14.7:1 is what we are aiming for, most importantly at highway speeds.
i.e. when your stock injectors are 440cc and you upgrade to 750cc injectors, your base low throttle setting should be -40% of the base tune in question.
Now with your baseline dialed in, you can move forward to tuning your Wide Open Throttle ( WOT ).
If you are not familiar with what size injectors you run, or are confused by my usage of #lb injectors or XXXcc injectors, use this conversion chart below.
Conversion Formulas
To convert cc / min to lbs. / hr. – Divide by 10.5
To convert lbs. / hr to gal. / hr. – Divide by 6
To convert cc / min to gal. / hr. – Multiply by .015873
Remember to maintain or bring your STFT as close to zero as humanly possible to prevent your PCM into tripping a rich condition or limp mode. For more information on STFT, try looking at my How to Tune Your Super AFC writeup.
C. Dialing in your Wide Open Throttle.
You can now initiate a baseline pull in 3rd gear ( or 4th for you boosted cheaters ) and identify where the torque curve begins to fall in contrast to your rpm. This will be the target rpm for your fuel controller to modify to extract the maximum power from your vehicle safely.
Now using a wideband sniffer ( preferably ) lay the A/F curve vs the rpm/torque plot to see where you need to enrichen or lean out the fuel mixture. Be aware of what target A/F or Lambda reading you are aiming for, this will depend on what kind of power adders you have on the car and what you are aiming to do with the tune.
Now comes the balancing act of IPW ( Injector Pulse Width ) and injector duty vs how much fuel is available to you at what time. Your main goal is to create a broad torque powerband without heavily taxing your IPW or duty cycles.
Remember that 80% duty cycle is a industry standard, anything about that mark and I start getting worried. Call me paranoid.
For most all motor setups, our ideal air/fuel mixture is 13.5:1 to create a safety window in which the vehicle can perform without worry. For turbo or boosted applications, anywhere from 11.5:1 to 11:1 will be your target depending on how much load you are putting on the motor and how high your duty cycles currently are.
Next up : How to dial in your vehicle’s overlap and ignition timing.
Happy Tuning!
Firesports by Jackie Chan? I knew he was into cars like the Evo IV and V from some posts I've seen a long time ago but never knew he was into design and making parts. WOW Jackie Chan! Nice to see there's real car enthusiasts that are into the scene and supporting it.
Here's the man himself in one of his Evo
The 7th generation of Honda Civics are funny cars that never quite took off in the aftermarket segment. Many changes seperate the 7th version of Honda’s Civic from the previously very popular models, including ditching the double wishbone suspension up front, and the new D17 motor which most tuners never could figure out what to do with.
Mostly because the car wasn’t too popular to begin with, and nothing from the D17 crosses over to its venerable D16 family of SOHC motors.
That’s where Andy comes in, who is the proud owner of this 2003 Honda Civic with a Homebrew turbo kit consisting of a Dezod manifold, T3/T4 hybrid Turbonetics turbocharger and a Griffin double sided front mount intercooler.
At 8psi, the car belts out a healthy 161 hp and 152 ft lbs of torque a solid gain over the stockish numbers of 87/90 hp to the wheels.
Today we’ll be testing AEM’s new Failsafe UEGO Gauge, which promises to do a whole hell of a lot for tuners worldwide.
The new gauge from AEM will not only monitor Air Fuel ratios, but will warn you and enact a predetermined safety protocol when your A/F ratios fall out of the safe window.
All parameters are user defined, which means you tell it what to do when you want it! Pretty neat huh? So if you want ignition cut, fuel cut or boost cut, the optional 5v switched wire will allow you do any of that within any parameters you wish to define!
Another cool feature of this unit is that it also includes a full datalogger that will let you datalog, capture and record your engine’s vitals.
A look at setting the parameters in question, you can see here that I have set the warnings to below stiochmetric mixtures and under boost. In this example we’ll be alerted, boost will be reduced and the warning flashers will go off, very very cool stuff.
Not to mention that this gauge will also function as a full service UEGO, there’s really not much reason to purchase anyone else’s wideband kit now that this Failsafe UEGO is available.
Next up.. Hitting the dyno and cranking up the boost… all while using the new Failsafe UEGO from AEM!
Happy boosting!
We will be upgrading the injectors on a 350Z drift missle for the upcoming Open Track event, and slapping in a set of 600cc Deatschwerks injectors. These injectors are a direct fit, and as they are customized for each car there is no need to fiddle with inline resistors for those wanting to move from high or low impedence.
The part number in question is 21S-05-0600-6and you will need an adjustible fuel pressure regulator if you don’t want to trip the good ‘ol P0175 OBDII System Too Rich check engine light.
To begin, remove your stock intake snorkel and disconnect all electrical sensors from the intake plenum and throttle body area
Now remove the lower 10mm bolts that hold the upper half of the intake manifold in place, and undo the 10mm bolts that hold the upper plenum to the lower half.
Make sure to use the sequence in the diagram below whenever removing or putting the stock intake manifold back in place
With the intake manifold removed, you can now access the fuel rail and injectors. Open your gas cap and undo the factory gas cap to relieve any pressure from the system. Disconnect your battery, as gas and gas fumes will be prevalent and then undo your factory fuel return.
Undo the clips to the injectors, and pull gently to remove the entire fuel rail assembly. The picture above shows that I have not clogged the intake ports to the engine, because I am incredibly overconfident in myself. In reality however, it’s a prudent idea to block these intake ports as you don’t want any isolators or nuts falling into your motor.
With the factory rail removed, you can now install the upgraded units with relative ease. Make sure not to rip or tear the oring isolators, and make sure not to lose any of the isolators that space out the rail from the heads.
Now may be a good time to install a intake manifold spacer, like this BLOX one. This car will be getting a new intake manifold in anticipation of….
BOOST!!!!
Next up, mocking up the turbo manifolds and wastegate locales before deciding on what engine management.
Happy boosting!
