GMEFI Magazine

Boostline Connecting Rods Won’t Bend Under Big Boost

| 28 September, 2021 at 06:34

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Boostline Connecting Rods Won’t Bend Under Big Boost

Perfectly good connecting rods will bend under the incredible cylinder pressure loads of turbocharged and supercharged engines running gobs of boost or engines running large hits of nitrous oxide. There is nothing wrong with those rods—they just are not made for these types of engines.

Wiseco’s Boostline Connecting Rods are designed to survive under big boost. The challenge for Wiseco engineers was how to make a rod stronger while keeping its mass as low as possible. Their solution was a hybrid design that combines the strength of an I-beam rod with the light weight of an H-beam rod. One important area was the big end area of the rod, which sees high loads at high RPM. Boostline rods have triangulated pockets where the big end meets the beam area. This arrangement drastically increases the rod’s resistance to bending by 60 percent compared to a typical H-beam design, making it ideal for handling the combination of forced induction and high cylinder pressures.

Boostline rods are individually measured using Wiseco’s coordinate measuring machine (CMM) that logs a literal blueprint of each individual rod. After a production run of rods is measured, they are individually screened and combined into custom-matched sets based on overall length, big- and small-end diameter, rotating and reciprocating mass, and total mass. For a typical set of Boostline 6.125 inch rods for an LS engine, center-to-center length variation is less than 0.0002 inch while total mass variation is just one gram.

Other features include:

Forged from 4340 steel
Heat-treated, shot-peened, and fitted with ARP-2000 cap screws before final finish machining
High-quality Ampco bushing material used in the small end
Pin clearance between .0009″ and .0011″ to allow an engine builder to set a custom wrist pin spec for additional clearance
Each rod is vacuum-wrapped for corrosion protection

Boostline connecting rods are rated up to 1,000 horsepower for four-cylinder engines, 1,500 horsepower for six-cylinder engines, and 2,000 horsepower for V8 engines. You can get plenty of tech information on the Boostline website.

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