Hello everyone!
Thanks for the kind words about our fuel pump upgrade. It is without a doubt one of my favorite products that we offer. The amount of time and R&D put into it resulted in one of the largest and most complicated efforts we have taken on.
Before I post any pump specific info, I would first like to talk about transparency. Transparency means to me that as a company and as members of the enthusiast community, you have a responsibility to your clients to present your findings and justify your pricing and design solutions. The reason APR feels this way is because we are very proud of our products and we are confident that we can put them up against the most severe and stringent automotive engineering principles and philosophies and they will be accepted and in most cases praised by our contemporaries and colleagues as well as our competition. We also feel we have a responsibility to educate our fellow enthusiasts and answer all questions or concerns about why we have chosen to do what we have done.
That being said, I can't for the life of me understand why other companies would choose to not do this. There is very little if any secrecy or trade secrets left in the global economy, especially in reference to automotive engineering. Automotive engineers move between companies very frequently and even though there are non-compete and non-disclosure agreements, if you ask one of them to design a high pressure fuel pump or any other part they have designed before, well, there is no way they can just forget the things they've learned at their previous employers. Short of listing the suppliers and the specs for the design, you aren't really making it any easier for your competition if you talk about what characteristics you've included in your products. Hell, they'll just buy one. If the product isn't released however, sure, secrecy is required so your competition can't come to market before or around the same time you do with a similar product.
Just my 2 pence.
Moving on to the APR pump I would say there are certain key elements that any pump manufacturer needs to include in their product in order to accomplish reliability and hassle free operation:
1.
I don't think in everything that we learned that you can include less than these parts and accomplish what we do.
2.
A test rig. I don't think its possible to insure quality and proper running in of the new parts without one of these.
3. Coatings on the Barrel and Plunger. I don't think its possible to insure long life and reliable operation if you don't use a particular coating of a specific type that is unable to be recreated less expensively than the one we use. For example, the coating VW uses on the cam follower is the next closest lower cost coating available to what we use and we are all familiar with the coating problems VW suffers on cam followers.
4. Tolerance between the Barrel and Plunger and manufacturing them as matched sets. I don't think you can prevent seizures or other issues unless you can recreate a microscopic tolerance between these two parts. You can't use Plungers and Barrels manufactured and matched separately as they won't be able to consistently repeat the tolerances. The machine that measures the tolerances of our pumps is so precise that its only found in the aerospace, military and medical industries. Its more precise than laser measurements and works by blowing a measured amount of air in between the two parts and measures what comes out on the other side in order to give you the distance between the two parts. This machine costs around 3mil GBP.
There are other finer points regarding the included parts such as the right kind of seals to use, the tensile strength of the new spring, etc. but I won't bore you with those details.
If the company making your HPFP does all of the above, its easy for them to relay this to you with pictures, videos, specs, data, etc. We won't be the only ones doing the above as there are some more HPFP's coming to market in 2013 from competitors that are made similar to our recipe. There could be some available today that are made this way but I guess we will never know since the companies are so worried about their "secrets".
Cheers!
