[Keith Seymore]

Seeing the snippet on the water trough reminds me of another story:

I designed the engine air induction system for the GMT800 series trucks, to be introduced in the 1999 model year.

Water ingestion testing is, by definition, a destructive test. The problem with the GMT800 was that not only was the truck new but the engines were a new design, too. That meant there weren't many around and you sure as heck didn't want to damage one.

We debated for a couple months about how (and if) we were going to test our design. We ran a couple of competitive vehicles through our test and they passed, so we knew we had to do it. Finally we hit upon an idea: we found an "old" prototype GMT800 radiator support and fender in the trash, so we added those to a carryover GMT400 pickup, and then installed our new induction system to emulate the new front corner. We remote mounted the engine air cleaner in the existing truck and then plumbed our new system to a shop vac (and generator) in the pickup bed. That allowed us to (a) drive the truck in the water trough, (b) not damage a current production engine (c) flow air through our new system in a somewhat representative environment and (d) collect and measure any water that was drawn in. Pretty clever, I think.

I still remember the first time we hit the 1000 ft trough at 25 mph with 12" of water: water was spraying over the top of truck and flowing big time into the cab through the heater box. I imagine this is what it was like on the Titanic, and I was crouched standing on the passenger seat and screaming like a little girl. But - our basic idea worked and we were able to continue the development process.

I was still pretty nervous, though, the first few times we had rain once we started driving the trucks on the road.

K