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A custom JE piston was the last component necessary to make the bottom end of our de-stroked, long rod engine work. Although the longer H22A rod brought us closer to the top of the block, we still had an additional .172″ to account for.
Normally in motorsports or high performance applications, the pin height of a piston decreases and the piston itself gets shorter as an engine becomes more exotic.
To make up for the shorter stroke, we needed both the longer Honda H22 rod and an increased pin height. Note how tall ours is compared to the piston above. In this case though, we increased the pin height to 1.427″ to bring the deck of the piston back up to the deck of the block at TDC and still allow .005″ of deck clearance. (The original SR20DET piston has a pin height of 1.260″, which is .167″ shorter than our set of JE Pistons.)
Having spent almost a decade of my life working at JE Pistons, the pistons were obviously one of my most favorite parts of this engine build. Not just because I was a “piston guy” though. When I transitioned from being a piston designer to an engineering manager, my sense of accomplishment also changed. My pleasure was no longer from saying, “I designed that part” but rather, by developing a talented team that was responsible for designing thousands of badass parts for the top tiers of motorsports.
Yes, I conceptualized the piston but, the design you see before you today came from a talented team of individuals whose personal and professional development I had the pleasure to be a part of. Dane Kalinowski, JE's Product Development Engineer, developed the forged, asymmetrical structure while Josh Wang, an Application Engineer, designed the trick 3D milled undercrown and spec'd the complex skirt profile.
