Brent, I have massive respect for your engine-building ability and your knowledge in that direction. And I always look eagerly toward what you have to say when it comes to such an area.
I, on the other hand, have built no more than a couple-of-dozen engines in my whole life, for myself, and participated in a few dozen more while helping other people. (That couple-of-dozen includes several flatheads, 'back-when'. One of them powered the family car, and one my '34 Five Window.) You have vastly more engine experience than I do.
On the other hand, I spent time during college working at various tasks at T&C Livonia. At one point I built Torque converters. We were supposed to make 800 per shift and worked seven days a week for several months at a time. Altogether, I probably helped make several hundred thousand. As a curious college kid, I learned all the jobs in the department. And since I was also racing at the time, I got to know many of the engineering folk as well. I learned about torque converters.
Since we last visited the subject, I called several of the manufacturers of performance torque converters. Talking with their tech folk, I asked if the words'stall-converter' were much in use in their facility. Depending on who was on the other end of the line, I got more-or-less polite derision. The words don't seem to appear anywhere in any manufacturer's printed material nor are they in regular use by the personnel.
Talking about a 'stall-converter' is just as incorrect as insisting on always speaking of a 'metallic engine' in the given contexts. The use of 'stall' is just as useless as 'metallic' or insisting on talking about a 'cloth shirt'.
I let your put-down dismissiveness go for the last couple of weeks in order to see if I'd just forget it. I haven't---nor the comments from others. A display of ignorance is never seemly, nor is attempting to poke fun at someone who says, "Hey, wait a minute, guys. That isn't right..."
Ken Sheffer
