Had a long chat to fred at trick marine about how we could improve the way in which we do business. One of the topics we came up with was explaining how KPM achieve run dry on thier pumps and can give a two year warranty on an impeller. This is probably the most asked question ( even though it tells you on our website) , and then we are not believed , until its tried.

We have just released our generation 2 pump which has ironed out all the problem areas we know about but there may be more. Please tell us

So we have decided to go open forum and if you have a question then we will tell the full truth (ps Its covered with patents). We are either Brave , stupid or very confident. All i Know that in three years we have never sold a replacement impeller.

How many times do you change impellers? , where do they go when they break? , do you have prime problems ? etc.etc

If you have had problems with our pump , in any way or problems with other pump systems lets discuss it. Unless we understand these issues how can we make things even better.
look forwards to hearing
Jules morgan KPM

Can you post a link to your product information?

Ok I will byte

How do you keep a rubber impeller from a melt down?

Yes, a link to product information please

Trickmarine.net

Here's one, a lot of Merc. engines have the sea water pump and fuel pump combo, working on a couple right now and finding your pump kits don't have the hardware to install correctly. The bolts are too short to go thru the bracket and pump and two of the holes need studs plus nuts. It will be a great pump once the bugs get worked out. I should have all hardware and pumps together tomorrow.

This new design no longer uses studs....it uses bolts that come in from the front side....This new style fits both applications

Yes, I have the new design, sent the old design back last week. Please tell us how it works on the sea water / fuel pump combo. There are five holes, one hole gets a 3/4 inch bolt, two holes get 1/1/2 bolts, and two holes have to be studs with nuts.

I have had 2 impeller failures in the last 5 years, both at start up. I usually change my impeller once every spring. The broken blades were clogged in my oil cooler.
I have been using Sierra replacement impellers ( $14). They appear to hold up just fine.
I took my sea pump apart last night to swap in a new impeller (new engine install). It had a few nicks/cuts on leading edge of blades. Failure was imminant...............

I would be interested in a KPM pump, if it were cost effective.

Ok How to stop the impeller melting down.

Let take this from first principles.
The impeller melts down because of heat , and the heat is generated due to friction. So logic would dictate if we reduce the friction then we eliminate the heat and as a result the impeller will not melt.

OK so Far. Good.

But There needs to be a certain amount of compression on the impeller otherwise it will not work. But with a pump there are only a few of the impeller blades actually working. So inorder to reduce the friction we have removed more material from the chamber of the pump that is not actually doing any work. This is where our pattented port configuration comes in. What we have also done is to shape the chamber to maintain flow but also reduce the friction.

So by port design we have eliminated some friction and heat.

But this is not enough to meet the standard we required.

There is however from the impeller enough heat to do some damage, but we cant reduce the friction any more otherwise the pump wont work.

The only thing we can do is to try and get rid of the heat very quickly. The way we do this is to ensure that we use the pump itsself to sink away the heat. So the way we do this is to have the inside of the chamber as thin as possible with most of the material on the out side of the pump. The heat energy in its simplest form wil be sucked into the larger mass off material . But the material has to be high quality billet , castings will not work since they have porosity and other things that will cause problems . So every chamber is machined from solid billet

Now this is were it gets really freaky. We connected thermo couples on the inside of the pump and ran it dry at 2000 revs . We measured 100 deg c on the inside and 124 deg celcius on the out side.Water would boil on the outside of the pump. On my life this is true. So we now have a heat sink.

However, if we put in a stainless steel liner or wear plate or the pump was made from plastic because thier coeffieients of heat dissapation are worse than aluminium (x6 for stainless) then we would still get meltdown. So we cant use these materials since they do not work.

Aluminium is the only alternative but we need to protect the chamber from corrosion and wear , whilst maintaining heat dissapation. WE developed a special finish which gave very hard wear properties and corrosion protection but again can only be used on pure material. A casting will not work.I wish it did but it just dont trust me.

To help reduce the friction even further we gave the inside of the chamber a very specific finish. Contrary to popular wives tales you do not want a polished finish it just wont work. Similar to glazed piston liners. For it to work well you need a specific grind pattern.

Also with my time on the race circuit we noticed that the impellers in other pumps were breaking in a very specific manner. This was due to the rear bearing support wearing and distorting the impellers which stressed them out. So we made sure we had a roller bearing in the back of our pump to give true concentric running.

With all this friction reduction the HP requirement for a two stage dropped to 1.5 HP. about 5 hp on our competitors

To add the icing on the cake We then set about the impeller and what we did was play with the compound a bit.

The result we ended up with are beyond belief and my original specification was to make the pump run dry at 2000 revs for 5 mins.

What we ended up with was

24 hours at 2000 revs dry ( we stopped the test)

10 mins at 6000 revs . I challenged Dan my business partner to destroy the pump. It hurt the impeller and he felt vindicated until I restarted the test rig and connected the water and the pump still primed its self from three feet. You should have seen his face.

To this day we have never sold or replaced an impeller.

We have recalled early pumps from customers and replaced them with new ones so we can analyze thier progress. We have had pumps run over a hundred hours with no sign of wear.

We have tested every pump on the market and we probably know more about their pumps than they do. Our big competitors pump runs dry and its a good pump. The problem comes when water is introduced after a few mins. The change in temperature causes violent stress fractures in the impeller which has vulcanised with the heat , and the thing explodes. Imagine heating a glass and throwing it in cold water. It explodes ( idle Childhood, loved blowing **** up)

The plastic housings ? Why????? . Wheres the pride??.

Oh yes nearly forgot kpm pumps do not need special impellers to work , you can use regular ones, but its not quite as good. But you will not need to replace it so why worry. We now gaurantee the pump and impeller for 2 years.!!!

If you want more details see our data sheets on www.teamkpmracing.com or call fred at trick who will email you.

Hope this is as clear as mud

jules