No trip to the PRI tradeshow would complete without stopping by the JE Pistons display to see what the high performance piston company had planned for the enthusiasts. According to company spokesman Sean Crawford, the company has added to their already huge line of products. “In the SRP line, our affordable forged piston line, we’ve expanded by about 260 part numbers,” said Crawford. “We’ve added 160 new part numbers to the SRP Pro line and 104 part numbers to the SRP line.”
JE Pistons have always tried to fulfill the needs of a growing high performance industry and this is clearly representative of the addition of these new part numbers. “Mainly these part number additions are offering more bore sizes that we haven’t previously offered,” stated Crawford. “We added some new LS applications to the SRP Pro line, which is basically building up the line, so these are huge additions.”
JE Piston has been one of the pioneers in the Forged Side Relief (FSR) pistons, which are turning into high performance enthusiasts’ go-to piece. This year JE unveiled another product in this line to fill another need. “Our brand new Chevy FSR piston is a hollow dome, high compression piston for open chamber big block Chevy heads,” said Crawford. “This part is extremely lightweight and it took us about a year and a half to get it where we wanted it.”
When asked what engineering was behind the new piston design, Crawford explained the details by saying, “We went through a few revisions where we did not hit our target weight so we kept working it and working on it. We took some extra steps like 3D milling in the pockets.”
“There is a lot of trapped weight in the dome of a piston, and we pushed the milling up inside the dome to help reduce the weight. We typically don’t do 3D milling on shelf parts, so this is kind of a big deal,” he added. “It’s really a full effort lightweight part.”
While it is lightweight, Crawford explained that it is still, “A very modern, robust, big block Chevy open chamber part.”
The Ring pack that comes with the new piston line is the popular .043-.043- 3mm ring pack with a nitrided steel top ring and a Napier-style second ring.
Another area where JE Pistons found a need to fill was in their JE Pro Seal head gasket line. According to Crawford, the company has been working on expanding their LS head gasket offerings. “These gaskets have a proprietary embossment process and a proprietary coating as well,” said Crawford. “It’s a real racing gasket and not an OE replacement style gasket.”
For more information on these and the other fine products from JE Pistons, visit them online at www.jepistons.com.