Ryan Lippmann — Projects & Garage

The 416 Sierra

The centerpiece of the garage is a 416-cubic-inch supercharged V8 combination that I document and develop in my own GMC Sierra. A pickup truck is an honest platform for a project like this: it hides nothing, forgives nothing, and gets driven, which means every decision eventually gets tested by reality instead of by the internet.

The build philosophy is the one I've used on jobsites for twenty-plus years: measured, logged, tuned on evidence. Establish a baseline. Change one variable. Log it. Compare against the baseline. Keep what the data keeps; throw out what it doesn't — including your own favorite theory, which is usually the hardest part. I run deep on HP Tuners, so every pull produces a datalog and every datalog gets read. "It feels stronger" is not a data point. It's a mood with a throttle pedal.

The hardware record matters: Golen Engine Service built the 416 short block, and Whipple rebuilt the supercharger. My role is to document and develop the installed combination as a measured test platform, keeping the data and the vendor work correctly attributed.

That discipline is also where TuneView came from — tuning my own combination on evidence and wondering why the whole industry didn't work that way.

Two longer write-ups: The 416 Philosophy on why this engine exists at all, and Grading a Tune Like a Jobsite on how the datalogs get read. Build and tuning videos are on my YouTube channel. The running record — six months of logs and counting — lives in the Sierra build thread.

Open Tools

The other half of the garage is software. I build open tools for automotive diagnostics and design — the utilities I wished existed when I needed them, published so the next person doesn't have to wish. The code lives at github.com/lippmoney. One of them, a front engine accessory drive layout tool, came straight out of the belt geometry work on this truck and is written up on the Orange County engineering page.

The pattern behind all of them is the same: take something the hobbyist world settles by argument and give it an instrument instead. A measurement you can rerun beats a forum consensus every time, and a tool that shows its work beats both. I write about these ideas on Medium and on LinkedIn. The biggest expression of that idea outgrew the garage entirely and became TuneView — a platform that grades engine calibrations against real datalogs. Same instinct, bigger dyno.

The Double Blast Footnote

One credit from a different life: I appeared in the 1994 action film Double Blast, where the credits list me as "Ryan Lippman" — one n short. Getting people to spell it right has been a passion project ever since: it's Lippmann. The full record of my brief film career sits on IMDb, where it remains exactly one line long. Some projects are engines. Some are spelling.