If your Coal Rolling in Colorado while heading to the SOHC4 Reunion, be careful.
They don't put up with no BS. Let's hope other jurisdictions follow suit.
http://www.bicycling.com/culture/coal-rolling-made-illegal-in-colorado
Firstly, the people filming that video are inconsiderate pricks... But this is just more government intrusion into people's lives and another excuse for theft. My tow pig and daily driver through the winter is a diesel, mechanically injected and no emissions anything to modify. From the factory these trucks are smelly and smokey as they didn't come with a turbo, but usually won't "roll coal" in the large black cloud sense. Lacking a turbo means to pull any load you're always into the pump pretty far to not get run down and harassed by unsafe self centered drivers, more fuel means more smoke. So a production truck that's generally underpowered and smokey, especially pulling grades at high elevation (less oxygen).
In any event the lack of power and generally smokeyness doesn't cut it for me, so I installed a turbo, bigger pump, and shimmed the injectors to pop a few hundred psi higher for better atomization. Result is the engine gets more fuel and more air, less smokey all around but it will "roll coal" at any time. Anything more than a haze or a brief puff is a waste of fuel that's not making power and can rapidly melt pistons as EGT can skyrocket over 1200* in 1-2 seconds, melting pistons. It's operator error for calling for more fuel than the engine can reasonably burn at the moment, and something to be avoided. So my truck will blow a puff of black smoke here and there and a haze when working hard pulling a load up a grade. I'm mindful of this of course, and will ensure no smoke is blown at cyclists, even if it means I lose momentum and it's down to 25 MPH up the rest of the hill. Eventually I'd like to swap to a bigger turbo to increase power and decrease smoke, but these things are expensive and time consuming (custom) and require other upgrades as well. Some people in this thread seem to think everyone has a huge pile of disposable income. Good on them for doing so well for themselves, but that's not the reality for everyone and some of us have different financial priorities.
Now I need to be worried about harassment from the law for minding my own business and harming nobody. The hilarity is because of environmental laws I now drive a smokey old underpowered diesel pickup rather than the clean burning (no visible exhaust) powerful big block truck I previously drove. My big block truck was illegal here because it was originally a small block. I built a torquey and fuel efficient big block specifically to tow and maximize MPG, using an engine I pulled from the same year and model of truck that the original owner ticked a different box when ordering it. That engine swap was illegal here. I was going to build it emissions compliant as I had all the factory equipment but everyone from the government I talked to said it's an automatic fail for inspection so I built it without emissions equipment which allowed even more power and MPG. I bought stickers but eventually ran out of sources after the government heavily fine and shut down a bunch of shops, so got an old smokey pre-emissions diesel instead. Maybe not the intended effect of their law, but this is an example of what actually happens when government distorts the market and people make decisions based on artificially imposed externalities.
