If you haven’t been following the KC Turbo YouTube channel, it’s chock full of great diesel turbo tips and tech videos. However, its podcast is also a welcome bit of content that brings on industry fixtures for interviews and discussion. On the latest episode of the KC Turbo Podcast, Charlie and Cameron talk with Jared Alderson, Kill Devil Diesel’s founder.

It turns out that for Alderson, who became a household name in the diesel performance world for mastering some of the most often-hated engines – namely, the 6.0-liter Powerstroke, his passion began with monster trucks and nearly everything automotive.

“I’ve just always loved cars,” Jared said in a recent interview. This lifelong passion for cars led him to work with Monster Jam, where he built blown-alcohol engines for their legendary trucks. “It was a great opportunity to work in the racing and motorsports industry…getting to play with blown alcohol engines every day,” he remembers.

These experiences gave him a solid foundation in high-performance engine building, which he would later apply to the diesel world. Jared’s shift into diesel was for personal reasons. “It was a work truck, yeah, I had to have it,” he explained, referring to his own 6.0-liter Powerstroke. Frustrated with the engine’s common reliability issues, he began experimenting and innovating.

“It was a lot harder back then,” he says. “The barrier to entry on getting parts manufactured was much harder.” This led him to adopt techniques from the hot rod world, such as O-ringing cylinder heads, to improve head gasket sealing.

Today, KDD is known for its approach to engine building. “It does take more time to quote-unquote do it correctly,” Jared emphasizes. He contrasts KDD’s methods with those of some competitors who, he observes, might simply “slap a label on a box” without conducting proper quality checks. KDD’s in-house machining process allows them to have precise control over important factors such as surface finish and flatness.

“We’ve had people bring us those heads to check out, and if they checked them, they were wrong. The valves didn’t seal, the deck surface wasn’t straight,” Jared explains. He points out the need for thorough testing and inspection, including checking valve seat runout, surface finish, and O-ring protrusion.

Jared believes in always learning and improving. “Sometimes it takes several iterations to find the one that does work,” he says, reflecting on the process of experimentation and refinement that he underwent before forming Kill Devil Diesel.