What Is It. PART 2

Water injection

Using water by itself or even mixed with Methanol is very common and also works very well. But Meth alone is better if you’re using the sub-injection as a fuel source as well as an octane booster. With that said, water has THE highest cooling effect in the combustion chamber. So when adding water, it is important to start by adding just a little. I could go on to explain multi staged water injection kits, but I don’t suggest using them, so if you go that route you’re on your own. A nice simple single nozzle kit will however allow you to run more boost and the setup is the same as the single nozzle alcohol injection kit except for starting with a smaller jet or pump speed.

Now that we understand what’s involved with running alcohol and or water injection, we can discuss the bad things about it, which just so happens to be the easiest part of the article… because there aren’t any. GM was going to use water injection on the Buick Grand National back in the 80’s and ran 100’s of miles of tests with NO adverse affects. You’re going to run into people who will say Methanol is corrosive and dangerous. You look those people in the eye and say, “see you at the finish line” cause you’ll be there having a beer waiting for them. Sure Methanol is corrosive, if you leave a piece of aluminum sitting in it, it will corrode. But there have been 1000’s of people running it for over 30 years that will say the same thing I am. Any kit you buy with the intent on running Methanol will be made from materials proven to work with Methanol. Since Meth is the most corrosive chemical you’d want to inject, it’s safe to say that any other chemical you want to run will work just fine.

Tuning with alcohol is quite different then tuning with pump gas. The correct air-fuel ratio for petrol is 14.1 to 15.1, but for alcohol it is 7.1 to 9.1 so that means we must pass at least twice the weight of fuel, in the case of alcohol, to heat the same amount of air to the same temperature as we need for gasoline. Now unlike gasoline you will find alcohol fuel will continue to provide increased power for a mixture well above the ideal mixture strength and you can always tend, therefore, to jet up on the rich side, and so avoid any possible chance of running into troubles through weak mixture causing burnt valves and holed pistons. This is a fuel with a large cooling effect provided by part of it evaporating after it has reached the combustion chamber and so tending to cool the valves, piston and so on.

In view of this amount of fuel entering the chamber, with possibly some of it in liquid form, the ignition system must be beyond reproach since if the spark is weak the mass of fuel will just soak the plug and then at once ignition troubles arise affecting starting in particular

Also do to the cooling effect and higher octane rating, detonation with alcohol is really not a problem. By that I mean that you don’t have to further retard your ignition with the increase in boost pressure, something that can not be done if just increasing boost pressure and running pump gas.

At this point it might be prudent to remind you that the handling of alcohol fuel, even in small quantities, is dangerous since poisonous Methyl Alcohol is the basis for most of these fuels. The effects are cumulative and if enough is allowed to build up, it oxidizes forming Formaldehyde causing blindness and insanity. But I’m fine and so am I (LOL)…Another point to consider is that alcohol is a solvent and so far as certain paints are concerned it acts as a perfect paint stripper. Alcohol also has a very thorough scouring effect on tanks, pipe lines and so on, not forgetting it can on certain types of fiberglass tanks cause them to disintegrate into a rather nasty sticky mess.