Does anyone use water-methanol injection on normally aspirated Olds motors? While the biggest benefit is seen on forced induction motors, Hot Rod installed a system on a pretty tame N/A Mopar V8 and it added 16hp and 11ft lbs! In fact, the torque was up 30ft lbs at certain points in the torque curve. If the gains are proportional to output, it may well add 18-22hp for a 400hp motor. It stands to reason a cooler, denser intake charge will produce more power. These kits are about $450 typically. But hey, upwards of 20hp without opening the motor is great. Thoughts?

https://www.hotrod.com/articles/how-to-boost-engine-power-with-water-methanol-injection/

 

I have one but its not installed just yet. Hopefully this summer. If anything it will lighten your wallet

Its a snow system with the proportional pump controller. Just trying to hide everything in a neat spot so you don't see the big pump. It will likely go in the trunk, fairly heavy.

I don't know of anyone using it myself. Not too sure how it will effect the AF ratio. Likely have to have a wideband to see in case of any jetting needed.

 

Please report back your experience with it. If you see even some gains, I'll pick one up for my 67. That Hot Rod article I posted said they say a 16hp increase and a 30ft lb torque increase at some points on the torque curve. That is worth the cost to me. Keep me posted.

 

I just read that article it says that was rear wheel hp - I did not think it would be that much

 

And.....thats on a relatively tame motor. If installed on say a 450 or 475hp motor, could the gains be proportional? I think it could. So, a 16hp gain on a tame motor may be 20+ on a larger stronger motor. If I can add 20hp without opening my motor, Im on board. I certainly know how much stronger my car runs on cool dense air rather than hot air (big difference). So, with that system having the ability to cool the incoming air notably, it could really be something. Keep me posted.

 

Sounds like Nitrous is still the better bang for the buck.

 

The real gain with these kits is when you can't run the timing the engine wants because it has too much cylinder pressure. Too much compression, not enough cam, or boost on pump gas come to mind. It allows you to run the timing where it should be

 

Good points. While I am interested in what this kit can do for my 440hp 468 at the moment, I'm also pondering my Phase 2, which will either be porting and cutting my Cs with big roller cam (70hp+), or maybe even a twin turbo setup on my current 9.57static/8.42dynamic motor as is (fresh motor with forged Speed Pros). In either case, utilizing iron heads and our 91 octane premium, detonation is foremost in my mind. Of course I could run E85 and have zero detonation risk at all, but I hadnt accepted going E85 yet. So, these are all thoughts running around in my little brain, hence my interest in this Snow kit. Here is my 67....

 

This.^^

Matter of fact, Olds pioneered the use of water injection on its '62 turbo Jetfire in order to combat detonation caused by increased cylinder pressure due to the turbocharger. My impression is that much of any power gain would be realized from the bumped compression and/or advanced timing that would be permitted by a water injection setup, rather than the setup itself. Although I guess a denser mixture would be an ancillary benefit.

As mentioned above, you probably would get more bang for your buck from nitrous.

 

If this injection ices the intake that would be where the majority of power is coming from. Snow Performance is probably 30 miles from my shop, maybe I will ask them if they want to test it on my dyno NA.

 

Could an overly rich water/methanol injection cause any engine part issues?

 

Interesting, will be following this

 

As long as you don’t hydro-loc the engine by leaving the spray on when it is at low RPM /low throttle, or not running, and you don’t cause a flame-out of your ignition/spark plugs, it will just loose power if overly rich by a lot.

I believe as Vortecpro said, the major advantages will be from cooling the fuel/air mixture in the intake, creating a denser charge into the chamber.

The higher your compression ratio and the hotter your intake manifold temp is, the greater the gains will be once you engage alky/water injection on that particular engine combination, especially if you have to run a less than ideal timing for maximum torque/hp under non-alky/water injection running.

Jeff Smith had a nice article about mixing E85 and certain percentages of gasoline to get higher octane mixtures and better anti-detonation resistant fuel without all the problems that running pure E85 can create with old rubber fuel lines/old carbs without upgrading the systems.


https://www.enginelabs.com/engine-te...or-less-money/



I personally wanted to build a 13:1+ compression Olds street engine to run on E85 exclusively, but the stock Block wouldn’t have held the power numbers that Vortecpro and I could’ve squeezed out.. as well, I didn’t want to be chained to just one fuel in case I drove the car far away on a trip and E85 wasn’t available along the way.

 

Have you thought of doing a DX based build?
You‘re going down a Motec EFI’d path correct? I don’t know what model ECU you have but why not do flex fuel? That would solve your potential availability issues.
And yes the water/meth injection systems are mainly to cool the inlet charge. That’s not Rocket science, no pun intended. But another system to check out would be the new one from AEM. It has enhanced vaporization along with reduced water consumption.

 

We had to keep the 455 engine we had to start with because of a lack of funds to start over with a DX build. A big bore Rocket Racing block would be a dream build since we have everything set up with these Batten heads and intake now. Going to a 520-540ci with a 4.35 bore+ and going up in intake valve size and custom valve spacing with some custom jesel/T&D rockers would allow the heads to get up into the 380-400cfm territory, very likely.

Going to hopefully get our current set up driving and tuned-in to optimize everything as is and enjoy it for several years is the plan.

Flex fuel would require a different Motec ECU than the one we have. My plan is to eventually get an ethanol gauge and make several different tunes optimized for a certain range of Ethanol fuel, or if we are running non-ethanol premium or even a mix with some of the high octane “race gas” canned mix added at a known octane number.

Changing tunes is easy, but obviously not as seamless as a “flex-fuel” adaptive ECU; possibly that will be a future upgrade if necessity requires it and money allows for it.

Because of our lack of air density here and lower horsepower output caused by the high elevation, I doubt I will need water/meth injection with our current naturally aspirated combo, especially if we switch to E85 or a mix for hot days.... but You never know.

I will give that AEM setup a look though for future knowledge, thanks!

 

Even with the older stuff you should be able to configure an input table using a 0-5v Flex fuel sensor and build a fueling table in percentages from that. That’s what you have to do with the Holley HP/Dominator stuff, there’s no provision for automatic flex fuel/spark tables.

 

Thanks for bringing that up Mark, I have looked at building an auxillary table to modify the fueling curve parameters based on a an ethanol fuel sensor, I just haven't had time to play with it much yet. I have the Motec currently configured to have fuel pump speed controls, but, the dual Bosch 044's ended up being so quiet that I don't know if I am in a hurry to use these speed controllers. I might just change this wiring to run the ethanol percentage sensor. As You know with older EFI systems, you only have a few outputs available to control items; I am using the two switched outputs for 1) fuel pump control and 2) electric fan control, and the two PWM outputs for 1) IAC and 2) the fuel pump speed control (which could become the ethanol percentage fuel adjustment table, using a separate input channel for the fuel sensor).

I may do the speed controls and the flex fuel auxillary fuel sensor/trim later after we are running and driving on what we have.