i would like to know how with works. like the actual process. is methanol always being injected, or is it activated manually. help me out here

p.s. a knowledgable response from a mature person who is willing to dedicate 5 minutes of their life will suffice. i dont need no0b comments, or people telling me to search


thanks in advance
jared

 

I'll start by saying that Meth injection is cool I work at a performance shop and we deal with GM vehicles (camaros, firebirds, vettes) and we have put methanol injection on many turbo/supercharged vehicles.

We have one kit that we use (that has done us well and proven many times to be very quality) and that is the AlkyControl kit. It uses a progressive controller and has a gain and turn on controller. Thus you can set when it comes on (say at 8psi) and then how much it sprays. It will also ramp up the more boost you have.

Methanol is cool because it will cool down your intake temp's (alot) because it burns cool. It's also equivalent to 135 octane gas (serious race fuel!) so it can allow you to run less actual fuel (giving you a lower injector duty cycle). When we install it on a car that didn't previously have it we usually see HP/TQ gains as well. The main reason to have it though is safety, there are just many benefits and it is a slight power adder (*shrug*).

It can enable you to run more boost/timing than you normally would, but (here's the negative) you're in trouble if you run out of meth. On alot of vettes and camaros it will utilize the stock windshield washer fluid jug as the "tank" for the methanol which will make it so that if you run into a low amount of fluid it will show up on the dash. For a race car it'd just be another thing to add to the checklist. The obvious negative to running out of meth is that you can't safely run up high in the boost/RPMs/throttle or you'll have hell to pay. I'm sure you could set it up (with a good alky kit and tuning) that you only need to spray some alky when you are running say 25psi. In this instance you could run say 18-20psi on the street every day, and when you feel like screwing around you can activate the methanol system, turn the boost up, and have fun. You can also run pump gas (92 or 93) all the time! So no more mixing fuels!

I hope that this helps some... This is my limited knowledge of the subject and there might be a few things that I am not 100% accurate on. I don't know evo's very well so things might be a little different for them but the main facts still apply. I'm not trying to say I'm the ultimate know-it-all on this subject so I'm going to be reading what other people have to say about this as well! I'm also not wanting to get into any **** fights either, lol.

 

make sure one of these meth dealies has a fail safe b/c you dont want to be boosting 30psi if the meth fails hehehe

 

nice write up. makes me want to get one. can you point me towards a good brand and price?

 

very nice write up, just what i was looking for , and as i said before, im like you, not looking for fights, just some friendly knowledge! thanks my man!!

here is another question for you. lets say i want to run 18-20psi daily, then around ~25psi on meth. what lets the engine know that it is going to be experiencing more power? EMS(or is that just for switching between pump and race gas)?, OR does the meth just let more 02 combust in the cylinders, hence allowing for more psi, hence more power? basically, do you need a device that switches between running on pump and running on pump/meth?

jared

 

Nice write-up Sp3aK!

I'm looking to do meth injection come spring time.

 

Well I take a stab at answering your question simple_mr2. If the car is setup to run good at 18psi on the street and you want to be able to say run 25psi as the high boost (screwin around or race only) then I believe you can setup the alky to only come on at say 19psi so that when you boost above 18psi, what can't be covered by the fuel as far as octane and amount being sprayed would be covered by the meth.

Our shop uses the kit from http://www.alkycontrol.com/ - Again it's proven time and again to be a very quality kit. You can look around the site for more details on the kit itself (to save me some writing). I will say that it usees it's own map sensor to know what boost you are at (you'd just T off the intake manifold for a boost reference).

There are other kits out there, I'm not going to trash them but I will say what I've seen... There is also SNOW Performance, AquaMist, and Devils Own. The Snow kit and AquaMist are just junk from what I've heard and seen. The quality, etc. just isn't great and not something I would want to put on my car and asusme it would be reliable. The Devil's Own kit is based alot on the AlkyControl kit (it uses the same progressive controller as far as I know), but we recently had a customer toast is supercharged GTO as a result of this kit failing. My boss (who does the tuning at our shop) and I were noticing some inconsistencies in the A/F ratio the car was being tuned. Basically the kit was not spraying an equal amount of methanol each time, which is a huge problem. If you setup the fuel injectors to spray X amount of fuel and the methanol is supposed to spray Y amount and you get the AFR dialed to say 11.8, then what happens if X or Y changes? Obviously the AFR will be leaner!

Again I'm not trying to be a salesmen here, this is just what I've seen. The AlkyControl kit is kinda expensive (you'll have to check to see if he has something specific for Evo's or not), but honestly it's worth it for the safety and ability to not have to worry about race gas. For alot of customers they will go through about 1 gallon of alcohol for every 2 tanks of gas (assuming normal driving). You can pick up alcohol (or methanol, doesnt matter what u call it) for something like $3/gallon at most race tracks. Our shop bought a 55 gal drum since a few of our own cars have it and we have it for cars that we install alky kits on.

If you can afford it's definately great to have! Even though my car is turbo'd, it's a POS station wagon so it's not worth the money for the kit. But later on when I get a nicer turbo'd/supercharged car (I'm really lookin at Evo's right now!) I will definately be havin some alky injection!

*EDIT*
There is a link to a video on the main site to sorta show how it works. I did see that there is a LOW LEVEL led on the A-Pillar in the vid. Since our shop usually installs it on cars that use the stock fluid tanks we don't need to worry about that, but you can get a float-type sensor that when the fluid runs low it will turn a light on. I'm sure this is part of the kit or something you can be told where to get!

 

nice write up Sp3ak

 

so basically, you can have alky always on, potentially, its just a matter of the style of driving that activates it? 0-19psi off, then if you get on it, and boost above 19psi the alky with come into play? (of course, as you said, you can set the desired boost level, correct?)


jared

 

I resent the fact you call Snow Performance kits and Aquamist junk, I would like to see evidence for your claims...that statement is like me saying alkycontrol is junk even though I have very little experience with the system...

 

where exactly is the 'meth' injected?

 

5-6 inches from TB

 

My claims on Snow and Aquamist, as I said, are from what I've heard and seen. Heard of several people having pump and controller failures and seen inconsistent dyno results with them. That's a big problem and why one customer recently toasted his motor (inconsistent meth spray and it actually just stopped all together). On top of that alot of people will do water injection which makes no sense... it's not combustable and doesn't cool as well as alcohol and it's obviously not fuel. I mean your Snow 2 kit obviously works for you since your car runs 11's.... But we out OUR shop with OUR customer haven't had any luck.

And before you get your panties in a bunch and act like I just slapped your mom I have also heard from some that they've had 0 issue. I think alot of the poor results were from early model kits and such, so whatever. It's just like Spec clutches. I've heard instances of them exploding and sending pieces through the tranny tunnel (happend to a customer of ours), and then I've heard (from a friend at another shop in Alabama) that they are great.

The main point of this thread is supposed to be how it works... I could care less what other people choose to use for injection... make your own kit, who cares.

And not to argue with you further but we usually mount them 3-4 inches Might be different between V8's and 4cyls though?

 

I was just defending the claim because I have sold hundreds of these kits and have not had one kit with a issue other than installation and we had a couple that had defective controllers (one batch of 8 controllers). If you guys ever run into a snow kit that has an issue just let me know as the customer service at snow is awesome and any issues they will immediately take care of. I totally agree with the water injection being a waste when there are so many more benefits to using meth injection. The added distance on our cars is because we run so much boost and high pressure an added inch or two helps in vaporization...Also if you have some free time I would love to hear a little more about the car that had its motor toasted, just like to hear the good and bad out there, we can keep those to the pms so we don't hijack this thread...

 

You need to "hear" less from other people.

You have done great so-far, dont ruin it by making sweeping statetments.

water actually cools 2X better than R-OH