New TR owner, please educate me on acohol injection

["Turbo-T"]

As a new turbo Buick owner I find myself asking lots of questions. Some may sound silly but we all had to start somewhere right?

I've been hearing with the turbo Buick, if you want to run anything over 15 lbs of boost or if your Scanmaster is showing anymore than 2.0 degrees of spark knock retard, you better look into running alcohol injection or otherwise be prepared to have to replace head gaskets (at a minimum) or possibly damage the engine....does this sound correct?

Now there's a ton of questions floating thru my head, please bear with me....

1. Why is alcohol injection important? Does it just reduce the temp inside the combustion chamber?

2. How is the alcohol injection set up to work? Does the alcohol injection automatically come on when you hit a certain amount of boost? Or does it come on when you are wide open throttle? Or do you just "have to remember" to turn it on before it gets to XX amount of boost?

3. How is the alcohol administered? Does it feed into the throttle body? Intake?

4. Is it just straight alcohol that is fed into the engine? Or do you mix it with water or some other liquid?

5. Is there some sort of reservoir that installs under the hood that holds the alcohol? And is it fed via solenoids like nitrous is?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Razor]

An alcohol kit is an octane kit. By adding octane, you can increase boost levels without seeing knock.

Typically done via boost pressure to activate. The kits we make use a MAP(manifold air pressure) sensor to read boost.. a controller reads this boost and sends a signal to drive a pump. As the boost increases.. more signal(voltage) is sent to the pump. The liquid comes from a reservoir that is placed under the hood. In the case of the TR.. a modded coolant reservoir is used. There is a nozzle that goes in the "Up-pipe" leading to the throttle body.

As far as liquid, I recommend straight methanol. Altho some use water mixes. You'll notice the very first thread "methanol Sources" top of this forum.

Safety should be the number one consideration when installing a device designed to deliver a liquid under high pressure may give you some reading

 

["Turbo-T"]

Thanks, I was under the impression the alky injection was supposed to lower the temps to prevent detonation, not increase the octane. I see it utilizes a modded coolant catch can....so are you then supposed to invest in another catch can for the radiator?

 

[Razor]

Temperature alone doesnt stop detonation. Yes the alcohol will drop the temps to ambient in a lot of cases.. but this alone is not the reason. Meaning just becuase you have ambient temp coming into the motor can you run 30 PSI on 87 octane.

Separate reservoir(catch can) comes with my kits for the Buicks.

 

[TURBOPOWERED68]

Razor
after i get my car on the road and all if any bugs worked out i will be giving you a call:wink: