Technical Vintage Water Injection - need info

Just got this vintage Vanderpoel/EXOLA water injection. I plan to use it on my 41 Chevy. Now I'm looking for a manual or instructions. Any additional information would be very appreciated. Also IMHO it looks very similar to a Octa-Gane Injection - are those somehow related?

Thanks guys, Frank

 

What is under the cover? The br*** screw looks like a metering adjustment of some kind.

 

Snake oil junk that never actually worked like it was advertised to. I never installed one but back in the 60's I removed a couple from cars that ended up in the school shop because they didn't run worth **** and local shops didn't want to fool with the car or the owners.

 

The theory with these things is that a small amount of water produces steam which increases the cylinder pressure when it fires off. I'm sure it also reduces the valve guide and piston ring lifespan in the process. Snake oil, sez me.

 

Came across this channel last week on YT. Seems to know his stuff, but haven’t watched this vid yet.

 

Water (or alcohol/mix) injection can absolutely be beneficial, essentially it does the job of an octane booster making the fuel behave as if it had a higher octane rating (if you cool down the combustion you have reduced what would make low octane fuel self ignite). The downside is that the amount of water has to be rather precisely regulated to work really well, you want to cool it down, not put the fire out, completely mechanical systems will really struggle to do a good job.

Water/alcohol injection was used on WW2 fighter planes, and I believe there are some good reports made by NACA from those days. Today it seems to mostly be used in various forms of racing.

 

Had one on a 69 428 ci. Pontiac. Didn’t hurt nothing didn’t help nothing.

 

In the '80s/'90s, Edelbrock made a setup called Varajection that had a little science to it. When I worked in an auto parts store in the '80s, owners of late '70s Fords were always asking about water injection; even with smog era compression ratios, they still spark knocked like crazy.

 

I don't know anything about them, but didn't GM use water/alcohol injection on their turbocharged 215 engines in the Olds F85 in the early '60's and called it rocket booster or something similar? You might research that.
Al Hook

 

Yeah. Now that you mention that, I believe there was a Jay Leno’s Garage YT vid about the car, but not sure if it was water or something else.

 

Had one on my '57 Chevy with 283 that had 11.5:1 compression, back in the late 60's. It was advertised as eliminating pinging and knock under hard acceleration, and came with a wiring kit and limit switch to activate it at full throttle. It didn't make my engine stop pinging, nor did it run cooler as advertised. I tossed it about a year later.

 

I use a water/methanol injection system on my OT Turbo EFI stuff. At certain boost levels, a switch activates a pump & nozzle to inject the Water/Methanol mixture (the cheap stuff most folks use is just windshield washer fluid). The atomized water molecules lower inlet temperatures under boost, which allows for more timing before detonation, and the methanol raises octane to make more power, as well as lowering cylinder temperatures. A friends car has the same system as mine and did before & after dyno pulls, the car made 660hp to the rear tire before the water/methanol, and made 710hp to the tire after.

This old contraption post above is just an old version of the same basic technology but for the fuel supply that was available at that time period, pretty cool, but probably doesn't do anything beneficial because it needs pressure and a nozzle to atomize the water to function properly.

 

I installed a set up on a M______ way back when, it was pre-detonating badly due to too much compression for the fuel we had available. It seemed to do the trick, car ran great and my tail pipes had a nice white soot in them.

 

Turbo Rocket Fluid! It looked like weak orange juice; probably a water/ethanol mix.

 

I still have one in the box out back from the time. Never got around to using it.
lol

 

There is a post right here on the HAMB where a member restores a 1963 Olds F85 with posts on the injection system.

Found it: https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum...oration-turbo-charged-fluid-injection.924403/

 

It was the Oldsmobile Jetfire. I am late to the game but just found the post. Turbo Rocket Fluid was the name of the stuff but it was 50/50 water and methanol with some oil. The oil was just to keep the methanol from drying out the diaphragms in the system.

 

The late 70's were a victim ( a**** other things) faulty EGR valves which leaned them out & made the rattle like marbles in a coffee can .

 

Loss of quench was the big factor I put a set of Asuie Heads on a 351 M gained compression and lost the pinging

 

WATER DOESN'T BURN !!!

It's simple... Look into your 7th grade science book, it'll say the same thing !
Makes little to no sense to inject straight "water" into an engine. ANY added water just takes up space that gas and or air would be in the combustion chamber doing good things.

On the other hand, as some have said, a 100% shot of alcohol WILL add a bit of power. Alcohol DOES...burn.

Been there, done that. Have seen the dyno results too.

But that guismo that you (FishFry) have is kinda cool, just as an experiment / artwork.

Mike

 

There is a time and a place for water injection.

Water doesn't burn, but it does do some funky stuff with fuel and nitrogen combustion chemistry. The modified chemistry is not enough to warrant it's use for anything in the power-adding game.

If you can access a fuel that does not knock under your engine conditions, then water will give little benefit other than turning into steam and cleaning out some of the carbon deposits.

If your fuel cannot keep up with the compression and cylinder temperature that your engine makes, then water can help. By turning into steam water absorbs a m***ive amount of energy. That absorption will lower your peak cylinder temperature and help suppress knocking. This may allow you to run the engine at higher boost, under harder load, or with a lower grade of fuel.

Methanol does the same "make me vapourise and I remove heat and cool the cylinder" trick. That's one reason that you can run such high compression in an alky motor... it lowers it's cylinder temperatures a lot. Unfortunately, methanol ****s up less than half the heat per pound than water does, so if you add a little bit to a gas motor to prevent knocking then you need to add more than twice what you would if adding water. On the plus side, methanol does burn so that little dribble of methanol does add some power... water does not. On the bad side again, methanol when burnt makes only half the power that gas does... so adding methanol to a gas motor and displacing gas tends to lower power. All up, there is a balance when adding methanol to a gas motor as it makes less power but cools the engine to prevent knocking.

As an aside, the world needs cooler product names again, like Turbo Rocket Fluid .

Cheers,
Harv

 

Many years ago I had water injection consisting of a windshield washer pump and tank sending water through a tiny nozzle above the carb choke plate.
I had the timing set so the car knocked going up a particular hill. When I turned the injection on, the knock disappeared.
No difference in power or anything else, just that it eliminated the detonation. Pretty cool!

And what's up with the guy's index finger (from the above linked video)?

 

different animal, but, we used water injection in the J-57 Pratt& Whitney jet engines on B-52's when I was in the Air Force. It did make more power/thrust. seems the water mist cooled the ambient air temp to make more thrust.

 

I don’t understand the concept of water not being a power adder because it doesn’t “burn”. It is not the burning of fuel that makes power, but the resulting expansion of gases. Water expands when it turns into steam, which is why steam engines exist. Water expanding to steam can be very efficient in those applications… What am I missing?

 

Just like you can use water to calm down a forest fire raging out of control you can use it to manage a fire inside the engine.

When you have too much compression/boost/heat for the fuel octane you are using, instead of a calm (well, relatively) burning you get sudden rapid detonation where the fuel has been heated beyond it's self ignition point. If you keep pushing your engine under these conditions it will destroy itself, hammered to death by those detonations.

Your options are:
1: Modify the engine to run on lower octane fuel
2: Increase the octane of the fuel

Modifying the engine will be a lot of work, it will reduce power, possibly increase fuel consumption. No fun.
Using a higher octane fuel will be easy, just needs carb tuning, but such fuel can be expensive and hard to get.

So... lets trick the fuel into behaving as if it has higher octane! We simply inject a small amount of water in full throttle situations (because that's when we have detonation issues). The water cools down the combustion slightly, not enough to cause problems but enough to prevent the fuel from self ignition. Wohoo, the cheap stuff from the gas station is suddenly behaving much like the hard to get high octane stuff you had to sneak out from the airport by night when your friend worked there.
Now you can add even more boost or compression to get a bit more power out of the engine, while running the cheap fuel. Everybody smiling, except the people you beat at the race track...

The problem we have is there's a fine line between calming down the combustion to avoid problems, and drowning it and losing power. Modern computer controlled systems can do a very good job of improving power and fuel economy (no need to run the engine very rich to avoid detonation at full throttle, the water does that job), while basic windshield washer pump & nozzle systems at best can prevent the engine from killing itself, there will be no precision and you'll have to error on the side of too much water.

Methanol injection does the same basic thing. The theory about it adding power as it can burn has little merit, there isn't any extra air allowing the extra fuel to burn anyway, it just makes the engine run richer. The entire point of adding it is to cool down the combustion - just like jetting the carb richer than theoretically ideal at full throttle, but without wasting fuel from the tank.

Water-alcohol mixes are used to avoid the water freezing.

 

I helped a friend install one on an off-topic vehicle 50 years ago.

He swore it made a huge difference on our first trial.

However, when we opened the hood, the water container was empty, and we had noticed no decrease in performance, and no idea when the water ran out.

So, more "scientific" tests.

We removed the unit, did a tune-up and ran (3) 0-60 timed runs, and averaged the times.

Next, reinstalled the unit, re-checked the electrical tune-up, and did (3) more timed runs, and averaged the times.

We then removed the unit, put it back in the box, and sat it on the shelf; you may guess as to the comparison of the average times with and without the unit.

It makes a nice conversation piece.

Jon

 

My understanding of what water injection does (and I'm not an expert in any way) is it is not a power adder. I believe that water has a solid state, a fluid state, and a gas state. When injected the water changes from the fluid (droplets, etc.) to the gaseous state which causes a cooler temperature drop and denser air charge. Alcohol is often blended with the water, not as fuel, but for the added cooling from the flash evaporation.
This is probably why we see reports of less knocking under load.

 

Possible the misting of the water removed carbon on the pistons that was/were causing hot spots?

Ie we used to dribble water through the carb to do the same thing.

 

I’ll have to dig out my “vari-jection “ and see if Edelbrock touted any advantages and why, in the paperwork

 

It seems very common that way too large a nozzle is used in WI setups. From what I've read on it, the amount of water injected should be about 1/8 to 1/4 the m*** of the gasoline.
So I just sized it to provide that much at max power, and didn't try to adjust for partial throttle or lower rpm.

Also, Shurflo type pumps are generally used because they're readily available. They are grossly oversized for the amount of water needed.