Date:         Sun, 25 May 2008 04:04:13 -0500
Reply-To:     Max Wellhouse <dimwittedmoose@CFU.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Max Wellhouse <dimwittedmoose@CFU.NET>
Subject:      Re: Water Injection
Comments: To: John Rodgers <inua@CHARTER.NET>
In-Reply-To:  <4838BEAA.50000@charter.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

John:  fWIW, I owned a Spearco dual stage water injector I bought at
a local speed shop in Little Rock many years ago.  It was like $100
and I used it on my 71 dualport bus with dual kadrons on top.  They
also made a single stage unit IIRC. It was a red windshield
washer-type container with a windshield type water pump and a couple
of other thingies at the bottom.  It used engine vacuum to determine
how much water to inject and the water hoses went into the top of the
air cleaners.  You had your choice of a variety of size of orifices
in the hose depending on how big your engine was.  It worked well for
a while and I noticed a difference in performance, but can't vouch
for the cleaning of the combustion chambers.

Ultimately, I got tired of putting  water in there as the engine
would go through over a gallon per tankful and eventually clog the
orifices with lime deposits(the orifices wer very small).   Distilled
water solved the lime problem, but ended up being too much hassle for
me at the time.  Back in the early 80's gas may have been pushing $1
gallon or so, and I was looking for a way to squeeze more out of a gallon.

I thought commercial jets used  water injection for take off and then
spewed the excess into the atmosphere once they were at altitude.  I
ws thinking I'd heard that they would go through several hundred
galleons of water to get to altitude, but a pilot could probably
answer that question better.



DM&FS

At 08:19 PM 5/24/2008, John Rodgers wrote:
>During WW II  the Navy F4U Corsair and the Navy Hellcat had  radial
>engines that used a water injection system that  enabled those engines
>to achieve "Military Power" from the engines or in other words - achieve
>substantial power above the engines design capability for sustained
>maximum power. This water injection system enabled many a pilot to save
>his butt in a dogfight with Japanese pilots.
>
>Does anyone on The List have any knowledge about this, and whether there
>has ever been any effort to try and use the principle to extract more
>power for an automotive engine or increase mileage per gallon?
>
>John Rodgers
>88 GL Driver
>Pomgranite