Had my car running good on nitrous in the 1/4 mile until one night the fuel solenoid didn't open on a pass, dumping pure nitrous into my motor. I ran the car hard down the whole 1/4 mile (like an idiot). Now i'm eating oil and can see faint blue smoke coming out of the exhaust. My question is has anybody else ran into this situation? I am just wondering what the extent of the damage is going to be (just re-ringing the motor or full rebuild).

 

Question? How many shots did you have till it failed? Do you run a wide band?

 

Probably ran a good 15 passes on the system with no problems before my fuel solenoid malfunctioned. No wideband, tuning by spark plugs

 

No fuel pressure gauge and no afr gauge huh.....and ppl told me those weren't necessary tools.................................[FAIL]

 

No need for AFR gauge, tuning by the plugs has been done since nitrous began being used. And I have a fuel pressure gauge, the fuel solenoid didn't open. This wouldn't cause a pressure drop. Anyway BTT. Any experience with tearing down a hurt nitrous motor?

 

if you had a wideband you would of seen it going lean so yes there is a need for a wideband .lol

 

motor is hurt. i know this. nothing i can do about hurting it now. BACK TO TOPIC

 

I vote for full rebuild.

 

I vote for FULL gauge set-up, and closer paid attention to fuel gauge since the pressure would (are you paying attention?) HAVE DROPED!!!!!!!!!! [GASP!] DDDAAAMMMMNNNN!!!! OWW ****!!!! NO HE DIDNT....

[hey, im doen a run on nitrous, let me check my gauge and make sure every things holden together...owww afpr must have bumped it self up as the pressure is full WOT pressure....hmmmm good for me....?_?]


-[my fuel pressure gauge STARES me in the face.] ok, but you get the idea....

 

And this is why I have been off of TGO for the past year, sick of the smart-*** comments that have no relevance to the original topic. I have only had one legitimate suggestion out of all of the above replys. Thank you for that. I am now unsubscribing from this thread and TGO for at least another year.

 

come on people, hes not asking what could have been done to prevent this, hes asking what might he expect to find....He should have used a wideband and gauge, ok we get it, aand parently your parents should have used birth control patin, o well whats done is done, his motor is ****ed and you are here. The world will go on. Irish I dont have first hand experience with this but i dont think your gonna know much till you bite the bullet and at least pull the heads...U might get lucky and just have to re ring it, maybe try a dry compression test then add a cpl squirts of oil, if the compression rises a good bit then ur probably looking at some rings, but you wont be able to tell if the cylinders are scarred up till those heads are off....good luck man

 

Full rebuild, otherwise you will be taking chances, there could bepiston, and bearing damage at the crank to say the least, tear it down and inspect closely or have your builder do the same. I wouldn't take any chances, enough damage has been done already....

 

I say full rebuild while your at it since it's already gonna be out and most sure it will last more nitrous passes as well.

 

You know that was just for laughs right....its d3mn funny too. ; )

 

No, it's not funny. Nobody here thinks you are.

OP, it sounds like you will need a full rebuild. Sucks to hear.

 

Chewed bearings and broken ring lands if I had to guess.

 

 

I vote for a full rebuild

When I had a nitrous "event" with my motor this is what I saw when I took the head off

That was on my 383

On my 305, I took the ring land off of one piston and scrapped that engine

 

Thanks man.







-LMAO!

 

AFR gauge pfff not a required thing. When I'm making a pass, I'm focused on hitting shift points, listening for odd sounds and keeping the car straight, not looking down watching pretty numbers or a scale. Chit happens, rebuild and retry, service/inspect your noids. Find out why the fuel solenoid didn't open. Busted wire? bad connection? stuck?

 

Some of these responses make me giggle.

A wideband doesn't tell you nearly as much as the plugs do. Internet folk-lore has them pinned as the end-all/tell-all gauge, yet many of the fastest nitrous cars in the country don't use one because trying to tune off it can easily cause you more harm than good. - If you've got time to stare at the instrument cluster you're not going fast enough to hurt anything that isn't already a problem. Not too many on this board running the kind of #'s I do, but I can tell you that I don't have a single gauge in the car that I can actually read while making a pass.


Back on topic - you could run a compression and leak-down test, but obviously you already know it needs to come out and be gone through. I doubt it's just going to be rings.

That said, if it only went one pass w/o the fuel noid and hurt it, you already had something a miss, be it the tune-up or a hurt ring/piston. Several of the big name tuners have proven many times that a pass w/o fuel like that isn't likely to hurt anything as nitrous by itself doesn't burn. The runs where it's getting fuel but not enough are the ones that hurt parts(and it's even easier to hurt stuff when it's too rich).

 

i was thinking the same thing. i cant really make myself look down till im nearly to the 1/8 traps.

 

Everybody wants a shift light because they don't have time to look at their 18" tach, but they expect to watch a 2 1/16" WBO2 for something that's already caused damage by the time the gauge even registers it.

 

The fuel solenoid isn't the only source of fuel.

 

So the unexpected failure of the fuel solenoid caused the damage?

If so, how does one prevent that damage form occuring?

I read somewhere all the solenoids are same quality and possibly come from same maufacturer. I read they are used primarily a non automotive application. Cant recall what that app is?

 

Use pairs of solenoids if you're worried about one failing.

 

Then one needs to jet down for 50% fueling on each? Is that ever done?

 

Two solenoids, not two jets.

 

Oh my goodness, you have to give members here a chance to respond. No reason to get like that, just place people on your ignore list if they don't give you the response that you are looking for. Why dodge the website for a year? Anyways I vote full rebuild, why take chances....

 

I'm not sure of the shot size in this situation by the OP, but wouldnt a failed solenoid cause it to go so lean that the motor would have been breaking up? That would be a noticeable event i would think and cause me to shut down.

Only thing i can think of was that the shot wasnt quite large enough to make the engine go so lean that it started to break up, but rather was too lean in the chamber and caused it to overheat.. Excessive exhaust temps would either expand rings til they touched and could have broken the ring lands. Or maybe overheated the valves and caused a valve stem seal failure, hence the oil smoke and consumption?

It certainly sounds like a ring problem but should do a compression test and/or leakdown to verify for sure. Nitrous doesnt burn by itself but the motor is still getting fuel from the EFI or carb, depending on which one it is. Combination of not enough fuel and too much timing likely caused the damage and its likely that most of that was too much timing for the mixture. I've heard this before on nitrous motors where its timing that makes the most difference.
Your thoughts?

its all about gauge location and how quick you can scan your eyes. I've been able to read my laptop during a low 10 second pass and can easily glance at my boost and air fuel during a run while shifting gears Just takes practice.

 

you fully know till you tear it down. dont listen to any e-mechanic tthat says otherwise. take it apart, inspect the damage, and plan your rebuild

 

i think you may be onto something with the small shot size, orr. damage depends on how much fuel was burning in the cylinder, and how hot it got. in this case, i think there may have been a small amount of fuel that got hot. so possibly rings, or ring lands if the rings didnt have enough gap.
to add another comment about a/f gauges on nitrous engines, ive heard of guys getting rid of them after seeing 17:1 once the car was dialed in. lol

 

Ok, my fuel gauges is at the top of the pillar staring me INNNN THE FACE, big red pointer and glowing, as soon as I kick the nitrous I can see (while looking out the window and not at the gauge) the needle drop as the system engages the noids and they open. Like that 1 guy said, its all about gauge placement.

 

to add another comment about a/f gauges on nitrous engines, ive heard of guys getting rid of them after seeing 17:1 once the car was dialed in. lol[/quote]

17:1 after being dailed in ???????

 

So if something goes wrong at the top of a run, how many lean cylinder firings have you gone through before the sensor has picked up the change, the dampened gauge movement has responded, your eye has processed what it sees, your brain has decided what to do about it, and your body has carried out the action?

 

yup. lol i have never checked mine with one, but some guys say their a/f goes crazy on the hose.
wideband is not the tuning tool of choice for any serious nitrous user anyways. more of a data logging instrument to pinpoint problems after a pass. major problems such as solenoids not opening are normally noticed by the driver without the use of a wideband, and its a good idea to abort the pass when the car noses over.

 

depends on how slow the car is. lol
my junk is nowhere near as fast as shagwell's, and things happen quicker than most people can understand. when i had a low 7 sec. car i thought it was pretty dang fast and the 1.5 60' felt like being shot out of a cannon. holy cow what a shock it was the first time i sprayed my gta.... went from a 1.5 on motor to a 1.35 with a 75 shot!! i remember thinking i was going to fly into the trunk of the car and had no idea where the track had disappeared to or which direction i was going in. i was bouncing off the limiter for awhile on the 1-2 shift.

 

Idk, im just talking about the "fuel pressure".

 

In tuning my old nitrous motor, i used the wideband and it seemed to function normally but then again, who knows. I didnt check plugs I just sprayed and it went 124 on motor and was 10 to 1 air fuel. Pig rich, I put 2 smaller fuel jets in and added 2 deg timing and it was 11.8-12.0 to 1, motor never hiccupped, and ran 128mph so it was moving in the right direction. I left it at that. But I have heard widebands reading weird on the sauce...its likely some cam overlap causing fresh n2o to get thru into the exhaust and the heat breaking n2o apart and the sensor picking up the left over o2. Just a thought.

When i tore it down, i found 1 plug with electrode broke off leaving half of it left and a plug gap like .1" But all motor still felt strong to me? oh well

But your right on the 60 ft stuff. Going from 11.4's to 10.6 with a 1.55 60 all the way down to a 1.41 on the bottle, that was the most incredible feeling I ever had in a car. I thought I was gonna black out.

 

i'm gonna trust my wideband over a poke an hope method .lol

 

i'm guessing qicker than a 8th of a mile run .lmfao

 

I'll keep trusting what the plugs say what the engine wants.

 

i'm not against the plug method but during a wot pull you can't pull a plug . i like to have that gauge for security

 

if you tune it the right way, you wont need a gauge, and really dont even have to pull a plug.

 

You need BOTH of those in order to get to that stage.

 

Nitrous was around for 50 years before wideband sensors became popular.

 

Exactly...they tuned motors years ago without electronics. You can still do it today. Plug reading is becoming more of a lost art these days with EFI stuff being all electronic.

Some of the big time racers that use solid blocks with no water ports in them run several stages of nitrous up to 500 shots and run 4's in the 1/8 mile...they dont even use widebands.

 

why guess when you don't have to now ? i mean hell you can still hand write a letter an mail it but why when e-mails quicker . it's called progress ... i believe in taking advantage of it

 

Like said, wideband doesnt exactly tell the whole story inside the chamber...it just reads the aftermath and is subject to reversion effects, exhaust leaks, etc. I agree both the gauge and plug reading are necessary tools in any tuning not just for nitrous

 

what good is a wideband if it doesnt read what it should be reading? for that matter, do you know what your doing with a wideband? is there a majic number you made up that you are trying to hit? what if you have a faulty wideband... where do you think that will leave you? would you just sit there on your hands? or maybe buy another couple-hundred dollar wideband to see if that was the problem?