A passion that traveled across international boarders

Went ahead and took care of #8 on my list above, pumping the civic tank empty of all the 93 I had in it. It felt so good taking the tarp off the car and checking things out. Definitely made me want to go ahead and get it on the road already!











Put some fuel stabilizer in the tank before starting the draining, that way if there was a little bit of fuel left in there it wouldn't go bad. Also allows the firewall mounted fuel filter to hold fuel that has stabilizer in it

In the process of building an injector flow bench. I won't be able to clean injectors with it, but I will be able to prove their flow rates out and determine dead times within a voltage range using my oscilloscope.



I'm using an old stock Honda rail from the Y8, the stock Y8 regulator, two bolts TIG'd together to allow for a clamp setup, and a lower aluminum plate with 4 holes drilled in it to act as the clamp to retain the injectors in the rail. It is adjustable for more than one length size of injector.

Yes, I will be using those Monster Hydro bottles as graduated cylinders for the flow testing. They are made out of PETE plastic, so it's hydrocarbon friendly and won't dissolve in most fuels/oils. Still need to build a base to support the rail above 4 of those bottles, then wire them together. I have an idea of how to modulate the injectors, but I'm saving that to share for later

I want to prove out my existing 525cc injectors. If they are still good and don't need to be cleaned after sitting for 4 months, I will offer them up for sale for really good price here to someone who needs them. I just want to be able to prove they are still in fine working order to anyone who actually does buy them. If everything is still OK, I will include the original test result paperwork that came with them from the injector company I bought them from back in Canada. It contains all the important information that will be needed for tuning.

Also, regarding #10 on my list, I 'was' going to put a check valve between my fuel pressure regulator and my intake manifold, since during my last tuning session I noticed fuel pressure rising really high while under boost. I figured the boost pressure was pushing harder against the diaphragm causing fuel pressure to rise, so I wanted to stop that.

UNTIL I discovered that this little AEM rail mounted regulator actually is a 1:1 rising rate regulator! It is not obvious or clear on the box, the instruction manual or any of the ebay seller listings that this regulator was a rising rate regulator. On AEMs site, this feature is a bullet point but is more clear on their website than anywhere else. It IS noted in the manual, but the function is described on like page 7 haha.

I didn't think a sub-100 dollar rail mounted regulator could offer 1:1 rising rate, I just figured it deadheaded at whatever you set it at and it didn't go higher. I didn't want the diaphragm to rupture during a pull or something when I saw that occurring on the dyno.

They really should make this 1:1 regulator attribute more clear and in your face, but this was my bad for not noticing this until now haha!

Maybe most people don't notice regulators doing 1:1 because they aren't reading fuel pressure live while tuning, and simply tune for AFR targets and duty cycle regardless of fuel pressure, just assuming pressure and volume is 'good' if the AFRs look good?

I just figured I'd share this with the group if you happen to have one of these regulators and didn't notice this. They are 1:1, where fuel pressure rises 1PSI for every 1PSI of boost, to allow the set fuel pressure deadhead to be maintained at the injector tip in the manifold under boost, to provide consistent fuel delivery rates regardless of intake manifold pressure.

I wasn't originally going to do this, but the longer I've thought about things knowing that I'm heading towards E85 made me question my ability to manually keep up with all of the different variables that come with obtaining and using E85. A tune in true 85% ethanol is very different from a 50% ethanol tune, and I would hate to have to literally butt dyno my shit everytime I fill up, which would be a reality if doing things manually. I would also have to test the fuel at the pump to make sure it contained satisfactory ethanol content or not. Without testing the fuel and tweaking your tune as necessary, is like using a shotgun in a dark room.

Variability in ethanol content in my area is a thing, knowing this from other guys around me who run E85 in their setups. They don't worry about their tunes because they are setup for true Flex Fuel, sensor and all.

I started doing some research, and found out that Hondata and latest SManager and S300 have native Flex Fuel sensor support, which means they can accept the Flex Fuel sensor signal as is (which is a frequency signal rather than a linear 0-5v signal) without needing a translator medium. These Flex Fuel sensors are pretty much all the same device made by Continental, and operate in the same way since I first started working on GM flex fuel vehicles as a tech in the aftermarket. The first generation of sensors were terrible, needing to get replaced every year almost like clockwork. The sensor would drift and provide false ethanol content readings to the ECU which would cause drivability issues. Replace the flex fuel sensor, reset learned alcohol and adaptives, good to go.

It seems 10 years has been enough time for Continental to have worked out some quality issues with the sensors, with people reporting almost 3 years out of them now! Lol.

Since I have a Demon2 and Neptune, there are no provisions for Flex Fuel sensors or even software implementations in a similar way as offered by most aftermarket GM tuning solutions, but Neptune does have this:



Sensor adjustments! Think of this as a generic active override to pre-existing fuel and ignition tables, as well as the PWM boost control settings for any 0-5v type sensor.

You can specify for a given input somewhere on the ECU or Demon2 board to look for a 0-5v voltage range. Using an interpolated scale across 1v breakpoints, you have the ability to tell the Demon to override fuel, ignition and PWM boost tables, with a plus or minus correction value that you program into it.

I started looking to see if anyone had developed a translator device that could convert the Hz signal developed by the Continental sensors into a linear 0-5v scale that correlates to ethanol content. Lo and behold:







My favorite odd ball honda tuning stuff supplier, Xenocron.com, has a Flex Fuel sensor signal converter AND cheap Continental FF sensors!

One and done purchase guys, I'm going full Flex Fuel!! These parts will be here from Xenocron this week, and I will get them installed and wired to ECU while I'm still waiting on engine machine work type things

Maybe this will help others wanting to go flex fuel on ECU tuning solutions that don't natively support flex fuel but have provisions for allowing generic 0-5v sensor automatic adjustments. This should be a viable work around, although not as precise and feature rich as a dedicated flex fuel tuning solution, this should allow me to add the correct decreases in fuel, timing and boost when ethanol content begins to drop.

FF sensor gives you night vision goggles so you can continue to use your shotgun in a dark room lol.

I completed the stand for the injector flow bench. I can usually eyeball stuff pretty good, but I had to build little feet using screws because I made the damn thing 3/16" lower on one side so it leans. You can't visually tell its leaning until you place the bottles below it, where the left side of the stand is higher above its bottle versus the right side. It kinda pissed me off because I know I measured correctly, but I think it was because I was welding it up on a crooked jig haha.

Either way, the feet screws perform a double duty. If I happen to change containers where they are higher for some reason, like using real graduated cylinders one day, I can raise the stand higher to accept them.










Next stage is building a wiring harness for the injectors, then setting up the fuel pump, tank and pressure gauge. Once I get it wired and running to where I can manually pulse the injectors, I will build the injector driver so that I can get real cc/min measurements out of the test.

Soul Engineering said:

Agreed on the Eth content as well around here. I'd have a hard time trusting it without the flex fuel sensor. HTS is making them fairly cheap and they are proprietary. Anyway, they seem to have a good setup for flex fuel.

Maybe one day, if I up to the G25 turbo, then I'll switch to E85. Will fuel economy go down like most alcohol cars do?

Click to expand...

Yup lol. They advertise E85 as 20-40 cents per gallon less than regular gas, but if you have a true 85% ethanol content being pumped into your tank, you have to inject 30% more of it in order to make the same normal power as regular gasoline, so it isn't really cheaper than regular gas in terms of MPG since you need more of it to achieve the same distance traveled compared to regular gas.

This is because alcohol has a lower BTU rating compared to gasoline, meaning if you take a gallon of gas vs a gallon of E85 and put them next to each other, there is more heat energy potential in the gas gallon than the E85 gallon.

Combustion of fuel and oxygen in the cylinder just generates heat, nothing becomes 'added' to the cylinder when that exothermic reaction occurs between the hydrocarbon and oxygen. Engine power is generated by the expansion of nitrogen. 78% of your intake charge is inert nitrogen, and it is the heating from combustion that expands the nitrogen forcing the piston down. If you add fuel to your tank that has lower heat potential per a given volume compared to another fuel, you have to add more of it to expand the nitrogen in the same way as the higher BTU fuel.

The benefit to E85 is the pseudo-octane rating it is given in a performance application. E85 at the pump is rated like 88 octane? But in a performance/tuned setting, the addition of more ethanol into the cylinder to make up for the lower thermal energy creates an interesting effect. Ethanol needs more energy to change state from liquid to gas compared to gasoline, and the state change is endothermic in nature meaning it absorbs heat. It absorbs more latent cylinder heat than gasoline does when injected into the cylinder during state change, which provides anti-knock properties effectively allowing it to 'carry' a higher octane rating, since octane ratings are values based on actual testing of anti-knocking properties of fuels in actual engines.

Sorry, got carried away lol. I get all warm and fuzzy when I get a chance to talk theory Yes, economy will drop because of the above reasons haha.

Oh, and another OUCH!

Since I've started building this car, it has been through a few iterations of fuel system design. I just looked to make sure that my fuel pump would properly supply the necessary volume to meet 350whp on E85, and there was a note that mentioned all of my pumps are E85 incompatible!

This means I need to buy another pump, will probably get the Walbro 450, but this also means I will have THREE fuel pumps with a combined value of over $250.00 that have super low usage on them that I will probably NEVER use once I get the new one.

Does ANYONE need either of the following:

• Genuine Walbro GSL392HP external inline pump with metal gerotors - $40.00 plus shipping
  • I will include the sock, pump mounting clamps, the original fittings hardware, and even a brand new never used high flow inline fuel filter
  • Pump price new: $100.00
  • Fuel filter price new: $15.00
  • Very low usage, maybe 4 hours total

• Genuine Walbro GSS342HP in-tank pump with metal gerotors - $30.00 plus shipping
  • I will include all the in-tank hardware that came with it
  • New in-tank hardware can be generically purchased at any auto parts store if you don't want to reuse my hardware
  • Pump price new: $80.00
  • Even LOWER usage than the inline pump above, less than 2 hours

I can provide videos of these pumps operating before anyone buys either, if interested. If no one is interested, these will sit indefinitely on my shelf otherwise