With the uniqueness of this project, the energy placed in getting thigs right is pretty high. Between the O2 sensor and gauge, the gallon fuel can test system and extra hose barbs, I've been doing a fair amount of work on this simple little project with even more work to come. One of the things I did do that only made sense was hook the main fuel line back up to the fuel pump since I wasn't ready to do MPG tests, so it didn't make sense keeping the gallon fuel can hooked up, requiring me to have to constantly add a gallon of fuel to the can. This was necessary as it would also point out any possible flaws with the gallon can fuel system just as well. I already had to hook the pressure regulator back up as my fuel bypass setup didn't pan out, so we're back to where we started as far as the fuel system. I did add the hose barb for the vacuum advance on the distributor as well, while leaving the hose barb open on the intake manifold in order to draw the air in necessary to get the AFR to an optimal point.
One of the other things that I took care of that I was late doing was advancing the timing on the distributor. Because of the physics behind this carburetor and the fuel mixture it administers to the engine, basically a smaller mixture, ignition would have to be sooner to allow the thinner fuel mixture to get completely ignited. By the time the cylinder reaches TDC, the fuel has reached a point of near complete combustion to push the piston down. This of course is exhibited in the higher RPM as the engine seems to get a jolt of power when the timing is advanced. Also based on the science behind this, better explained on the Thunderhead289 videos on this same project, vacuum advance is not really present due to how vacuum functions with this carburetor setup so advancing the dizzy more kind of helps on this angle just as well. I did do some driveway tests, driving the car up and down the driveway to see how the engine acts and how our AFR reacted. It would go rich during acceleration cycles, obviously, as the engine is sucking in more fuel, even in the absence of air, and upon deceleration, go super lean for a little while as fuel flow is restricted while the engine is throttling down, while still drawing a higher amount of air flow, resulting in the engine sucking every bit of fuel from the intake even after flow slowed from the carb. I would have to guess this is normal operation anyway, but it was interesting to note, just for reference when it comes to really learning how this fuel system works. Of course in order for me to do the driveway tests, I had to move the Monte Carlo around to the back parking spot where Rustang was situated earlier. Afterward, I started doing more tweaking to try and see how the AFR continued to react. One thing I noticed was that the AFR was bouncing around, sometimes going as rich as 10:1 and as lean as 15:1. I would imagine that the fuel pressure regulator as well as the carburetor's fuel flow contributed to the flaky AFR readings. If the fuel pressure gets a smidge high then extra fuel squirts out and makes the mixture rich, while a slight drop in fuel pressure has the opposite effect. At this point my main thing was to try to have the average AFR be somewhere around to the slightly rich side, as too much air can actually be worse for an engine than too much fuel. Too much air means too hot a burn and that means damage to the engine. Too much fuel will actually help in cooling the air charge and in turn, the engine internals, as gasoline has endothermic properties, absorbing heat from the environment. Up to a certain point of course, but then it gets to a point where the fuel undergoes incomplete combustion and carbon build up results, then more maintenance is required, but that's for another discussion. The next thing I wanted to do, in order to get ready for recording the work being done, was hang camera mounts on the car. I wanted to put a mount on the roof for an action cam to record clips from that angle of the car going down the road, and another camera mount on the inside, aimed forward through the front window while also looking slightly downward at the last camera mount which is really a mount for a phone. The phone will have the GPS speedometer app on it operating. The camera in the cab will see the numbers on the speedo app in real time while both cameras will see us in motion. For the sake of validity, I will also remove the camera in real time to show the carburetor still in operation during the driving, just to verify we're not trying to pull some slight of hand during this project. The next video will really only briefly touch on the technical aspects of what we done, while mainly focusing on actual testing and results. We've already seen the engine run so we know the concept works for the most part, we want to be able to show proof of concept by actually driving the car with this system in order to show its validity as well as practicality when it comes to saving fuel while still being able to perform reasonably well. There will definitely be more to come on this unique project.
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