WATER INJECTION WIZARDRY

Image Gallery At left is the water injection ""brain""... at right the results.

A 20 to 50% gas mileage improvement can be yours with ...

During the second World War, fighter pilots could push a button and inject a stream of water into the turbochargers of their monstrous powerplants . . . to get extra thrust on takeoff. Some time later, Chrysler (among other auto manufacturers) installed water injection on a number of its large displacement engines . . . again for a performance increase. Indeed, water injection—used to produce power increases—is nothing new.

But using "Adam's ale" to save gasoline sure is a change of pace! You see, until recently there just hasn't been any way to effectively control the volume and atomization of the tiny amount of fluid needed to adapt H20 injection to a small, economical engine. And typically enough, while big technology has failed to figure out how such regulation could be handled, a small back-lot entrepreneur ( with a wealth of experience and ingenuity, but a paucity of dollars and degrees) has succeeded.

Pat Goodman installed his first water injection system (on a Porsche racing car) in 1964, and the racing organization responded by banning his device . . . it made the vehicle too fast! Undaunted, Pat decided that—even if the racing establishment wasn't interested in "improving the breed", he was.

Today, several near-bankruptcies later, the innovative mechanic owns a vehicle that only the government could argue with: a 1978 Ford Fiesta . . . that gets 50 MPG in normal around-town driving. (This impressive figure has been verified by a MOTHER staffer, who accompanied Goodman on a 48mile jaunt around Winchester, Virginia. During the drive—which Pat accomplished with, if anything, more speed than normal—the small four-cylinder sipped only .95 gallon of unleaded gas.)

BACK TO BASICS

Like most good ideas, the Goodman water injection design is an amazingly simple approach to a frighteningly complex problem. In fact, the production system is much less complicated than the prototype model pictured in the accompanying photos. It consists only of an atomization nozzle, plus two one-way valves from squirt guns, some hose (to supply water to the "sprayer" and draw pressure from the emission system), and a one-gallon water tank.

The nozzle is screwed into the top of the air cleaner housing and sprays minute droplets of water into the carburetor throat . . . in response to orders from the engine's stock smog-control devices.