Ron Novak’s Homemade Water Injection System

1 / 2
Ron Novak (right) explains the subtleties of his water injection system.
Ron Novak (right) explains the subtleties of his water injection system.
2 / 2
Diagram shows the parts and assembly method for the water injection system.
Diagram shows the parts and assembly method for the water injection system.

You can improve your car engine’s starting ability, pickup, and fuel economy by constructing a homemade water injection system … for a total cost of under five dollars! And you’ll spend that small amount of money (heck, it takes more cash than that to buy one tank of gas nowadays!) entirely on parts, because all the information you’ll need to “inject” your own auto is right here in this article!

MOTHER EARTH NEWS’ staffers have installed and tested one of the “engine aids” (and, by jeepers, the thing works!), but we can’t take the credit for inventing the build-it-yourself device. Nope, all the know-how for this half-hour (or less) shop project comes from a very generous–and clever–visitor to this magazine’s seminars: Mr. Ron Novak.

Ron openly shared his under-the-hood “secret” during the July MOTHER EARTH NEWS Week with everyone who was interested. (And once the word of his brainstorm got out, the inventive fellow spent as much of his visit teaching as he did studying!)

Actually, Mr. Novak made two improvements to his 1978 Honda CVCC station wagon before he started the long trek from his upstate New York home to our western North Carolina land. The traveling seminarian’s major modification was to install a homemade water injection system that feeds a 4:1 H20/alcohol mist into his vehicle’s carburetor, but he also added a drag-reducing “air dam” under the Honda’s front bumper to further improve his car’s gas mileage. [EDITOR’S NOTE: MOTHER EARTH NEWS’ ever busy researchers are hoping to report in the future on this second (the “fender extender’) idea.]

Ron got the notion for his water injector from some automotive magazine advertisements that offered a $50 fuel-saving device. The canny Nor’-easterner carefully read the literature about the expensive accessory and realized that the mileage extender consisted of little more than a bottle (partly filled with some “miracle” solution) that was rigged with [1] an underwater air intake line that bubbled air through the liquid and [2] a mist-grabbing outflow tube to feed the “foamed-up” vapor directly into the engine’s carburetor. The wet air was reputed to help produce more efficient fuel-burning (by “atomizing” the gasoline droplets and lowering the fuel’s temperature) and to improve the power plant’s overall performance and life span (by cleaning out the engine’s carbon buildup).

  • Published on Nov 1, 1979
Comments (0) Join others in the discussion!
    Online Store Logo
    Need Help? Call 1-800-234-3368