Water Injection Wizardry

By The Mother Earth News Editors
Published on September 1, 1979
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The water injection system uses the feeder hose attached to the air filter cover to squirt water directly into the carburetor.
The water injection system uses the feeder hose attached to the air filter cover to squirt water directly into the carburetor.
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A jury-rigged gauge wired to the dashboard tracks the vehicle's fuel economy.
A jury-rigged gauge wired to the dashboard tracks the vehicle's fuel economy.

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 EARTH NEWS staffer, who accompanied Goodman on a 48-mile jaunt around Winchester, Virginia. During the drive–which Pat accomplished with, if anything, more speed than normal–the small four-cylinder sipped only 0.95 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. 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.

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