Water Injection kit from Underdog Racing Development

[JoeB]

FIRST WATER INJECTED SOLARA!

WOW! Very cool stuff! When we pulled the kit out of the box, I was astonished. The kit from Aquamist is VERY high quality. Every part had a lot of great features like compressionless fittings, O-rings and stuff like that. The kit has a lot of pieces, I was surprised how sophisticated and well thought out this kit is. Even though there are many components and very little space for everything, Gadget did a VERY clean installation. Hopefully he will put together a DIY. He took some good pictures.

I previously had my car tuned to 11.5:1. With the water injection, we leaned it out to 12.5:1 and I still had no knock (monitored by S-AFC-II) and it pulls much harder now. I was very anxious to rush putting a 8psi and maybe a 9psi pulley on but Gadget talked me into waiting a little. I am very busy with work right now anyhow and we didn't finish until late. I would strongly recommend this to anyone who has already done a fuel system upgrade looking to take the next step. I would definitely do the fuel upgrade first.

If you have a supercharger and haven't upgraded the fuel system, I would urge you to look into it. I talked to a guy at TRD that gave me the story on the supercharger. We talked about the sc actually damaging the bank 1 knock sensor and how even at 4psi it ran lean (reason for the low boost). He said the fuel system upgrade was the FIRST thing he would do! Then he mentioned as you run up the boost, you need to do the headers/Y-pipe/exhaust. I told him about the water injection and he was very impressed and said it was a great idea. -JoeB

[SolaraT]

Is this like a Methanol/Water Boost Cooler? There are a few Solaras that are running that with the rippmods supercharger. Is this something that you did for the 1MZ? Cool! Your on your way to become the fastest on this board! hehe.
http://www.rippmods.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=139

[JoeB]

Gadget from Underdog Racing Development is distributing the kit from Aquamist. They do recommend a methanol/water mixture (cheap windshield washer fluid ). I wasn't aware they were doing that. Thats the rippmods turbo for the 4 cyl right? This Aquamist system is VERY impressive. It is controlled off the boost. I adjusted mine to come on at ~3psi and leaned the mixture out from that point on. The duty cycle of the injection is timed with the duty cycle of the fuel injector. They really put a lot into it. -JoeB

[SolaraT]

Yeah they make superchargers for the i4 and can understand why you probably did not know. But what you got seems very impresive and should give you great results. Can't wait to see what you do next! Your on a roll! Keep up the great work. Your milestones are setting the pace.

EDIT: The Ripp Boost Cooler comes with a digital controler and for when using 8psi+ / I plan on getting this along with the complete SC kit. Fuel,CPU contol,ect.. set perfectly to run 9 - 11psi. The best thing is that I have learned so much from solaraguy.com and it's knowledgable members providing great cause and effect experiences to get me where I want to be without errors or blowing stuf up!

[all_red]

I'm very impressed with what your achieving ... Keep it up and keep us posted ... Your making all Red solaraguys proud!!

[cdssolara]

Joe, so the guy at TRD basically confirmed what Eric said last month; that they are aware of the knock sensor problems due to the S/C? Did you talk to him about rewiring the sensor input to the ECU so that it reads the Bank 2 input for both sensors?

Good work on the Aquamist, by the way.

[JoeB]

Joe, so the guy at TRD basically confirmed what Eric said last month; that they are aware of the knock sensor problems due to the S/C? Did you talk to him about rewiring the sensor input to the ECU so that it reads the Bank 2 input for both sensors?

Good work on the Aquamist, by the way.

Carlo, he said they didn't try anything like that but thought it was a great idea. Because they were only trying to bring a product to market, they couldn't bypass one of the safety features. I still think they were just a hair over the line listening to people who have blown knock sensors at 4psi. BUT, I have to believe that they couldn't go ANY lower than 4psi and still sell it! I think 4psi is laughable and had trouble defending it when others laughed at me because I was running 4 lbs of boost. -JoeB

[cdssolara]

Joe, so the guy at TRD basically confirmed what Eric said last month; that they are aware of the knock sensor problems due to the S/C? Did you talk to him about rewiring the sensor input to the ECU so that it reads the Bank 2 input for both sensors?

Good work on the Aquamist, by the way.

Carlo, he said they didn't try anything like that but thought it was a great idea. Because they were only trying to bring a product to market, they couldn't bypass one of the safety features. I still think they were just a hair over the line listening to people who have blown knock sensors at 4psi. BUT, I have to believe that they couldn't go ANY lower than 4psi and still sell it! I think 4psi is laughable and had trouble defending it when others laughed at me because I was running 4 lbs of boost. -JoeB

Joe, I agree with you completely about TRD's rationale in arriving at 4 psi as the safe solution for the limit of this product. I was just curious if they admitted to knowing about the problem of the supercharger setting off the knock sensor based on their R&D.

[JoeB]

Joe, I agree with you completely about TRD's rationale in arriving at 4 psi as the safe solution for the limit of this product. I was just curious if they admitted to knowing about the problem of the supercharger setting off the knock sensor based on their R&D.

Carlo, if you are looking for acknowledgement that TRD experienced the same problem with the sc falsely setting off the knock sensors, we have it. That is exactly what he said. As a matter of fact, he said that the amplitude of the frequency spike was so high that it would blow the sensors in some case. He agreed it isn't a good idea to bypass the safety features of the engine by disconnecting the knock sensor for bank 1 but thought it was a great idea and a manageable risk.

I don't think we could use this information to go back and try to get TRD to replace parts or anything though. I'm sure they would deny it or simply say that wasn't a problem at 4psi. I honestly believe they thought the problem would be manageable at 4psi. For the most part, it seems like it has been. -JoeB