Methanol Injection
 

Morning Everyone,

I have the stillen SC kit w/ the garbage water cooler, I upgraded to a frozen boost but as it expected it did little to nothing to help. In the summer I'm getting 160+ IATs after a few pulls, etc.

I had a lot of stupid **** come up along the way that I've had to redo over or be overly complex with that have cost me a lot of my budget and an A2A conversion is not in my cards right now. I was going to run E85 but I lost a station by me and the only other one is almost an hour away now. So I'm turning to Meth lol. Someone else by me has a 370 w/ a similar setup on meth and has had good results.

I have some concerns about how this works and I can't really seem to find a good answer. I would like to take advantage of the timing you can get with meth but I want to do it safely and it seems all the flow monitors available for creating a failsafe are awful and either dont work or they're not meant for methanol and fail prematurely... like within months of installing.

I'm trying to understand the capabilities of this so I can have more productive discussions with my tuner about it. The mere advantage of air charge cooling is more than significant in my case, but I'm reading that depending on flow rate and methanol ratio, it could raise octane up to 116. How do you take advantage of the colder air charge without adjusting for the change in octane? In my thought process the ECU would be constantly making some crazy live adjustments to accommodate for a change in octane like that. Is there a threshold that you could take advantage of the extra timing without having flow failure be a concern for detonation?

Switch over to A2A and never look back.

It's unfortunately not in the cards for me right now, probably at least for another year and I want the car to run better in the state it's in. But that's also not to be said that you wouldn't want to run meth with A2A either, taking advantage of the octane boost and additional timing you can run on WMI, you can get the same E85 performance with it in the end. It's a good medium for people like me who don't have access to E85.

I wouldn't use it. It is just a band aid. For a drag car, yes. For a daily driver, NO.

This isn't a daily driver. I wouldn't call it a track car either though. But I don't know that I'd call it a band aid really either. The overall goal would be to maximize power even when on A2A considering you can get the same performance out of water methanol injection that you can out of E85. E85 isn't practical for me because I either have to order a drum of it, or burn half a tank of it to drive the hour needed to fill it up. The reason I'm jumping to install it now is because of the cooling properties is has to get me through this summer's season until A2A can be added in the budget. But it still doesn't negate the fact that WMI can achieve E85 power numbers without having to deal with the ******** that is E85 lol.

In fact there's a Z here locally with just the impeller upgrade, smaller pulley and WMI making 569WHP on 14psi. It's definitely nothing to sneeze at.

Well, the reason I said what I did is because it appears you don't have the money to buy or build a motor if it pops. Save your money for the A2A. It is much more reliable than a stock Stillen kit ever thought about being.

I get what you're saying, but if tuned correctly in the configuration it is in, methanol acts as a safeguard as it suppresses knock and detonation. If you're running and tuning methanol with the expectation of lowering intake temps it doesn't present catastrophic failure if the meth system ceases to work. It's only when you're pulling extra timing based on the methanol injection that you run the risk of popping the motor if the system fails at WOT. In the summer here with IAT's above 160 that's an incredibly useful safe guard. There's also nothing really unreliable about the stillen kit. Aside from the air cooling, the Soho A2A for example utilizes the same hardware as on the stillen kit. They're both reliable one is just subject to more heat soak and loss of performance from said heat soak. The system is already installed on the car anyway, my question wasn't about someone's opinions of how methanol works, but as to how the tuning process works.

just run a 25-50 percent methanol mix sprayed into the single pipe before the y at the throttles and have it only come on at around 4 lbs of pressure with the controller or a hobbs switch and dont get crazy with the jet size. having higher octane will not make the car run worse it just means less pre-ignition. the car will actually advance timing on its own because it usually pulls timing normally so it will run what it wants. most of the power gain comes from the charge cooling from evaporating the water and meth. if you dont over jet the crap out of it it wont effect the afr enough to hurt it since meth like to run rich AF anyway. side benefit of just jetting it enough to bring your charge air temp down is that you wont have to fill the tank as often too.

Edit: side effect of running it this way is that if you ever run out of meth in the tank it just goes back to normal

You can try sending a PM to "Z"en on this forum but he's not on here very often. If you're on Instagram, his IG name is minized123456. He runs water/meth on his a2a kit and should be able to give you the info you're looking for

I've also thought about methanol injection since on 92 octane gas the car just pulls so much timing at 14-15psi of boost and ethanol isn't exactly available locally. My biggest concern is from my understanding methanol is pretty corrosive. It very well could be a negligible amount over the lifespan of the engine when it's only used in boost but who knows.

Contact Nik@SOHO Motorsports; as he’s used it a bunch in the past & has great knowledge :tup:

From what I've been reading it seems like it is pretty negligible in the long run, the methanol being the corrosive part you could also dilute it to 25-35% instead of using store bought 50|50 boost juice or the stuff from VP. I was planning of only actually having it on during the summer and the car sees like 100miles a weekend from spring to fall and then i make a decision to do something stupid and have it sit on jack stands from october through april every year lol

Thanks lol this was the exact type of answer I was looking for lol. As far as jet size, I was going to run the 400-650 jet size, I believe it's #5 from Snow. Should I run the smaller jet size you think? Or just dial back the max value if it's too much?

It depends on what pressure their pump puts out last time I messed with meth was using an aquamist setup which is much higher pressure and smaller jets so the sizes I'm used to won't carry over. The jets are cheap you can start small and work your way up until the iats come in line.