I have an 84 all stock. is it hard to install a nitrous oxide kit
to get a little extra horse power, and are they expensive?

Thanks in advance...Poncho

 

You may want to post this in the C4 FI/Nitrous section as well... besides doing a search.

 

I always thought nitrous was a way to ensure an early death of your motor. So the real question is, is the boost worth it?

 

Dale:
Thats an old wives tale, it all depents on the size shot, how long boost, what type (wet or Dry)...

 

I've used nitrous on various vehicles (both mine and clients) for 27 years now.... the misconceptions about nitrous are many.


Getting back to the OP... using nitrous on a Crossfire is doable, but requires a bit of engineering as you're dealing with two TBI throttle bodies.

 

Before you mess with this stuff, you should look at this thread, especially post #5.

http://forums.corvetteforum.com/show....php?t=1896245

 

No, it's actually physics. In addition to increasing the amount of available oxygen, there is this:

"The most important power-producing property of nitrous is that it expands in the combustion chamber-at 565ºF, to be exact. So as the piston is compressing the (already highly enriched) air/fuel mixture, the nitrous expands at the same time. All this makes for an explosion that will BLOW YOUR MIND (but hopefully not your heads). "

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but seems to me that if the design constraint is for a cylinder explosion with gasoline vapor and oxygen at a given compression, then the rings, heads, valves will be designed to withstand that explosion. If you increase the explosion intensity, good luck.

 

Well, I'm not a mechanical engineer myself, but let's see.... 125 shot on a cast piston 403 Olds engine (in my heavy old '79 Trans Am), raced most of it's life over 90,000 miles without even so much as pulling a valve cover? Hmm... 1.5 bottles a week, average (10 lb bottle), over a 2 year period.. 78 bottles a year @ 10lbs per bottle... hmm..780 lbs of nitrous (per year). No engine failures to report (though I did burn up a transmission!) And this was back in the early 1980's.

but that's just my personal experience... not something I read on the Internet.

Nitrous needs adequate fuel pressure (and volume)... and jetting that works for whatever application it's intended for. And NO DRY SHOTS! Wet only.


Carry on

 

There you have it. If you haven't done it, don't bother doing research, just talk to someone who has.

Wet nitrous is 100% safe and effective. Have at it.

 

I've had great success with it! As long as you don't get greedy, you won't hurt a stock motor with it. I ran
a 125 shot on top of a B&M blower (which I over-drove), with my only other mods being a regular Holley
1850-2 600cfm carb and Hooker Super-Comp headers on my bone stock (internally) 84 Z28 (5.0) for
40,000 miles...

 

At said temperature the Nitrogen atoms release the Oxygen atom. It's sort of like water turning into steam. It does increase in size, but the pressure spike from the N20 collapsing is pretty minuscule when compared to the pressure spike of combustion. There are some graphs out there from a 2500 HP engine that show cylinder pressure. I'll go look for them in a minute, but the graphs used some kind of super sophisticated equipment to monitor cylinder pressure. The nitrous graph had a larger spike than both the forced induction and naturally aspirated graphs at nearly the same horse power level, which means that nitrous is rougher on parts than other means of making power. However, the pressure was all on the power stroke. There was no small spike to indicate increased pressure during compression due to nitrous expansion.

The pressure spike from a nitrous engine is higher than a naturally aspirated engine, but it's not nearly as drastic as the author of that article is trying to convey, especially at power levels that we use nitrous oxide at.

I'm not a mechanical engineer either, but I think you're right in that increasing the intensity or force of the explosion beyond system design is what breaks parts. On the other hand, it's what makes more power. Adding heads and cam to an engine increases cylinder pressure, so by your analogy, "good luck" with heads and cam. We all know that adding heads and cam isn't a death sentence to an engine, neither is nitrous.

Lots of people don't like nitrous, and it is less forgiving than other means of adding horsepower, but immediately condemning and engine because of nitrous use is pretty lame. There are millions of cars/engines that have been using nitrous for a long time without any problems. I've probably ran 50+ bottles through my engine, it still dynos the same, runs the same ET on motor, gets the same mileage, and performs exactly the way it did before I added nitrous to it. There's countless stories like mine. I ran probably 200 bottles through my 99 Firebird without ever having a problem.

I'm not saying nitrous isn't hard on parts, but it would be accurate to state that the extra power nitrous adds is what is hard on parts, not the nitrous itself.

 

Holy cow, settle down man. That's not what he was saying at all. In his experience, a relatively small shot had no perceived or measurable effect on engine life. He's not advocating a 'spray and pray' mentality; and he's certainly not telling anyone to avoid research.

What he is saying is that he has some first hand experience with nitrous, and that experience qualifies his opinion beyond what someone who has never used nitrous might have to say.

RacerX70CC has ran over 70 bottles of nitrous through an engine. Granted, that application wasn't a Corvette, was most likely carb'd, and was using a different head design that what we have; but at least he told us why he thought the way he did, and was able to justify his thoughts with real world experience.

We don't know if you've ever used nitrous, what experiences you've had, or really anything about you.

I'm not saying you are wrong, or don't know what you are talking about, but qualify where you are coming from a little bit. There is a ton of bad information out there on the net, the article you quoted isn't the greatest source of information and contains a fair amount of fallacy.

I'm just curious as to where your opinions/views come from. If you've got some legitimate tech on why nitrous is a death sentence, lets see it, I'd love to read something like that.

For what its worth, I don't have any real backing for my opinions either. I've successfully used nitrous on 3 cars for about 10 years, I've installed probably a dozen kits or so, and none of those (to my knowledge) have caused an engine failure, but other than that all I've got is what I've read off the net and in books. My knowledge base certainly isn't infallible, neither is RacerX70CC, so if you've got a legit way of adding to the topic, by all means share.

 

That was 70 per year, actually.

And no, I don't claim to be a "nitrous guru", just passing along one of my experiences, such as it is. I'm just tired of all the MISinformation I read on the Net.

 

Not upset, I did find it odd that research was discounted. The bottom line is, I don't have any experience. My opinion is based on what I've read, and heard, all 2nd hand stuff. I think Neat put it in perspective. Nitrous generates horsepower, and that's harder on the parts, but then again, so is anything else you do. The difference is, when you change parts, you generally strengthen them to get HP, (new heads, new cam, etc.). When you spray, you just intensify the blast. As an arm chair quarterback I have to defer to those who've used it.

It seems the consensus is that if you're careful, nitrous is safe.

 

No worries.. As I said, there's a lot of MISinformation out there, and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak.

Your statement above sums it up perfectly, and it actually applies to ALL forced induction methods.

 

Cool deal man.

I wouldn't go that far, any time you are using nitrous you are completely dependent on an electrical device to keep your engine alive. There are inherent risks associated with that. You can take steps to minimize the risks, but there is no way to add horse power with zero risk.

I love the bottle, I'd put it on my moms car if she would let me. However, I've never had a failure. If I blew up my car with nitrous, I'm sure my opinion would change. Everything you read, just about everything anyway, is opinion presented as fact. My opinion is that nitrous is the freakin' bomb, I sleep with my nitrous bottle next to me, and I shower with the bottle on track days. Obviously, my long diatribes on the net will be slanted to favor nitrous.

If I blew up my Zo6 like the car in the picture, you can bet that my opinions, and hence my long diatribes on the net, would be very different.

Just do your own research and draw your own conclusions. Nitrous is pretty cheap, if it's something that really interests you, snag a kit off E-bay for a few hundred dollars and play with it. Stick a 50 shot on your car, then see what happens. Check the plugs after each run, monitor compression numbers, keep a note book of what happens, do your own little study on nitrous. Maybe you're right and nitrous is the devil, maybe I'm right and nitrous is the greatest thing since colored condoms, but most likely the truth is somewhere in the middle. The only way you'll ever develop a valid opinion on the sauce is to dink with it. Stick it on your daily driver, stick it on your lawn mower, or put it on your vette. Just be careful with it, do as much research as you can, follow the instructions, and then draw your own conclusions.