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Re: EGT measurements

To: WMW79@aol.com
Subject: Re: EGT measurements
From: "Jack W. Drews" <vinttr4@geneseo.net>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 17:11:59 +0000
WMW79@aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 5/24/01 7:35:06 AM, rccook16@voyager.net writes:
>
> << Anyone have opinions as to advisability of installing exhaust gas temp
> gauge
> to fine tune Weber carbs >>
>
>  I would be interested in hearing anyone's experience on this also.  The EGT
> gage is effective on an aircraft engine or any engine that is running at
> constant power such as on a dyno; but can it be useful on an engine that has
> constantly changing power levels?
> Bill

I'm sure that others have more experience at this than I do, but that's never
stopped me in the past from sharing my experince.

For a couple of years we had a problem with the car coughing coming out of
corners, and we had a miss and loss of power on really long straights. We
finally installed an egt gauge, one pickup, in cyl #4, to see if it would help
diagnose the problem.

The short story is that it helped tremendously to determine what was happening
on the straights, but was of no value diagnosing the cornering problem.

On the long straights, we were just plain running out of gas, despite lots of
changes, and we could tell because going down the straights the temp would
continually climb -- right up there to the hand grenade neighborhood of 1600 deg
or so. We solved our high speed problem by using the gauge.

For the cornering problem, though, we found that the event we wanted to measure
was too short a duration for the gauge to measure. We eventually determined that
we were going lean on right handers and rich on left handers, and the gauge just
wouldn't react quickly enough to tell us that -- it must take five or ten
seconds for it to give meaningful results.

All this having been said, we found it very useful and we still run it just to
be able to monitor what's going on at top end.

We had a brief encounter with the fuel / air monitoring technology. It is
extensively covered on various web sites. We had little success with it, perhaps
because of the device we had. Hopefully someone who uses it successfully will
share their experinces.


--

uncle jack and New Blue

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