Back when I was running nitrous on my cavalier, I came up against a problem. The '91 2.2 has 1 injector and low fuel pressure which caused me to lean out. I then hooked up a propane bottle, ran a line to the fuel soleniod, and tried it out. It took some tuning but it worked great.In all I ran close to a 80 wet shot on stock internals and a stock pump. I'm just curious if anybody's played with propane to cure lean conditions.

 

Engines can run on propane as well as gas but the burn rate is different so supposedly timing on a propane motor needs to be different. For that reason I would imagine your solution would be hard to optimise.

 

The propane is only a addition, there is not a need to change timing. But when a engine converted to run totaly on propane , then yes, timing does need to be adjusted.

 

I was reading up on that last year but never got around to hooking anything up. It's big with diesel applications and I think there was a a lot going on with it on the national DSM boards. Looked like a good solution to me. Propane has an octane rating of 118, it's cheap as hell and will also cool the intake charge like nitrous will, although not as much. The trick is to get a bottle setup that will allow you to deliver it in liquid form like nitrous.

 

What's also good is the fact that propane resists detonation more than gas.I checked around last night and turbobuick.com has a link for the kit. I wonder if anyone has one hooked up right now? I know that they make drag cars run off the stuff.

 

Oh, and I forgot to mention this. I used a snap-on scanner to tell me when the car is rich and lean. The scanner showed I was too rich one time and it bogged down. When I did in with the propane injection I wanted to start out on the rich side. The scanner showed that it was rich like before but the car pulled strong. Any reasons for this,does propane mess with o2 sensor

 

Ya, someone told me that the sensor is just a guidline. It just odd at the readings I was getting, and what the car was doing. I have to find out if gas exhaust is the same as propane exhaust. In theory the same amount of propane should burn different than gas,yes

 

You shouldn't have to run richer to test the propane. The propane itself if fuel and not an oxygen source like spraying nitrous so when you inject it, that's the same as adding more gas (118 octane gas at that) so you will be running even richer than before. As for the increased power you got, maybe the car liked the increased octane and ran better even though it was running richer.

 

I didn't know what the car would so I figured to play it safe, thats why I went rich the first couple times. I had the small bottle in the engine bay pointing back at the solenoid. It seemed that the closer the bottle was to the solenoid, the more effective it was. I went to the hose shop off 49th st to get the hose from the bottle to the solenoid. I think in all this project cost me $85. I did use some of the stuff laying around the shop, but it is a cheap alternative to race gas and a performance pump .