So, last night I dropped by a local performance shop that I do alot of business with, Extreme Motorsports; their work quality is prestine. The shop owner, Sean, is always patient enough to answer my never ending questions. Well the topic of last night's question barrage was Methanol injection. I've always been quite wary of Methanol Injection, especially as a generally paranoid person. The possibility of blowing up my engine because of a random unlucky event of a methanol pump failing or something like that turns me off really quick. Well, I noticed Sean and one of his techs, Matt, uses Methanol Injection on their daily driven vehicles, so the barrage of questions ensued.
The first thing he demonstrated was the outright cooling effects of Methanol. If you put your finger in some water and run air across your finger, you'll notice that your skin feels much cooler on the portion of skin with water as opposed to dry skin. Stick your finger in Methanol and run air across it, and you're finger nearly freezes instantly. I suddenly had a true appreciation for the cooling effects of Methanol (on top of it's already high "octane rating" of 120+). However, the "risk" still bothered me. His reply to that was simple (one of which is quite obvious, and I kick myself for not using common sense); Install a wide-band o2 sensor in a clear line of sight and simply monitor the o2 guage during a hard run, not to mention I should already have the thing to begin with out of pure principle :-) . Another safety precaution is a pressure sensor in the Methanol line that will alert you via light or buzzer or some other electronic device that the line is not pressurized properly, or not pressurized at all. Ideally, however, you can implement Methanol Injection directly into a standalone fuel management system such as the AEM EMS and be done with it. However, in most cases, that level of implementation could be prohibitively expensive.
Needless to say, alot of my concerns were alleviated by this information, and so I'm going to reconsider installing Methanol Injection (this is not, however, putting a damper in my interest in toluene; I'm still on my local search to find a supplier). Having said that, this should not only allow me to run upwards of 26-28 psi safely on pure pump fuel, especially on occasions where I might not have access to toluene for a quick and cheap 'rocket fuel' mix, but on the occasion that I do find toluene, in addition to a healthy toluene mix, the sky is the limit with running as much boost as my turbos and/or fuel system can muster.
