Now I'm going to take a moment today to talk about something that I can trash in and trash
out.
You can start with the best components that money can buy, but overall if you have a bad
combination or bad platform to start with, it doesn't matter what you purchase you're
going to have problems.
Common things that are often over looked and we deal with all the time on the tech line,
people that are fighting issues simply because they didn't check fuel pressure.
High fuel pressure as well as low fuel pressure can both be an issue.
A lot of people are always concerned with low pressure, but you definitely want to check
high fuel pressure issues as well and make sure you have everything within the proper
operating limits.
Common things that you'll run into that will cause some other issues are things like vacuum
leaks.
Old dry crusty vacuum lines, new lines that may have been cut or chafed because they are
too close to a sharp object or something they shouldn't have been, will cause you issues.
Vacuum leaks are a common problem for a lot of other issues that people face on a daily
basis.
Some of the things like ignition, something as simple as spark plug wires, a super low
resistance plug wire really isn't your friend, a common spark plug wire that's on an LS application,
which is really short, is commonly 400+ ohms.
Another thing that a lot of people don't utilize, dielectric grease.
Dielectric grease can do multiple things, it can block RF noise that could be leaking
past the boot, it can also eliminate things like carbon tracking which will result in
misfires and poor engine performance.
When your using dielectric grease, you need to be conscious and understand that this is
designed to block electrical conductivity, it's not designed to enhance it, so when your
utilizing it, you'd want to avoid the grease wheel baring method where you just go and
you squirt it in the tube and you put your plug wire in.
When you do that you're going to get dielectric grease between the metal and the metal contacts
and that's not what you want to do.
I'll generally put a little bit on to a q-tip or some kind of a swab and just wipe a little
bit inside the boot.
It will keep it sealed up from moisture as well as reducing the chances of spark leak
as well as some RF leakage that you can have through the ignition system.
You want to be conscious about your exhaust, leaks as small as a pin hole in a poor weld
that's upstream of the O2 sensor can result in erroneous readings when it comes to your
Oxygen sensor.
If you have poor O2 sensor readings and your operating an engine in closed loop it can
really throw things way off the rails in a hurry.
We've talked a bunch about wiring so I'm not really going to get real deep into it, but
wiring is really important.
If you've got things that look like this, you want to fix those and make sure you've
got nice clean wiring.
Once again make sure that that main battery power and ground go directly to the battery,
keep things that are high current separated from things that are low current and don't
stack stuff.
Another thing that I want to talk about is go over a combination of the vehicle and the
engine platform.
We run into this not only with fuel injection but also with carburetors, for some reason
a lot of the thought processes behind this and the understanding of it seems to go out
the window when guys convert to fuel injection and that's your overall engine combination.
If you build an engine, say for example it's got a big single plane intake manifold, big
honking set of cylinder heads and large lift and duration, that doesn't make power blow
3,000.
Say it's set up for 3,000 RPM up to 7,000 RPM but your going to put it in a heavy street
vehicle with out a lot of gear converter and it's going to leave off of idle, say 1,000
RPM and you try to load the engine, well if you have a carburetor it's going to bog and
hesitate and the same thing is going to happen with fuel injection.
You need to make sure that your overall combination matches the vehicle.
Set up the gearing, the converter, the cam shaft to match the vehicles operating range
and requirements.
At the end of the day, simple philosophy, trash in trash out.
If you have a bad combination, valve train issues, ignition problems, vacuum leaks, poor
combination things just aren't going to work out in your favor.
For more helpful tech tips and videos, go to Holley.com