Big Dilemma
In the last 48 hours I’ve come to realize that KITT has a major air/fuel mixture problem. I suspected that something was wrong the more I drove the car, and finally realized that it’s running too rich. It’s not pouring black smoke, but there’s no question that the rich condition does exist. It wasn’t until just a few hours ago, however, that I realized the financial seriousness of this situation.
The previous owner of my car installed Accel 24 lb/hr injectors just before I bought it, because one of his old injectors failed. The problem is that the factory injectors are 22 lb/hr. I had read that 24 lb/hr units could work without a PROM (computer) reprogramming, but apparently that is not true in most situations. My PROM thinks that the engine has 22 lb/hr injectors and so it is opening the injectors accordingly, spraying more fuel into the engine than it’s supposed to. The result is a horrendously rich mixture. I let this go long enough, and it’s going to foul the shit outta my brand new plugs and screw up the O2 sensor.
The problem is that fixing this condition isn’t going to be as cheap as I had hoped.
I basically have two options. I can either buy a set of eight new 22 lb/hr injectors to match factory spec, install them, and probably solve the rich condition that way. Or, I can get the PROM reprogrammed for 24 lb/hr injector flow rates. The problem is that neither solution is cheap. I can’t for the life of me find an 8-pack of 22# injectors—they only seem to be sold individually—and at a cost of $38-40 per injector. That’s friggin’ $320 for the whole engine. Kinda nauseating when you consider that the injectors I have now are brand new and work perfectly fine.
On the flipside, customizing the PROM is an even bigger job. It’ll cost anywhere from $200-$400 to get the computer reprogrammed to custom specifications, and I’ll have to take out the chip and send it to whoever’s doing it. Then it may not be just right, and I’d have to send it back and try again…ugh. My other option is to buy the chip-burning equipment, read up on it, and do it myself. That’s going to take longer—and cost about the same amount of money, if not more. The good part there is that I’d be able to tune and burn my own PROMs for life, but jeeze…it’s like learning a second language. Meanwhile, my car’s running rich as shit and I need to fix it, QUICK. Either that or stop driving it. Which isn’t feasible this week, because I have to take my Trans Am into the dealer (yeah I know, horrors) for some warranty work and I need to drive something while it’s in there.
There is also one other possibility. It’s not very attractive, but it would be cheaper. It would also be more like a “stop-gap” measure until I could, for instance, learn how to custom-burn PROMs. The previous owner of the car did give me all eight of his old injectors. One of them isn’t functioning. If I could isolate which one that is, and replace just that one with a new, stock 22 lb/hr injector, maybe I could get everything to run normally for a while. But mixing/matching old and new parts is not a pleasant thought. And with injectors from different companies and of different ages, even though they may be rated the same, the flow rates might vary significantly. ARRRGGGGHHHH.
I’d like to go the “learn how to burn PROMs” route, because that would be the most useful to me, and I’d end up getting to keep my bigger injectors and any performance increase resulting from their use. Plus I’d have learned a very useful skill. But it’s going to take some time and some up-front investment in cabling, a programmer and software…plus I don’t know the first thing about electronics or soldering, in case anything like that is necessary. Add to that the additional complexity of the fact that I may not necessarily know everything that’s been done to the engine, for instance by the second owner (I’m the fourth). And unless you invest an additional ~$200 in an emulator, you can’t make tuning changes on-the-fly. You have to take out the chip, erase, reprogram, reburn, reinstall, turn the ignition key and try again.
Damn….just damn.
Categorized as Cars/Knight Project