water injection

[johndeereman]

has anyone ever put water injection on say a 1951 jd a? if so was there a noticeable power increase and how did you build it? im aware that jd had water injection on some models but dont really know much about it and why its not very popular thanks

 

[Anonymous-0]

I tried water injection instead of fuel injection on my car. Didn't work out so good, so I drained the water from the tank, and went back to gasoline. Seems to run fine now

 

[Z. Robinson]

I understand that water injection is used mainly on high-performance spark engines that operate under high compression. The water serves to cool the mixture and reduce detonation. I doubt it would be useful on early JDs like your A since they used moderate compression.

 

[pete 23]

The old D's had water injection. Used water out of the cooling system, they held 15 gallons if I remember right. Used it to control detonation and operator adjusted it on the fly.

 

[BushogPapa]

The water injection on a JD was to keep Carbon deposits from building up..

Ron..

 

[BushogPapa]

Did you catch the Video of the JD "A" converted to Diesel..???
Original engine with Injectors..has to be pull-started but runs fine..!

Ron.

 

[RonMC]

My D used to have water injection, being a dual-fuel model. My understanding is that it was used to prevent destructive detonation in the combustion chamber due to the low octane of the distillate fuel. The reason it's not used now is because running distillate (like kerosene) is more expensive than gas, which doesn't require the water to damp detonation. The second reason (and a good one) is that nowadays most of these tractors run antifreeze, which you most definitely don't want injected into your combustion chamber. Hope this helps your understanding - RonMC

 

[dan_41jdh]

RonMC is correct. Water injection was used in the model D as a means to control detonation. Distillate was the fuel of choice at the time (because it was inexpensive compared to gasoline back then), but it had a horrible octane rating, something like 15-25. Regular gasoline has octane ratings in the high 80’s to low 90’s.

Many factors influence detonation, including fuel octane ratings, engine compression ratio, combustion chamber design (“squish” designs that cause lots of combustion chamber turbulence suppress detonation), fuel mixture ratios (rich mixtures suppress detonation), and so on.

Although the D had a very low compression ratio (the early D’s had something like 3.9:1, if I remember correctly), detonation using distillate could be a problem with heavy loads and lean fuel mixtures. That’s why water injection was used. It kept the combustion temperature down to prevent detonation. The lower combustion temperatures would typically cause a loss of power, but the expansion of water droplets into steam helped offset power losses.

It’s not likely that water injection would create noticeable power increases in an engine designed and tuned to run without it. Water injection really comes into play when high compression ratios are used, or if the engine is supercharged which will also significantly increase combustion chamber pressures. And in those cases, the significant power increases comes from the increase combustion chamber pressure, and the water injection permits those increased pressures by suppressing detonation. That’s not typical of a standard John Deere two cylinder tractor. However, the model D did need water injection to control detonation problems when using distillate under heavy loads.

 

[Bob Harvey]

Ha, Ha,Ho Ho, Hee He

 

[NoDakInMN]

The only application of water injection being a performance enhancer that I'm aware of is in air cooled aircraft engines. In the thirties air racers hit a wall in extracting performance out of their engines when the air cooling became inadequate and would cause the fuel to detonate well prior to the spark. Adding water injection prevented this by keeping the temperature of the cylinder low enough to prevent predetonation and allowed higher compressions and other enhancements such as supercharging without having to resort to the adding the extra weight of a radiator cooling system.

 

[johndeereman]

ok i should have added this before probably wouldnt have changed the over all opinion but here goes. mine has a pb roughly 10;1 compression ratio, shaved head, cam, ratio rockers, petronix plus other little odds and ends no im not going to run distilate or kero i do have an all fuel b that i could if i wanted

 

[twopop]

in the 60's thru 80's a person could buy water injection sytems for passenger cars and pickups.my dad had one on a 86,460 ford pickup.he said it increased his mileage 2 mpg.the problem he had was it would stop working when the tank was half full.