Infrared pyrometer for checking AFRs!!!!! FUUU YAHHH
 

Wooo! I thought of a great way to check if you are hitting the same air/fuel ration in all cylinders!

Instead of having individual cylinder widebands or EGT sensors-

Do a big hard throbbing swollen pulsating quivering dyno pull (or hill or brake'd pull) and then use a pyrometer to check the temperatures of your exhaust manifold runners. If you have one cylinder that is hotter then it is either getting more air or less fuel. If you have matched injectors, then hot=more air.

I will be doing this shit when I dyno tune so I can make sure my modified intake manifold is not fucking up my air-cylinder distributions. I think this test is so damn easy it's worth it on any setup including stockolio.

What do you all think? I think I deserve the super prize. Fuck flow bench testing!

Put the vodka down

EGT can and often does increase on both sides of stoich. You may very well have identical temperatures with AFRs varying by as much as two points.

Well, the pyrometer would at least indicate a variance.

This was done in the age before widebands and EFI. Nothing new.


What are you going to invent next? sliced bread?

some of us are not that old :p

bah! I have read so many threads with "but i would have to run widebands on each cylinder to know" or "i need individual cylinder EGT sensors". This fine skill has been long forgotten.

This.

Were you reading the FFS thread on miata.net and trying to make a joke?

Thats what i was like... Tom, is that you?

Fuck, my point is that the pyrometer will indicate a slurplus or deficit of air. Suck a dick, that is all.

Are you going to be doing your own tuning on this car?

No, Phil @ Element.

You might want to run some of these ideas past him. I'm pretty sure he'll be fine tuning the car without any help.

I do have a wideband and EGT for tuning. The idea is really just to check if an individual cylinder has more or less air than the others.

But do you have the ability to adjust the output of each injector to even them out?

I like the idea

Yup, got individual injector trims.

Cool. Like to see the before and after statistics

There are going to be minor differences in temperature cylinder to cylinder, but also a lot of error is introduced measuring in this manner. We have a non contact thermometer at the dyno for this purpose, however if tuning a real monster of a car, we'll stop a couple of times to pull and check the plugs.

The non contact thermometer is more trustworthy for verifying sensor calibrations, looking for / identifying a dead cylinder... and for tuning our RC nitro cars. ;)

So you're going to measure the runner temp at every RPM for each cylinder to determine exactly where you're running lean?

How about if you're running way lean in cylinder 3 at 3-5k RPM at 25 psi and when you taper down to 20 psi from 5-7.5k you're running pig rich? What will your rectal thermometer show?

That wasn't done very long ago!

Hell, 10 years ago, WB02's were something only shops had........ Or emissions test stations.... I remember tuning the DSM using a pyrometer and an AFC before the GM MAF-T setup came out.