Steve Johnson's .02 on fuel pressure ....

Just my two cents on flowing your fuel pressure....

Many have ask about what jet to flow their system with ??? Do I use a 70 "Holley" or a .073 "nitrous" jet ?? Actually, these are the same. Nitrous jets are numbered in thousandths on an inch, and Holley jets are numbered by drill size.

Most have heard over the years that with a direct port system you should use the square area method. This is where you take the jet size squared times the number of jets, then take the square root of this number. For example....

If you were using a system with eight .032 fuel jets you would take 32 X 32 = 1024. The you take 1024 X 8 (jets) =8192. The square root of 8192 would be 90.509, thus telling you that for the eight .032 fuel jets it wants you to flow thru a .090 jet......

Needless to say, the larger the fuel jets your using, the larger your flow jet gets !!! The larger your flow jet gets, the lower your regulator would read if it were not adjusted back up in pressure for the larger, more free flowing jet, correct !!

So that being said, with each set of larger fuel jets you use, its' going to tell you to raise the fuel pressure each time !!!

A few things this method does not take into consideration would be.....

Let's try and use round numbers for the ease of this..... Let's look at the average direct port system it has two nitrous solenoids with say .115 orifices in them. Then you have to fuel solenoids with .156 orifices in each of them. So that being said you can see that the nitrous solenoid starts out being smaller then the fuel side by over .040.

Then let's take a look at the pressure the systems each run at. Again, for sake of round numbers we'll say that you are using 1000 PSI on your nitrous pressure and 10 PSI on the fuel pressure. That being said, the nitrous is running at 100 times the fuel pressure !!!!

Then let's take the last piece of the puzzle and look at it... As far as nitrous to fuel ratio's go many of you have heard us talking about running a N/F ration of let's say 6 to 1. Meaning you need 6 parts nitrous, to every one part of fuel..

Can you see where this is going ??? You have fuel solenoids on each side of your engine that are already .041 larger then you nitrous solenoids.. You are trying to force the nitrous thru the system at roughly 100 times the pressure of the fuel side.. And last but not least.... You need 6+ times more nitrous then you do fuel to have a proper nitrous to fuel ratio !!!!! By design how is the nitrous ever to keep up with the fuel gains ??

ALL that being said, if you have say a four jet spread (larger nitrous then fuel ) and say 5.5 PSI in fuel pressure and you start with a .024 nitrous and a .020 fuel jet as you work you way up to say a .032 nitrous and a .028 fuel jet, the system gets richer with each jet change larger just because your inching your way closer to the max area of the nitrous solenoids.

Think about this ??? How many times have you read where a guy say this solenoid won't flow more then a .038 jet or a .042 or whatever.... Ever think that the solenoid isn't the problem ????? Maybe the tune up or tuner is the issue ?? If you take your average .115 orifice nitrous solenoid ( area of .010386) and divide it into 4 jets it will mathematically flow at least 4 .057 (.002551) jets.. But again, this doesn't take into consideration the pressure drop across the solenoid either..

All this said... If you have an out of the box plate system in most cases you may be better off to flow thru the fuel jet your going to use in the spray bar. This is how most manufactures have chosen to set up there systems.. That being said, when we flow a plate system and re map them we do this using a .073 orifice to flow thru on all settings. Some do, some don't !!

Anyway, If you've made it this far I thanks you for your time.... Just my two cents on flowing fuel....

Thanks, Steve

Induction Solutions
Steve Johnson
www.Induction-Solutions.com