1998 Ford Ranger 3.0 Liter V6
OK... I had been running HHO for about 6 weeks. I didn't feel like I had a very good baseline of pre-HHO MPG data, so 2 weeks ago I turned it off. I drove to work 2 days ago, everything fine in the morning, but driving home, I had an obvious miss. At idle the engine was vibrating pretty bad, & under a load like climbing a hill was a lot worse. I checked the obvious things like spark plug wires, which by the way, was replaced along with the spark plugs & coil, 5 months ago, before I knew what HHO was.
The way my air intake is designed, it comes in from the driver's side & curves down to the center of the engine, so the 3 fuel injectors for the driver's side are pretty well covered & inaccessible due to the manifold. I described this because the other 3 are easily accessible, & to check them, I was unplugging them 1 by 1 to see if there was a difference in the missing engine. All 3 injectors on the passenger side made the miss worse, & the puffing at the exhaust worse. So, at this point, I decided to take it to Ford for diagnoses/repair. I just got the call that 3 fuel injectors are bad. Which ones? I asked. The 3 under the manifold... as luck has it.
I'm not sure if the HHO could be the culprit here, but first off suspected not. Then I was wondering, & if anybody knows this, I'm all ears. Do the injectors enter the cylinder above the piston, or do they actually spray the valve on the air manifold side? If they go to the manifold, I'd say there is probably no way HHO could be the cause, but on the cylinder side, the increased explosive force may have been too much for the 141K mile injectors. Why only on the driver's side? I don't know, but maybe because it has a shorter flow path, although it appears the manifold is tuned to be the same length going to both sides of the engine.
Any ideas?
Thanks, Dennyk159
1998 Ford Ranger 3.0 liter V6
Modified Smack design installed 6/20/08
Modest gains of about 1.5 MPG (17.8 to 19.3)
No sensor controls (yet)