- If "Fast and Furious"
taught us anything, is that when you push
that little red button on your steering wheel, your
car goes into warp speed, like a fricking speed racer on Naboo. That magic button releases
a squirt of nitrous oxide, and instantly allows your
car's engine to produce 50, 100, 300 more horsepower. That's pretty incredible, but this Mr. Hollywood
"Fast and Furious" way of using Nos is pretty antiquated. So I wanted to find out in 2020, how is it really being used? Today we're gonna break down the chemistry of this laughing gas, look at how "Fast and
Furious" used it in the movies and see how Stephan Papadakis, the king of Nos himself,
uses this mystery gas. (upbeat music) - Thanks to Keeps for
sponsoring another episode of bumper to bumper. I once had a full head of lushes locks. These flowing follicles
took your Uncle Jerry to places you have never seen before. Then I was one of the
two out of three guys that experienced male pattern baldness by the time I was 35. I'm (spiting) I'm 42 years old. Look at me! Does this look like a 42 year old? No, it doesn't. Luckily for you, you have Keeps. They allow you to visit a doctor online and get your hair loss medication delivered right to your
door every three months. Man, do they have carrier pigeons working hard for them or something. I like birds. Do you like birds? I have a falcon in my basement. He's a peregrine falcon,
fastest bird on earth. What kind of birds do you
guys have in your basements? Let me know, maybe we can be bird friends. Now, if you're ready to take
action and prevent hair loss, go to keeps.com/b2b or click the link in the description below to receive 50% off your first order. You can thank your Uncle Jerry later. Buy me some bird food. I'm running out of bird food. - So there's no need to go into how a combustion engine works. We've done that a lot here on the channel, but as long as you can
remember this you're golden. Okay? An engine makes more power
by combining air and fuel, and then igniting that air fuel mixture. You've got more air plus
more fuel equals more power. And one way to make more power is by forcing more air into the cylinders. That's called force
induction and to do this we use superchargers and
we use turbochargers. Now the air you're breathing in right now, the same air that your car's engine is sucking in through the intake contains 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. And oxygen is the important
element we're after. So 78% of the volume that's getting squished into the cylinders is pretty useless in
the combustion process. That nitrogen, it's taken
up a lot of usable space that oxygen could be having. Now you might be thinking
and I thought this myself, why not just take pure oxygen and somehow sneak that into the cylinders? Well, there are a couple of reasons why, but the main reason is that pure oxygen will cause uncontrolled
burns, it's volatile. So when you supply a dense
concentration of oxygen, it makes a fuel mixture
extremely reactive. So reactive that hotspots in the cylinder, heck, even in the intake itself can cause many combustions
and that's not good. You want those combustions
to be controlled so that they add to
making more useful power. A second problem is you'd
also need a ton of oxygen to carry around with
you to feed your engine. Say your fuel ratio is 14.7 to one, meaning that for every gram of gas burned, you need 14.7 grams of oxygen. You can do the math and it turns out you'd need over 200 scuba bottles
of oxygen to carry around. Now, things would get a little easier if say we could use liquid oxygen, we could store a lot more
oxygen in liquid form and therefore not need as many bottles. Well, we'd run into another problem and that's oxygen can't be liquified above a temperature of
minus 119 degrees Celsius. So the equipment needed and
the high cost to make it makes this not a feasible option, but what if there was
a substance out there that could be liquified fairly easy, that has an oxygen component to it and doesn't need a ton
of complex equipment to use in our engine? Well, welcome to the
party Mr. laughing gas, nitrous oxide just fricking
walked in the door. Now a common misconception is
that nitrous oxide is a fuel. It is not, it is an oxidizer. Nitrous oxides consist of an oxygen added bonded to two nitrogen atoms. And at most temperatures and pressures it's considered an inert gas, meaning it doesn't undergo
any chemical reactions, but if you put it in a high
heat, high pressure situation, the bonds holding the nitrogen
and oxygen break apart. So at about 300 degrees Celsius it gets split into three
oxygen and nitrogen molecules. Now let's say this split happens inside the combustion chamber. We now have a sudden increase in oxygen that can aid in the combustion process. We get to now dumping more fuel to maintain our proper air fuel ratio. And it's the additional fuel being burnt during the combustion cycle that allows the engine to
produce, hit it, hit it James. - Power baby! - Now there's also a second
benefit when you use nitrous. When it's released from the bottle, it's going from a state of
high pressure to low pressure and it vaporizes and when
that happens, it gets cold. It's so cold that it also cools
the surrounding intake air and when you lower the
intake air temperature, you increase the air's density providing even more
oxygen into the cylinder. So that's all theory and all, but what about the practical application? What's the hardware required
to make this stuff useful? There are two types of
nitrous oxide system designs, there's wet and there's dry. A dry system only
injects nitrous oxide gas and relies on the car standard fuel system to deliver more fuel. A wet system adds both nitrous and fuel. So let's see how Brian's dry set up works. On the rear of the car is a
bottle that stores the nitrous and coming off that bottle
is a bit of plumbing that routes to the engine bay where it meets up with a solenoid. A solenoid is just an
electronically controlled valve. Open, close, open, close,
that's all it does. Running from that solenoid
is some more plumbing that leads to the intake track upstream from the throttle body, where it meets a fogger and
a fogger is just a nozzle. It's a fitting with a hole in it that allows the nitrous
oxide to flow through it. When a switch that's connected to that solenoid is activated, that's our magic button on
the steering wheel there, the solenoid opens and
the nitrous oxide flows into the intake flowing
pass the throttle body into the cylinders. So that's what we see in the movie, but we already know that
we have to add more fuel into the mix, that's how
we're gonna get our power. So how did they do this in the age of simple fuel injection systems? Well, it's actually quite clever. Coming off your nitrous
solenoid is another line that goes to the top of the
fuel pressure regulator. So by bleeding off a small
amount of nitrous pressure from the solenoid, it
creates a pressure increase that feeds the factory
fuel pressure regulator. Imagine your fuel injector
is working around 50 PSI then you turn on the nitrous, a little nitrous goes with
the fuel pressure regulator and makes it go higher, say at around 100 PSI fuel pressure through our injectors. The more pressure pushes more fueling. And this method only works
on fuel injected cars. For carborated systems, there's
no way to get extra fuel into the motor. You could rig up a Smokey Yunick system like they did back in the day by jetting your carbs super rich, or you could get with the times, grandpa, and use what's called a wet system. (slurping) Ah. Now there are a few
variations of the wet system, but for now we're gonna talk
about the single wet fogger. Now it's called a wet
system because the nitrous and fuel are mixed together. The fuel makes it wet. The nitrous side of things
are the same as before, but there's also an additional
set of fuel solenoids. Now coming off your fuel
line is a fuel solenoid that when activated sends
additional fuel into a fogger that mixes with the nitrous
and this fuel solenoid gets activated at the same
time as the nitrous solenoid. Now what's controlling the amount of fuel as well as the amount of
nitrous is the size of the jet. Now you may hear the term
50 shot, 100 shot, 300 shot, that refers to the amount
of horsepower gained when using this type of setup. And the piece that dictates
what horsepower figure you get are the fuel and nitrous jets. Now jet is just a piece with an orifice that is precisely measured in
the thousandths of an inch. The bigger the number,
the bigger the orifice and the more fuel and nitrous that can be squirted through it. And then that makes more power. That's the only thing is
controlling more power, which is bigger holes. Now with either method,
the way I just described is a system that rests
on hitting a button, but in today's age, we have computers that are much better at determining when this system should be activated. So I wanted to see how current
day racers are using it. So I got to chat with Mr.
Stephan Papadakis himself on how he uses nitrous. Now one of the current
ways of using nitrous oxide in small horsepower applications is to let your electronic fuel
injection system do the work. But this is having a lot of
faith in your car's stock ECU and fuel management system, and if you're running a dry
setup, you're risking a lot. If for whatever reason,
your car stock fuel system can't match the requirements needed with the added increase in oxygen, your air fuel mixture will run lean and then you're kind of screwed. So you can get around this
by using a wet fogger, which we talked about before, or by using a more advanced wet system with some aftermarket hardware and tuning. Papadakis uses what's
called a direct port setup. This is where you have one
nozzle per intake runner which provides each cylinder
with its own supply. So if you have a six cylinder engine, you have six foggers that supply
each cylinder individually. Now this can be in the wet variety where fuel and nitrous oxide are mixed, or it can be dry where you
use your existing fuel system and that's how Papadakis uses it. So when you arm the nitrous oxide, his aftermarket ECU knows
that the system is on and so instead of opening the
fuel injector only X amount, it opens the injector X
plus a little bit extra because we now have more oxygen thanks to the nitrous. And because the injector
is open for a longer time, we get more fuel. Now with this method, you can do a lot of fine
tuning with your fuel delivery. Inside the ECU, they have
a bunch of parameters set. Once the switch is
flipped on in the cabin, the ECU knows that nitrous
oxide is available. It then has a list of
commands that follow. For example, the solenoids aren't active until your engine reaches 3000 RPM. And let's say your red line is 8,000 RPM so to be safe, it'll only dump
nitrous up until 7,500 RPM. And this is just one example, but you can tune and create
any type of profile you want, depending on your application. The system will also
retard the ignition time you can say by a few degrees. By retarding the timing, the plug fires later in
the compression stroke, when the piston is closer
to top dead center. That helps to reduce detonation before you want it to actually happen. Now, let's say an example, when you're running a turbo, we can have the nitrous turn on when there's some turbo lag. So say you're under 20 pounds
of boost, the system turns on. Then once the boost builds up and you're back over 20
pounds, it turns back off. So you only using nitrous
in that small window when your turbo is building
up pressure to boost. And one of the great
things about nitrous oxide is that you have a
separate tune on the car when the system is armed. So the EC knows that you have
the ability to use nitrous. So when you don't have it, it switches back to its normal stock state and your business as usual. A little sneaky, that's why
they call it sneaky gas. (beep) (dramatic music) - Listen up, class! I've been asked to come to you today to talk to you about
a thing called bundle. And we're offering
different themed packages at an extreme discount! Stop laughing. (laughing) Stop laughing, Jesse. This is a serious. We've got the starter pack, the buff horses bundle,
the lighting bundle, the boost creeps bundle,
the mo powa babeh bundle! (somber music) Guys, this is an insane opportunity. Once in a lifetime really. To get a great deal on
an amazing collection of Donut Media merchandise. (upbeat music) So go to donutmedia.com and get yourself a bundle. Rep the set. This is really exciting. I love you guys. (soft violin music) (beep) - Our nitrous has come a
long way since the 50s. I'm thinking of actually running
some nitrous in my Catfish. What do you guys think? Do you guys run nitrous? Let me know in the comments. How much nitrous do you use? What's the most you use? Thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you for Stephan Papadakis for helping us out with this episode. Guy's a fricking brainiac, he' a big wiz, go check out his channel. Follow us on Instagram @donut @donutmedia. Follow me @jeremiahburton. Till next week, bye for now.
