I need help figuring out how to adjust the timing on a 1997 Ford Aerostar XLT Sport with the 4.0L Cologne V6 engine. How can I increase or decrease the engine's timing

 

You can't really adjust the timing on that engine, as it's all controlled by the EEC. There is an octane shorting plug that you can pull to retard the timing if the gas you get is of such low quality that the engine knocks while burning it.

 

What is the EEC? Is it possible for me to adjust the timing through the ECU computer?

 

Electronic Engine Control is what Ford calls its engine control computer. Although on yours I think it also controls the transmission.

And yes, if you can alter the EEC's programming, that would be where you would advance the ignition timing.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

Don't mess with this on a computer controlled car, get the old Ford Falcon and play with that.

Several reasons for this.

A car with a carburetor, a distributor and points will prove or disprove your concept, but you wont be risking much like the cost of a new computer or cooking off an oxygen sensor, or burning out a catalytic converter.

You can adjust mixture, timing and spark advance quickly and easily, and you do not need to worry much about a $100 car.

There is plenty of room under the hood and you can see everything really easy. If you feel like drilling a hole in the intake manifold you can do it without a worry. You probably can replace the fuel pump for $25 and don't have to drop the gas tank to change it. For that matter, since it is not fuel injected, you don't even need a fuel pump for your experiments, you can gravity feed the fuel to the carb.

Face it, vans in general and mini vans in particular, are a pain to work on when compared to a pre-smog, pre-computer, pre-fuel injection sedan.



If your idea works beyond your wildest dreams, then you will know exactly how much the spark needs to be advanced or retarded, and if there was anything else special you needed to do to get it to work.

Of course it won't work because while the oxygen hydrogen mix will burn, you can't overcome the laws of physics so you will be "spinning your wheels" but at least you won't screw up the Areostar by buggering up the electronics, smoking expensive fuel pumps etc.

You can also save some experimenting time and money by just buying the oxygen and the hydrogen in bottles. You can then get regulators and flow meters to allow you to adjust the mixture and quantify the amount of hydrogen and oxygen you need to run the car. While the components are not cheap, you can probably get back most of the cost selling it off on ebay.

Once you know how much go gas you need to run your engine, you then could work out the details on how to go about making the gas from water. What you will prove is that you will need more energy to make the gas from water than you get when you burn the gas and use an alternator to power up the gas generator.

 

That is true for all the cheap and useless HHO designs out there. I was using a very special design that gave me excellent results

I will make a video of my next road test when I'm done with my latest design. I'm not attempting to prove anything. I'm only sharing my experience and results.

 

I guarantee that is not the case. Even if you used a design that was 100% efficient, you would still consume more power to make the HHO than you need to power the engine.

I think you need to understand how fuels works.

All fuels contain energy that was stored there by processes. In the case of fossil fuels, either directly or indirectly, the energy they contain ultimately came from the sun. The vast majority of fossil fuels come from either peat (coal), or limestone (oil).

Coal is formed when peat is buried under the earth, and under heat and pressure, the non-carbon molecules are basically burned off. This leaves relatively pure carbon behind, which burns very hot. However, peat is composed of swamp muck, which is basically all sorts of organic material, which once drew its energy from the sun, by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon, and the carbon was used by the plants to produce sugars and other compounds.

Oil is formed by a different process. Under high heat, a bacteria that can survive the intense heat and pressure breaks down limestone as a food. The energy input is heat, but limestone is ultimately formed from living things, that ultimately got their energy from the sun. Limestone is made from the shells of marine animals, and in some cases, plants. This bacteria literally eats the limestone, and in the process produces long chains of hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbons are crude oil. The bacteria continues to eat the limestone and convert it into oil until either, the heat is no longer sufficient for the bacteria, the bacteria dies by being drowned in the oil it produces, or the heat becomes too intense, or there is no longer a sufficient quantity of limestone. One way or the other, this is still a cycle than starts with solar input.

Water on the other hand, was not formed by solar input, and does not directly contain any energy, in fact it could be considered a negative energy. Water is the end result of a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, and this reaction does produce an energy. The release of energy occurs from the combination of these two. Pure hydrogen is not readily found in nature, at least not on earth. It must always be separated from something else. The bonds in water are particularly strong, and it takes energy input to separate them. It takes a lot more energy than the burning of hydrogen and oxygen produces, assuming it was even possible to capture all that energy.

Your results are not proving success, in fact if you will do just one simple test, you can prove it to yourself. In science you test things, and those things often include variables. You have a lot of variables, and without ruling those out, you cannot come to a real conclusion. The largest variable you have is in the form of stored energy. To be more specific, your battery. You cannot accurately test whether your vehicles own electrical system con produce enough electricity to run an HHO generator that can meet your engines fuel needs so long as you have an enormous stockpile of energy being input into the system. You have to eliminate that variable. You will need to start the HHO generator, run the vehicle off of just it, with no fuel, then disconnect the HHO generator from the battery while leaving it connected to the alternator. How long does it continue to run? I have a prediction that it won't be very long. The amount of power it takes to run the HHO generator far exceeds the amount the alternator can produce, and the amount of HHO being produces with the remaining amount of power is not even close to what the engine needs.

And it doesn't matter how efficient you HHO generator is, because 100% efficiency is not possible, and anything less than that will not work. Your engine is not anywhere near 100% efficiency either, plus 100% the amount of energy the engine produced would have to go into the alternator, any that went to other purposes would kill the system eventually. The alternator is not 100% efficient either.

Your alleged success is nothing more than taking some previously stored energy, converting it into a form the engine can use, which allows you to temporarily run your vehicle off the battery. Nothing more. That battery had to be previously charged by burning fossil fuels. So all your HHO system really does is come up with a clever way to burn more fossil fuels than you ordinarily would.

 

Very interesting. I will conduct your version of the test very soon. Possibly within the next few days.

During my earlier test I had a voltmeter hooked to the battery and the battery read slightly more than 13.50 volts the whole time while the HHO device was running. After the 7 minutes the battery continued to show a full charge and after I did the test again and again the battery always maintained a full charge.

If I was to be over powering a system that has about 100 free amps then the battery voltage would have dropped. Only when I ran a previous lower model HHO device design at 115 amps did the battery voltage drop because at that time I was using more energy than the alternator could handle plus I did not get a very long run time.

I mentioned earlier that I had upgraded the alternator to a 200amp. During the 7 minute run time I was only pulling 30amps and the alternator was able to handle that with no problem while keeping the battery fully charged.

You know how some people may have to upgrade there cars electrical system to handle high powered radio systems (very loud speakers, powerful sub-woofer, power eating amplifiers)?

Well, my hho design was aimed towards the goal of using no more power than an aftermarket super sound system. I basically only had to upgrade my van's electrical system as if I was upgrading the stock sound to high powered sound.

What happens if you upgrade the electrical system but skip putting in the upgraded booming sound? You are left with unused energy that can be used for other things (maybe a small television, expensive power inverter to power a small frig or other small appliances) or maybe instead just use the extra available power to power an HHO device but adjust the HHO device to only use no more than the available extra energy you gained from the power upgrade which is what I did.

By using the HHO device I cannot also install a super sound system because then I would be using more power then the van can handle and at that point gas consumption would also become higher.

The HHO device only runs on stored energy when the van is off.

When the van is running the HHO device is not running on stored energy but the energy from the upgraded alternator.

The HHO device is taking the place of a super sound system.

The HHO device is only using some of the available extra energy from the electrical system upgrade.

Even after the HHO device is powered the van still has more than enough energy to keep the battery fully charged at about 13.80 volts.

The HHO device and the van are friends since they work so well together.

 

You are missing part of the equation here. When the big alternator is spinning at full power it is taking power away from being able to turn the wheels and push the van down the road. The drag on the engine increases as more current is drawn from the alternator.

Think If you have a small flower mill running off a small stream and then hook a turbine that came off of Hoover Dam. You won't have enough oomph to spin the big turbine like you would if you had several hundred feet of water pushing down propelling the water by the turbine blades. This is what you do when you put a bigger alternator on the van, you are just absorbing the energy being out out by the engine to make electricity. A similar device is the dynamometer.

"Electric motor/generator dynamometers are a specialized type of adjustable-speed drives. The absorption/driver unit can be either an alternating current (AC) motor or a direct current (DC) motor. Either an AC motor or a DC motor can operate as a generator that is driven by the unit under test or a motor that drives the unit under test. When equipped with appropriate control units, electric motor/generator dynamometers can be configured as universal dynamometers. The control unit for an AC motor is a variable-frequency drive and the control unit for a DC motor is a DC drive. In both cases, regenerative control units can transfer power from the unit under test to the electric utility. Where permitted, the operator of the dynamometer can receive payment (or credit) from the utility for the returned power.
In engine testing, universal dynamometers can not only absorb the power of the engine, but also drive the engine for measuring friction, pumping losses and other factors.
Electric motor/generator dynamometers are generally more costly and complex than other types of dynamometers."
From:

Dynamometer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There aint no such thing as a free lunch.

 

I agree with the equation but the alternator is not spinning at full power to power my HHO device and I'm not drawing a whole lot of current from it either.

I'm just using a little of the extra available energy from the upgrade.

 

So test it. You are probably drawing more power than you think, and the alternator is always producing full power so long as it is rotating at at least 2,000 RPM, which even at idle it is.

Do the test, remove the battery from the equation.

 

I think you are in error. An alternator consumes and produces varying levels of power depending on load. If you turn on the headlights the load goes up, turn on the blower and the load goes up do this after cranking the engine for an extended period of time and it goes up.

The voltage regulator is controlling the power to the field coils, so the amount of mechanical resistance (drag) goes up until you get to full output.