Farewell??? I'm not going anywhere... I may not be a LUV owner, but hell a chevy is a chevy, hehe (did I say that?)
Anyway - Well I am a bit aprehensive about my smog secret, but it worked so here goes... My truck as you might know is a 75, V8, a BAR label vehicle, california blah blah blah.. Well anyway every time I took it to get smogged it is ALWAYS a big hassle, the CA spec for my 75 is 250 ppm (parts per million) on the HC (hydracarbons) for the V8, well the first three visits to the smog place it eventually passed with a 200-250 range on the HC at idle, at high speed it never had a problem passing but always the idle was high. Well last year it passed with 193 after lots of tuning and tweaking. This year (when I sold it) I had to get it smoged and did a little research and discovered a way to significantly reduce the HC.
Well I tried it, and after a little tweak on the idle mixture it passed with 50 ppm on the HC level at idle, a record low for my truck! You tell me if it works...
ok now the secret is a 10 to one mixture of unleaded pump gas, and one part denatured alcohol. I know it sounds real funky - but man it worked, I have paperwork to prove it. Now just dumping in a gallon of denatured alcohol is not going to make the truck pass, when the alcohol is added to the mix it actualy leans the mixture so much the motor will misfire and run so bad passing the smog test would be a joke. Once the mixture is added drive the truck about 15 minutes to get it mixed and in the float bowl, this will also clean out the motor big time! once you have done this you will need to richen the idle mixture quite a bit, I had to back out the mixture screws on my quadrajet about three turns to fatten it back up, and I don't think you have to worry about making it too rich, if it goes too rich the CO will go up over the limit, but just lean it back out and it should be ok. I used five gallons of unleaded and .5 gal's of alcohol (I wanted to get the mix out before the buyer took delivery) and this worked quite well. So there you have it... if you don't believe me feel free to email me, there are some green peace folks that think this is a hoax, well I know first hand this is not the case. Total cost was about 9.00 for a gal of denatured alcohol.
You may ask is this legal? Well I have no idea, but the smog tech guys didn't say anything, but I am sure they knew something was up when it passed with 50 ppm at idle.
Keep in mind this will not help you if you don't have the smog equipment on the motor, they still do the visual crap, this is ONLY to help reduce HC from the tailpipe..
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