Jaycar fuel mixture guage

[slopster]

http://www.jaycar.co.nz/productView.asp?ID=KC5300&CATID=25&keywords=&SPECIAL=&form=CAT&ProdCodeOnly=&Keyword1=&Keyword2=&pageNumber=&priceMin=&priceMax=&SUBCATID=347

Saw this on the jaycar website. Not too pricey and could be useful for adjusting your carbs. Does anyone know anything about them. Would it really be useful and accurate or is it intended as a gimicky boyracery flashy thing to mount on your dash. I'm guessing you stick something up your exhaust to get a reading?

[imdying]

Hard to say mate, see if you can find more info on the web. The range they talk about is defintiely a good one, but I have my doubts as to whether that device would really accurately read that.

There are two types of exhaust sensors, wide and narrow band. Wide band ones are generally 5 or more wires. Most cars/bikes don't have a wide band sensor fitted. An exception is one of the Hondas, a Civic iirc... it has a fairly cheaply priced wide band sensor. As a result that particular NTK (the brand name) sensor is very popular for wide band gas analyser kits. I can try and find you the Honda part number for it if you like.

Narrow band sensors, as typically fitted to most cars and bikes, pretty much can only indicate too rich and too lean, they have no granularity in between that is worth a damn.

Wide band sensors, becoming more common on nice closed loop setup stuff, have the ability to measure actual values.

Find out what the kit requires... if they talk about hooking it up to any old car, or they're not very specific about which cars to pinch a sensor from, then it seems extremly likely that is a narrow band kit, and not worth anything much for tuning.


/edit: This search http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q=KC5300+fuel+mixture+kit&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
gives us http://www.techedge.com.au/vehicle/wbo2/5300.htm which talks about wide band, so you might be in luck. IIRC correctly the sensors are about $250 these days, which is nice n cheap.

/edit: If I'm reading that link correctly, they tell you (or sell you) how to modify the jaycar kit for WB operation.