• The site migration is complete! Hopefully everything transferred properly from the multiple decades old software we were using before. If you notice any issues please let me know, thanks! Also, I'm still working on things like chatbox, etc so hopefully those will be working in the next week or two.

Wideband vs Air to fuel gauge



asite57 said:
alright thanks for the advice im pretty sure im just gonna get a regular air to fuel gauge but i have a scan tool that can give me an exact number of my AFR
Click to expand...


Such fail.

A regular air/fuel gauge is nothing more than a pretty light show. It only reads off the factory o2 which is constantly cycling trying to get stoich AFR. Its a waste of money. A wideband will give you TRUE AFR readings.

Another way to think about this is to think of o2's like a clock. A wideband o2 can read all the way down to the second hand, but a narrow band can only read the hours.
 




How does a gauge blow up or save your motor from blowing up?

We are trying to help you here...
Do you understand what an air fuel ratio is? What its for? How it works?
 
Oh Yo Yo, or is it, Eye Yi Yi, I am just going to come in here to stir this thread up. O/P if you are running boost, and want to fine tune the car, then take the peoples recommendation and get a wide band.

Now to the people that say a narrow band is useless and a light show, thats not totally true. I have another car that I have and will do rough tuning using a narrow band A/F gauge. So now you just spat your coke out on the screen and said ya, how in the hell do you tune with that. Its fairly simple. If I am at WOT nearing redline and that meter does not stay at the top max green or drops to the first yellow, then I know the car is starting to drop down out of full rich. If I notice that while at cruise it is spending more time cycling at the green side I know it is too rich. If I ever see it go into the red at part throttle high rpm I know its running lean. Its not as dumb simple as looking down seeing a number regardless of throttle position and instantly knowing what the engine needs. However if you are gear headed enough, its no less a mystery that tuning a car that does not have an O2 sensor at all. Let alone a narrow band or wide band system. Stuff like running your finger on the inside of an exhaust tip to check for black soot. Smelling the exhaust, listening for the faint sound of detonation or learning how to deal with high speed detonation vs low speed detonation. It took me a long while to come up with a good timing curve for some of the cams that I use, having to increase base timing at low rpms to bring up low rpm torque, and then needing to reduce timing on the same motor as the rpms increased, because cylinder pressures increased enough to cause detonation. (high lift, long @.050 duration cam)

Now back to the O/P by the fact that you didn't know the difference between a narrow band and wide band O2 sensor or the fact that a wide band was even an Air Fuel Ratio meter. I'd say you should get the Wide band or nothing.

P.S. the reason I didn't jump on the wide band bandwagon long ago, when I started tuning cars, Widebands didn't exist, and when I got the early A/F gauges Widebands were around $750. Come to think of it, I think I paid 200 for my first Narrow Band gauge and that didn't include the O2 sensor.
 
you can get the narrowband sensors 'tuned' so they only read from .800mV and up. it is sort of useful because it doesn't bounce around as much and it'll really only read (and read more accurately) when you're in the upper RPM actually using fuel. however, a wideband is light years ahead of it in the ability to diagnose the car.
 


Capt Fiero said:
Oh Yo Yo, or is it, Eye Yi Yi, I am just going to come in here to stir this thread up. O/P if you are running boost, and want to fine tune the car, then take the peoples recommendation and get a wide band.

Now to the people that say a narrow band is useless and a light show, thats not totally true. I have another car that I have and will do rough tuning using a narrow band A/F gauge. So now you just spat your coke out on the screen and said ya, how in the hell do you tune with that. Its fairly simple. If I am at WOT nearing redline and that meter does not stay at the top max green or drops to the first yellow, then I know the car is starting to drop down out of full rich. If I notice that while at cruise it is spending more time cycling at the green side I know it is too rich. If I ever see it go into the red at part throttle high rpm I know its running lean. Its not as dumb simple as looking down seeing a number regardless of throttle position and instantly knowing what the engine needs. However if you are gear headed enough, its no less a mystery that tuning a car that does not have an O2 sensor at all. Let alone a narrow band or wide band system. Stuff like running your finger on the inside of an exhaust tip to check for black soot. Smelling the exhaust, listening for the faint sound of detonation or learning how to deal with high speed detonation vs low speed detonation. It took me a long while to come up with a good timing curve for some of the cams that I use, having to increase base timing at low rpms to bring up low rpm torque, and then needing to reduce timing on the same motor as the rpms increased, because cylinder pressures increased enough to cause detonation. (high lift, long @.050 duration cam)

Now back to the O/P by the fact that you didn't know the difference between a narrow band and wide band O2 sensor or the fact that a wide band was even an Air Fuel Ratio meter. I'd say you should get the Wide band or nothing.

P.S. the reason I didn't jump on the wide band bandwagon long ago, when I started tuning cars, Widebands didn't exist, and when I got the early A/F gauges Widebands were around $750. Come to think of it, I think I paid 200 for my first Narrow Band gauge and that didn't include the O2 sensor.
Click to expand...

These cars are best tuned with widebands.

You can guess at the AFR using injector pulsing assuming the fuel system is all in order, but a wideband still is best.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top