Well the 100 HP that I can get with the Hesco Supercharger would be nice but not at $5k. So the next best thing is just a little more torque and HP for now to help with getting up to traffic speed and to help with towing a pop up trailer loaded with camping gear. Right now, both of these are a chore.

 

Nitrous I say. Nitrous.

 

If you are going meth you may consider making sure the engine can handle it. I have no clue about the 3.8 to be honest. But basics you usually do first are full exhaust, intake, cams, larger TB, etc.....

Meth works on race cars...lol...no doubt, but you will need a full tune like I said. Are there any shops that would professionally tune a jeep?

And stay the hell away from nitrous lol

 

The engine can probably handle it. It is my understanding that the RIPP Supercharger uses water/meth injection to cool the air charge instead of an intercooler so that is a supercharger plus methanol on a stock 3.8 engine.

 

I am just speaking from a turboed vehicle perspective. It will cause your vehicle to run rich. You get a shitty tune and you might be in trouble. That is pretty much the basics. AS I said before, not sure the reputable places that will do a full custom tune on your jeep for it. And in reality, since the jeep is NA, you are looking at a gain of maybe 10 hp.

Ideally, you are gonna run a 50/50 mix and be looking at about 110 octane.

Personally, I wouldn't bother unless you had a TC or SC vehicle to be honest...but to each their own.

 

Meth/water injection is NOT for NA vehicles. You need boost to be able to use it without bogging down your engine. The reason the water cools the charge is because of the boost pressure. The Methanol raises your octane so you won't get knock as easy.

It also doesn't make your car run rich. In fact, you can run leaner with the meth because you don't have to dump fuel in to prevent knock. On a turbo vehicle, meth is really nice.

Check out Snow Performance kits. You'll see that the stage 2 kit (the good one) has a control module that runs the pump and controls when the meth/water is injected. That doesn't even start until you're at least 2psi into boost (The lowest setting).

a CAI isn't going to give you a lot of HP by itself either. You would need to install that along with header and exhaust and either high-flow cat or a cat delete to really gain any significant power.

Good luck.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I checked out Snow and found that they have a kit for NA engines. I think they rightfully claim however that you will only see an increase in power if you increase your engine timing. As you know, an increase in timing by itself would give you extra power but it will call for higher octane to avoid knock. (By the way, a timing advance is primarily how the programmers and chips get you some extra HP). The water injection can provide the extra octane so instead of having to buy 93 pump gas you can buy cheaper 87. It also appears that the NA system uses vac to determine when to spray so it will only spray H20 at high RPM's to avoid engine bog.

 

My understanding is that it can be ran on NA vehicles, solely increasing the octane and thus timing...which as I said would be a tad more hp...about 10...and also you may gain a little power from the cooling effect. All in all though, you still need a tune to utilize it...and yes, this is primarily for the TC vehicles.

Also, if he solely runs meth injection it WILL run rich unless a tune is done. Your A/F ratio would be leaning toward the top end. At the point of spray, you are definitely rich. that is why you need the tune.

Also, if you are NA and of course don't have a FMIC or TMIC, the tune can take care of it.

 

Maybe I'll just start with unichip (or Hypertech) and catback exhaust to get a little extra HP for now and hope that the superchargers come down in price after a while..

 

Geez - water/meth injection has been around for a LONG time - and successfully used in N/A engines - on carburators none the less (try getting a "full tune" on one of those HA! Some of the old systems used to feed it right into a vacuum port and use nothing more than a simple valve to control a slow 'leak' of water/methanol into the system. It was real (mildly??) popular in the 70's when the gas crunch, switch to unleadded, and insurance hikes hit the high compression V8's real hard and people were looking for ways to run cheaper gas...

Anyhow - like most of the posts said - it's a great way to gain increased performance on low octane fuel *IF* the engine is modified to take advantage of the potential. That means you need to either bump timing, increase compression, or run some sort of boost (turbo, supercharger, etc.) - even nitrous tunes can benefit with the added fuel/octane of methanol.

I really doubt you'll see any measurable gain for daily driving on the stuff with the low compression JK engine. The computer can pull fuel if it needs to so I'd bet in SMALL amounts the added fuel (methanol) can be compensated for by the factory tune.