Operation EFI: The Point

There's certainly something to be said for old tech.Image courtesy of mybulldog.

Since long before most of us were alive, the automobile has been powered by the internal combustion engine. "Suck, squish, bang, blow," goes the old mantra, describing the four operations performed by an Otto cycle engine. What those four words don't describe is the mechanical precision with which hundreds of components must work to produce mechanical energy from the chemical bonds of chains of hydrocarbons.

Everything must be timed to the microsecond, to the perfect moment, so that when your foot mashes that butterfly open air is drawn in, combined with fuel, compressed, ignited, and exhausted all within a fraction of a second, the extracted energy howling through lever arms and linkages until it's used to deposit the outer layer of your tires on the pavement.

In the olden days, this precise metering was performed by mechanical systems. Sparkplugs were triggered by rotating components that aligned at repeating intervals, fuel was mixed with air in a carburetor, a device that utilizes voodoo and witchcraft to combine the two in the proper proportions.

Despite the IC engine operating via a system of springs, screws and levers for over 80 years, at the end of the 1970's there was a new kid on the block: the transistor. Studied and developed by thousands of nerds across the globe and responsible for getting man to the moon, the transistor offered such precise control of electrical flow that it began cropping up in everything, from alarm clocks to 80's bands. It was only a matter of time before someone applied that precise control to an engine.

Unlike mechanical components, computers could be used to monitor engine conditions, to detect temperatures, pressures, and with time, even the amount of oxygen in the exhaust. Taking thousands of samples of data every second, the computer could observe, quantify, and modify the timing of almost every every critical engine event. The culmination of this technology is traditionally known as Electronic Fuel Injection.

EFI is partially responsible for bringing automobile performance out of the doghouse in the mid 1980's. Emissions systems were growing more and more advanced in response to increasingly stringent government regulations, and yet power levels were going back up. Computers eliminated the guesswork of mechanical systems and offered on-the-fly adjustability and compensation for the enviroment in measurable quantities, boosting economy, performance, and reliability hand-in-hand.

So what does this have to do with me? My project car was built two years before Armstrong walked on the moon, and a decade before anyone considered transistorizing any of Henry Ford's finest work. While I have nothing but the utmost respect for the engineers of the time, Bob Dylan said it best when he said the times are 'a changing.

It's high time to meld this icon of American automotive freedom with a little NASA ingenuity, to build a car with the soul of 1960's Detroit and the brains of the Apollo Command Module. Operation EFI is beginning, and it ought to be a fun ride.