TUNING IN COLOR
We made an interesting purchase the other day that has to do with color. It's a device called ColorTune and it's made to help you set the timing of your vehicle's engine by the color of your spark.
What the manufacture did was make a generic spark plug with a window in it. Yup, you take the ol' number one out, replace it with ColorTune, fire up the engine and observe. The color of the spark indicates the character of the air-to-fuel mixture.
As it happens, color and heat are related. If you take a candle flame, for instance, the outer part of the core of blue is about 1400 degrees Celsius while the red sits at about 800 degrees. When you tune with a ColorTune, the idea is to get the spark on the edge of the blue range. This point represents the most efficient air-fuel mix. Yellow and orange are too rich (meaning too much fuel is heading into the combustion chamber), dark blue is fine, but pale blue is too lean (not enough fuel).
It's easy. You just tinker with the mixture setting until the color starts to turn orangy-yellow, then lean it to blue. Perfect!
After we tried it, we took the vehicle to our professional "wrench" and now he won't give the ColorTune back until he tests it on a few dozen vehicles. We showed him the lens cleaner and brush to clean the soot off the window.
Take a peek at aep.bigstep.com/color.htm for more info on the product.
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