After drilling and tapping,...
After drilling and tapping, Johnson sprayed the inside of the pipe off with an air hose in case any metal bits were left over.
Nitrous solenoids are also restricted by how much nitrous they can flow, and eventually they can become a limiting factor. For our goal of adding an extra 100-200 hp, using a single nitrous bottle, a -6 feed line (-4 is standard), and a single fogger nozzle should provide us with the boost we need. If you're looking to make ridiculous types of power with nitrous, check out the "Big Power Nitrous" article on page 160.
Unfortunately, we didn't get any horsepower numbers for our homebuilt nitrous kit because we were still dealing with our stock transmission. As for how much power we can make, stay tuned, and we'll get a number in a future issue. We'll be trying .035 (roughly 50 hp) and .070 jets (100-150 hp) to let you know what kind of power a little bottle can get you. For now, we nickel-and-dimed ourselves up to about $300 in parts with this kit and have all used parts to show for it. You could probably cobble together a single stage kit for around $200, or you could just spend $500-$700 on a new kit. As for us, we're hoping to see an additional 100 horsepower (or more) at the wheels from our little investment. We feel that, at that power level, the risk will be fairly minimal.
Cheap means cheap! We found...
Cheap means cheap! We found a piece of scrap metal that we cut up and ground to the proper size to mount our nitrous solenoids.
THE DANGERS OF NITROUS
Even with a 100-200 horsepower kit, there are still dangers when it comes to using nitrous oxide. The main ones are turbo overspeeding, nitrous backfires, and too much horsepower. Nitrous is hard on turbos because it hits them all at once. Suddenly, the turbo has to work a lot harder and spin faster. The best way to prevent overspeeding is to know what kind of boost your turbo can produce without failure. With our stocker, we knew we could see about 35 psi without it blowing up, so we're keeping that number in the back of our minds for all dragstrip runs and dyno pulls.
 Oddly enough, this step actually...  Oddly enough, this step actually took the longest. The intake on our truck had never been off, and the gasket seemed welded on. After about an hour of scraping and sandpaper work, we felt the surface would be flat enough to seal 28 pounds of boost once again. |  The next step was mounting...  The next step was mounting the bottle, which was fairly simple. Just make sure your feed line is long enough and that you're not drilling into anything under your bed (like your fuel tank!). |  The bottle we used came from...  The bottle we used came from a 5.0L Mustang kit, and we felt a little better about paying more for it since it had a pressure gauge and quick-release bottle brackets. |