One of the biggest "bang for the buck" products for your diesel is nitrous oxide. There's not much else on the market that can boast an increase of 100 or more horsepower, for less than $500. With our project Rust Bucket Cummins-powered Dodge Ram, looking for dirt-cheap horsepower meant that nitrous was the next logical step after our fuel modifications. A nitrous system would give us the air we needed to burn up excess fuel without an expensive turbo upgrade, and since nitrous oxide is 36 percent oxygen (versus about 21 percent for regular air), we figured a nitrous-assisted vehicle might make more efficient use of the fuel that was available.
Nitrous parts are available in non-kit form, and used bottles, solenoids, and lines are all available on eBay. Since Associate Editor Jason Sands had about 1,000 old nitrous parts lying around his office, we decided to gather them all up and see if we could create a used nitrous kit on a budget.
THE BASICS
To have a workable nitrous system, you only need a few basic parts: a bottle, a feed line, a solenoid, a spray nozzle, an arming switch, and an activation switch. Since we had a bottle, two feed lines, about five solenoids, and three switches already, we were off to a good start. We ended up needing a fogger nozzle and miscellaneous fittings, which we bought at a local speed shop. They were out of dry fogger nozzles, so we had to buy a "wet" nozzle-where gasoline is designed to come in one side and nitrous on the other.
We're going to try running nitrous through both sides of the fogger, and presto, we'll have a two-stage nitrous system on a budget. The only drawback is that, with this type of design, we will be somewhat limited on power because the single nozzle will only flow so much nitrous.
We went over to Big Power Diesel in Palmdale, California, to have some shop access while fabbing up our budget nitrous system. Shop owner Craig Johnson helped us out with all of our drilling, tapping, and grinding needs. Our first step was to remove the intake pipe so we could drill and tap it. | 
Normally, a "dry" fogger nozzle would just have one inlet, but the only one our local speed shop had was designed for a wet kit (fuel and nitrous). By blowing through each side, we found out that one side flows a lot better than the other, so the good-flowing side is where we're putting our bigger jet. | 
We used a drill press to drill the hole for the nozzle. Check out those metal shavings! This is why you'll want to take the intake off (or whatever you're drilling into) for this step. |