Question for Hired_Goon (or others) on his Manometer

I am looking at building Hired_Goon's manometer and I had a few questions I hope someone can answer.

1) does it use the constricted passageway at any point to help reduce spikes? The reduced passage where you use a piece of red straw from something like a wd40 can. If so, where? If not, how does it deal with such spikes?

2) How long is each of the 4 segments?

3) How do you determine how much ATF to pull?

4) How tall should it be?

 

Have a link?

I assume you are not talking about the bottle style?

On the bottle style you can use what ever you want for fluid - the thicker it is the slower it moves, but as it can't suck up the fluid anyhow that doesn't much matter.

If you find it flows too fast, pinching the line that goes between the two bottles will add resistance.

 

His was a 4 tube construction with no reservoir outside of the tubing itself. All 4 tubes get plugged into the vacuum jets.

The thread was "Have to use Instant Start" by bpberk62 back in Jan 2006, page one of four. There is one picture there along with partial instructions. He has another pic on page 3 that is a close up of the bottom and the 4 way connector, but there aren't any details in either post to answer my questions.

 

I'm not sure what Hired Goon did, and there really aren't any specific answers. My thoughts:

He probably used a restriction, however the longer the tubes the less this would be necessary because the volume of the tubes damps the fluctuations. I think the best answer is to restrict the passages and put as near the intake boots as practical.

Long enough for the fluid column + enough to reach to the port on the motorcycle (see #4below).

How much doesn't matter, when synced they all pull the same amount. Since they're hooked together they will pull 0.

When synced it doesn't need any height. Theoretically if they're way out of sync it needs to be more than 40' taller than the level of a tube with all the fluid you're using in it. If you do a decent bench sync it probably only needs to be about 4' tall and the tubes about 2' full.

 

First, I want to say thanks to Hired_Goon for showing us this in the "instant start" thread. It's a easy tool to build, works great, and let's face it: home made tools are cool.

I made one of these manometers using 1/4 in vinyl tubing from the hardware store. I did not use any restrictors. Each of the tubes are 12 feet long. I jammed a 3" hunk of vacuum line in the ends to make the connection to the engine. I have the manometer mounted right to the wall in my garage and have no problem reaching my bike parked 3 feet from the wall. The lines reach up the wall about 8 feet and at rest, the ATF level is at about 3 feet.

It works great, very easy to read. I have no problem with it "spiking" to much. I think the 12' long tubes help for that. I pretty much guessed on all my dimensions when I built it. As long as you follow the basic principle, you can make it however big you want to fit your space.