It’s funny what is OK to say as time goes on. I was in the theatre watching that movie where the kid got busy with a pie in the kitchen and that redheaded band chick said, “This one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute…” Well, you know the rest. Anyway, almost everyone watching the movie said something like “Oh!!!” or “Dang!!!” or some other unprintable words. The point is that we were all shocked, but today something like that goes past and almost no one says boo. It takes more to shock us today than it used to.
Nothing is the same anymore, and that’s true of fuel injection, too. So when I got a question last week about where to get fuel-injection computers and harnesses, one thing led to another and pretty soon I was going down old memory lane. I’m not sure what address I stopped at on that lane, or even why they call it a lane, but I was remembering the bad old days when even a drop of water might kill the computer. You can dunk practically any of today’s computers in water and they will live. What computer you have makes a big difference in where you can put it in the Jeep.
Well, really you can put any computer just about anywhere except for on the exhaust because computers don’t like heat. Electronics get hot, so computers need vents. The computers of old got really hot and needed huge vents to keep them cool. Even today’s computers have vents, but they have gotten smaller over the years. So when you pick your computer and want to mount it, in addition to heat, you goofy Jeep guys need to be worried about water and mud because either inside is just not good.
The old computers were barely enough to keep the engine going, and today’s wristwatches have more computing power than the old fuel-injection computers ever did. I used to call them fool’s injection, because back then everyone knew that a carburetor was better and more reliable than injection. Only fools swapped to injection. Today’s computers have no problems running the engine and are very reliable. To program the old computers, you had to remove a chip, send it off, wait a few weeks, and hope it was right when you got it back. Today we can program them in real time from our laptops, dedicated controllers, and maybe even by the time you read this, our cell phones.
So what computer do you have? Where should you put it? How can you tell? What do you need to look out for when figuring all that out? Let old Randy help you out. I’m not really that old, it’s just something people say.
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