I see if I went cheapy cheap (like a chicken) I can ebay a lambda sensor for £10 that'll screw into the VS exhaust and a meter for it for £20, both from Hong Kong or suchlike places. Price either indicates they're cheap and nasty or possibly as it's electronics, the £100 are the same but with rip-off Britain surcharges... Has anyone done this?
Not recently or for a tenner but when genuine sensors were £1-200 we used to buy generic ones( had to solder the old plug on) for £40 and never had any issues, so prices of generic ones at £10 are probably similar , though you can probably get a genuine used one for around that money
Ive had a few things cheap things made in china that are blatent rip offs of there uk or us expensive counterpart and they have been perfectly fine The standard of chinese manafacture really has come along way in the last decade
That's what I was thinking. At the price I might get 2 sensors so I can check each side. It could be a big help fine tuning jetting and balancing. Or it could be misleading and cause me to screw up my engine.
Could you pull an OE one from a scrappers? I know it's far easier to click on a buy it now button and get it delivered to your door, but presumably, there's another reason, other than economies of scale and import duty , why the "same" sensor costs five or six times the price....would be an ar*e to go to the trouble of fitting it and never quite trust the results
I've recently fitted a cheap sensor to a cb performance gauge. It works as well as the previous sensor (no idea what that was). On mine the needle on the gauge is either at the rich or lean side, pretty useless! No idea if it could be useful for jetting or tuning as I'm mechanically incompetent. Gauge reads exactly the same after rolling rd. Gauge is 10 yrs old. For me, a waste of money. Hope some of that may be useful.
like Vanorak said any should work if your using a afr meter http://www.redline.lt/293/diy-airfuel-ratio-meter/?width=1024&height=768
Having read a bit more I find I need a wide band sensor 0-5V and these are more expensive, starting around £50. I like that, but sourcing all the parts, building the circuit and installing in a box seems a faff when a cheap meter is £10?
So says Wiki...so it must be true Are you intending to run an ECU that you can adjust on the fly, or just fit a sensor so you can log the mixture and tinker with jets etc .? The reason I ask is because there's a Megaojolt on fleabay at the moment that could possibly be jigged to do the former
There are several varieties of lambda sensor - simpler ones that indicate rich/lean switching almost immediately at 14.7 afr intended as feedback for a simple ECU . and then wideband sensors that have four wires or more. These work with the Innovate LC family. Or the PLX devices setup that also appears on eBay which is less faff as it doesnt need fresh air calibration unlike the Innovate LC1. You can also buy wideband kits from Australia. But they cost over £100 whichever wideband sensor route you go. The PLX devices setup appears on eBay around £170. I like mine . With a bag of carburettor jets I can avoid the rolling road.
I think you would have to have 2 with your backbox theres no single exit point like a normal downpipe
That bung in the end is designed for a lamda sensor I believe. The routing if the baffles inside should ensure an even flow to where the sensor will be
