Is nitrous good or bad?

[Badams]

its pretty useless in all honesty, its puts alot of unnecessary stress on pretty much all of your engine and drive train. the only people i know who use it, do drag racing. so if your not, theirs really no need to do it. and yes, a turbo or supercharger would be a much more economical and safe option

[Black Edition]

It's good in virtual reality but bad in this real world.

just like what the others say, it's much safer to use a supercharger and/or turbocharger to boost power and torque

[Bob]

ok, there is some SERIOUS problems with the things said in this thread.... lol i had to register just to answer...

Don't listen to the idiot who brought back the thread that's been dead for four years. Also I feel the need to reply to the things he said wrong...

NOS... is NOT bad for your engine! the extra 150horsepower you get is.. but as in ANYCASE! when power goes up, engine life goes down!! unless your not retarded and build your engine right for NOS

This is kind of true. I'll admit that I'm not an expert on nitrous but there are plenty of people who run reasonable amounts without breaking things.

and no, nos is not only for honda's its just their cars are so unbeilivably gay, the only chance they have at making it close to acceptable is nos, but they are stupid and have MANY retarded things done to their car's (most of which lose torque) that they blow motors and make nos look bad.

This is just stupid. Honda makes some of the best engines on the market and anyone who works with them knows it. The simple fact is that they are smaller engines for smaller cars. And their engines are geared towards passenger cars or circuit racing, not drag racing.

we built a Boss mustang that is N/A but designed to run nos. it has roughly 400 lb torque (torque is what matters, NOT horsepower) and after a 100 shot jumps to about 600. and has been through about 200 Nitro pulls on a dyno, and has ran the track many times, engine is still "FINE"

The whole torque is what matters bit? False. The equations are really simple mechanics, but what it boils down to is that acceleration is increasing the kinetic energy of your vehicle... which is DIRECTLY tied to power output. All that matters is power output over the power band- which is a result of the engines torque curve and the transmissions ratios. Torque X RPM is what matters... and Torque X RPM =power. Furthermore peak power and peak torque, while useful indicators, mean nothing in terms of performance. If those numbers come as a result of sharp peaks they're useless.

That being said, peak torque is often useful as an indicator of the width of the power band. Engines with higher peaks at lower rpms generally have a flatter power curve and therefore higher power.

But ultimately, what matters is average power over the working rpm range. Whether that range is 1500-3000rpm for normal driving or 5500-7000rpm for racing (and the width depends on number of gears and ratio and so on) average power is the determining factor.

and finally, ONLY.. and i cannot stress this enough. get nos if your car is chipped (or has a tuned carb) and make your car run rich as all hell, do a dyno pull, check your AFR and lean it out till your car runs 12.5:1 AFR at ALL RPM RANGE, and no.. richer does not = more power, after 12.5:1 you LOSE power, make sure you start rich though, cause if its too lean you WILL detonate and blow shit up, as shown in the video LOL
(with mustangs i highly suggest SCT, there are many reasons why. but mainly the designer of SCT was the designer of ford's computers)

The whole subject of engine tuning is too much to bother with. Just don't listen to this guy.

pretty sure i forgot some shit but i dont wanna type anymore lol, but everything i said is correct. i've built many cars and the shit i hear people say is depressing, i bet 90% of people on this thread have parts that LOWER torque, and dont even realise it..

p.s. K&N open box "cold air" intakes lose power... go dyno if you dont beilive me, ALWASE! keep your god damn air box, ITS GOOD!

p.p.s. Big exhaust tips hinder scavaging and cause you to lose power,
"decibels do NOT!! = power

Exhaust tips hinder scavenging? my god...
they're so far downstream, not to mention after the muffler, that they affect nothing. Big headers can reduce torque at low rpms but exhaust tips... no

"cold air" intakes... can help, mostly do nothing. every car has a different stock setup - sometimes the stock intake is fine for large gains of power, sometimes it can be the limiting factor. If the stock intake is a "bottleneck" and the rest of the engine components have the ability to flow much more, replacing it can have huge effects.
But more often, engines are equally or more limited by exhaust manifolds and heads/cams, so changing the intake has little if any effect.

[G35COUPE]

My understanding of Nitrous systems is that high compression engines do well with dry nitrous systems and low compression engines do well with wet nitrous systems. (I may have swithed it around or I may be wrong here).

If an engine was not designed with nitrous or a turbo or a supercharger in mind, without the proper after-market tuning and alignment of other parts, it can't be good for the car or system, without additional work being done to the engine or transmission.

My beleif is that a nitrous system would place just as much stress as any turbo or supercharger on an engine and transmission. IMO the difference with nitrous and the other systems maybe how it burns with the gas in the combustion chamber, which can lead to a higher incidence of detonation, as a result of poor installation, than the other systems, if tuning is not done correctly or not done at all. And because nitrous systems are cheap and easy to install, the likelihood of users ignoring a tuning, is much higher. Just a thought.