I was recently looking for some add ons on my car and saw a website selling flamethrower kits that shoot flames out the exhaust. I have a 99 GT with full saleen kit and straight pipes. I emailed the manufacturer and said teh kits would fit on my car. Does anyone have experience with these kits. My main worries are backfires and safety, as well as the heat from the flames causing damage to my rear bumper.
I setup a homemade system on my '66... and flamethrowers in general have a problem with washing down the cylinder walls with gas. this is a very bad thing since A: it isnt lubricating when there is gas on the cylinder walls and B: that gas gets into the oil and breaks it down.... also flamethrowers can only be used during deceleration since it cuts the spark from the engine in order to get fuel vapor into the exhaust and sends that spark to the back to ignite it.....doing it on a newer car though is even more of a problem, main problem: if you have cat. converters.....at best the effect wont work as well as it could since fuel is being burnt in converters.... at worst the converters overheat and set your carpet on fire (ok so carpet fire is unlikely but the converters WILL be under alot of stress and WILL fail early)........ I didnt notice any paint problems on my rear valence.. however it was only primered at the time (anyone know if primer is tougher than paint?) ... what I finially ended up doing to solve all the problems listed above (I dont have cats but if I did it would solve that problem too) is to get fuel injector bungs (the kinda they make for building custom intakes) and run fuel injectors (and an old external EFI pump) in the exhaust...far enough back the pipes are cool but not too close to the spark plugs near the tips (WITH CHECK VALVES!!!!!).. you get much bigger flames this way and you dont have any of the gas washing problems... and the cats would be safe.. and you can do it whenever you want for as long as you want (somewhat.... dont want to do it so long the exhust hangers melt, but by comparison it's alot longer than spark-only systems)... also you have adjustability by varying the amount of gas in the pipes by injector pulse width....it's bordering on the insane/crazy side of things... but given the benefit of looking cool w/o hurting the engine it's the only way that I would do it... the wiring is fairly different, I built 2 pulse generators one adjustable to control the injectors (they will fry if you just give them 5v to be open all the time) and one constant to power the coils). but it is fairly simple and there are many online schematics for them and parts are at radioshack (google "pulse generator schematic").... wire pulse generators and the fuel pump to a switch and it's ready to go (I have a second cutoff switch to the fuel pump on mine just in case the main switch fails, but still no gas would come out without signal to the injectors)..... it's alot of work, but again it's worth it... and you would easily spend less than the kit
