[BrooseDaMoose]

On my V8 Ranger I am running the exhaust off the headers to a dual in/dual out X-flow muffler. Where should I have the wideband installed? I was thinking about adding a piece of pipe where they exhaust comes together before going into the muffler creating a sort of H-pipe and putting it in there. That way it sees the exhaust from both sides or is that even necessary? Thanks!

[cgrey8]

I don't know that it's necessary. Where having the WB really makes a difference is tuning Open Loop conditions. During open loop, the EEC isn't trimming and adjusting fuel. It's blindly commanding what it HOPES is delivering the target amount of fuel. That's where you as the tuner come in to make sure the tune is delivering what it's trying for. However if one bank is slightly off from the other, there's not much you can do about that. This is what KAMRFs are trying to adjust for, but there's nothing that says that the difference the banks are off at cruising (i.e. Closed Loop) RPM/Loads is the amount it'll be off at high RPM/high load conditions. However if they are relatively close at cruise, chances are they are going to be "close enough" at all conditions. If they aren't it's likely because of some physical problem (e.g. bad injector). And even this was the case, now the WB is giving you fluttering values that represent both banks. I'd rather have a more stable and consistent WB reading than one that's bouncing due to sampling exhaust from more cylinders. But there are applications that can't avoid this as they've been piped to be single exhaust.

But as I said, it's not really important the WB sample both banks. If you were REALLY that worried about it, then you'd want WBs in both banks. But even if you had that, there's not much you can do about it with stock strategies. We can't command different open loop fueling values to each bank or even define an adjustment for one bank relative to the other. So why confuse the issue when close-enough is good enough.

It's kind of like the old saying that a man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watchs has doubt.

[cgrey8]

I will add one more thing since the title of the thread is where to put the WB, the mfgs suggest that the sensor be installed in an upward orientation to prevent condensate (that's water for those in Reo Linda) from being drawn into the sensor during cold starts. This sometimes isn't an option. On my truck, the only non-downard pointing location that would work was in the side of a horizontal run. The only other places accessible were the downpipes from the header collectors, but that would've oriented the sensor upside down and if water was in the exhaust, it would've rolled right into the bung and onto the sensor.

Another thing that's often done is installing the sensor in modified spark plug spacers (click here for details). This is a good solution if you are reusing existing ports and it's not that expensive. Although it does require some drilling.

However if you are having a new one welded in, then use a 1" bung which will locate the sensor's tip out of the flow a bit.

wb_bung_deep.jpeg

I have no clue if this is really necessary or not, but I do recall that Innovate started supplying double-thick bungs with their sensors a few years after I got mine. So it can't be a bad idea.