The Star - July/August 1990

Review of Bosch Fuel Injection and Engine Management from The Star, July/August 1990

"For anyone interested in the how and why of fuel injection of gasoline-powered cars, this is the first book to get. Even if you intend to get the factory manuals, this will help you to find your way through the one of your choice. Having said that much, we must tell you what this book is not. It has nothing to do with diesels or with the purely mechanical injection used in Mercedes-Benz cars from the 300SL/300d era to the termination of the slash/8 series.

The author deals uniquely with the complications of naming and identifying the various Bosch systems. Each of these systems and variants thereof has a Bosch name, such as D-Jetronic, K-Jetronic, LJetronic, etc. Then each automobile manufacturer applies his own name to the system. Bosch D-Jetronic becomes the Mercedes-Benz ECI (Electronically Controlled Injection), and so on. The author manages to group these systems into either "pulsed" or "continuous" systems and does an excellent job of making them understandable. Inevitably there must be a lot of referring back and forth between sections of the book, but that is the price of packing so much information into so few pages.

The book is directed at all applications of these Bosch systems to cars sold in the U.S. and therefore does not deal with specifications for individual models. If you are going to actually work on your car, you will have to have the applicable factory manual. This point is brought out by the author.

The writing throughout is a model of clarity, with many illustrations and diagrams. The photographs are clear and well printed, avoiding the all too common darkness and loss of detail found in many manuals. We recommend this manual highly.

Book reviewers are often accused of glancing quickly through a book and making a decision on the basis of a few pages. We've looked carefully and found only one error: on page 1:11 is the statement that "all Mercedes are fuel injected, the diesels are identified with D." Carbureted Mercedes-Benz cars were offered in the U.S. through 1978, and 1990 versions of the carbureted 190 are still being sold in Europe. The reference to page 1:11 brings up one complaint of this reviewer. That is to the system of page numbering in which a manual is divided into sections with each section having its own sequence of page numbers starting with 1. In a tome such as Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, with over 1,800 pages in 18 sections, such a system is reasonable. In a manual of 224 pages (we had to count them) the page numbering could have run from 1 to 224 and made it easier for the user.

If the reviewer can be allowed one more bit of carping, it would be over the author's equating one bar with the standard atmospheric pressure of 29.92 in. Hg, or 14.7 psi. One bar is as close to 14.5 psi as the gauges used will read. Standard pressure of 760 mm/29.92 in. of Hg (14.7 psi) was engraved in too many of our minds in high school physics and chemistry to be forgotten."

Frank King
Technical Editor

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