Mad Scientist Matt's Lair

The latest in money wasting useless products for your car

2010-07-05T12:09:00.002-05:00

I had a link spammer stop by my blog recently trying to promote an amusing bit of pseudoscience. (There, I've given their link a more appropriate title.) The commenter asked if I could post some relevant info on it. Naturally, I'd be glad to.

Called the "AG Power Fuel Saver," this device attaches to the negative terminal of the battery, where it apparently, well, does nothing. The reason I say that is that it's made of nonconductive materials, according to their FAQ - so there's not much electrically it could do, and there's definitely nothing non-electrical it can do. They claim to have done mileage testing with it using an IM240 test - an emissions test that doesn't report anything about fuel mileage. It's interesting to see a bogus gas saver where its promoters don't even try to come up with a plausible reason why it could work.

What's even more interesting was that this isn't the first money waster of its type I've seen. I ran across a report where the EPA tested a nearly identical device (except it did have a few conductive parts) called the Fuel Maximiser. You probably won't be surprised to hear that the Fuel Maximiser didn't do anything either.

The long overdue fake hydrogen booster theories

2010-05-05T18:34:00.001-05:00

A while ago, I blogged about hydrogen booster theories, creating a list of all the claims I've seen put forward by proponents of hydrogen boosters - then adding three claims I've made up out of whole cloth, and challenging readers to guess which ones I'd made up. I can't think of a sound theoretical reason why using the car's electrical system to power a hydrogen generator and feeding the resulting gas into the car's intake should improve mileage. But proponents have no shortage of unsound theories. From the reactions I had from readers, it seems it's pretty hard to distinguish their theories from patent nonsense. Here's the fake theories.

"6. The hydrogen and oxygen react with decane in the fuel, causing it to split into ethanol and iso-octane."

This was an effort to think like a scammer, making up a claim that tied into real research on flex-fuel cars (in truth, ethanol tends to hurt gas mileage). You can write a balanced chemical reaction based on that line. But I can't think of a good reason why this reaction would actually happen.

"3. The flow rate should be proportional to the engine size and RPM. To find the best flow rate in liters per minute, take the engine size, multiply by the RPM, and divide by 2."

For some reason, hydrogen generator proponents seldom try to size the generator to the engine. This line would also result in a far larger hydrogen generator than any I've seen tried on a car. On the other hand, if you feed an engine that much hydrogen, it'll definitely get some sort of results...

"8. Because hydrogen causes the air / fuel mixture to implode, the engine needs very different valve timing. The cam should be replaced by one with a much longer intake opening and a far shorter exhaust opening, and overlap absolutely must be cut to zero."

Believe it or not, I didn't make up the implosion theories. These theories also seem to be tied to orgone, although trying to figure out what orgone even is can give you a headache in a hurry. However, I haven't seen anyone try to make internal modifications to the engine to get better results with the hydrogen generator. Logically, changes to the fuel should call for changes in things like cam timing or compression ratio, but you don't see anyone trying it.

Forming a support group

2010-05-02T18:29:00.002-05:00

Believe it or not, I've actually been getting more work done on the Dart recently than on this blog. Several of my co-workers also have unfinished project cars (it's practically a requirement to get hired in the technical department...) and so we've been setting aside a couple days each month where we stay after work and help each other out with our cars. I've finished a manual steering swap on the Dart, got the turbo support bracket 100% complete, and now I'm working on some final details of the radiator and intercooler setup. Having buddies help work on your car can provide a lot more than just extra pairs of hands. You also get new ideas, and just as importantly, a lot of encouragement whenever you start feeling in over your head.

What I've been up to

2010-03-02T21:13:00.002-05:00

I haven't had much time to update this blog lately, or work on the Dart. But here's what I have been working on. I think you'll find it interesting.

MegaManiac - Drag Pack Challenger

Not much time to work on the Dart this week, but I did pick up a few items...

2009-12-24T13:18:00.003-05:00

Picked up one of Summit's extra long battery relocation cable kits, a Moroso battery cutoff switch, and an Optima Red Top battery this week. I'll see if I can get these in soon.

My plan is to run the 2-gauge wire forward to a bulkhead fitting on the firewall, then connect that to the starter and the alternator. I'll run two more 10 or 8 gauge wires from the battery to the front of the car, one for the EFI and ignition, and one for everything else. There will (at some point) be a cut off switch in the EFI / ignition wire to meet NHRA requirements.

Speaking of NHRA requirements, I probably need to order their rule book - I've got a feeling that a weird homebrew setup like what's under the Dart's hood might get looked at a bit more closely than normal when going through tech inspection.

Spot the fake hydrogen booster theories!

2009-12-23T19:19:00.002-05:00

Call them hydrogen boosters, HHO systems, Brown's Gas, or what you will, these things seem to be on the way out. Maybe it's been all the debunkings (some of which I've blogged about before), or maybe it's been the Ozzy Freedom types have moved on to other schemes. At least, I haven't run across as many discussions of these things recently. The way it's going, in another ten years, the hydrogen booster fans will be hanging out with the vapor carburetor crowd and commiserating over a few beers about how the government / auto industry / petroleum industry / Bavarian Illuminati have conspired to kill their technology of choice.

So, while these ideas are still getting kicked around, I thought I'd try gathering all the hydrogen booster theories in one place, as well as all the claims about how to tune the system. My first plan was to put that side by side with the theory that most of the claimed improvements are the results of bad experimentation, but where's the fun in that? Instead, I'm going to try something a little different - I'll post the theories without comment, although I will attempt to fill in gaps on occasion when a theory seemed incomplete. However, three of the items on these list are fake - theories or tuning methods that I've made up out of whole cloth. All the others are genuine claims that advocates of hydrogen booster systems have used to explain why it should work or how you should tune the engine after installing it.

Theories of operation:

The engine burns fuel to drive the alternator to power a hydrogen generator that makes more fuel to be burnt in the engine. Appears to be the oldest theory.
The hydrogen generator doesn't create additional drag on the alternator because it is only taking up unused current that the alternator would be putting out anyway.
The hydrogen isn't extra fuel so much as a combustion enhancer that speeds up the burn rate and increases knock resistance.
It's not really the hydrogen that makes a difference, as much as that the generator also collects a mysterious sort of energy known as "orgone" that it feeds into the engine.
The hydrogen generator produces monoatomic hydrogen - that is, the hydrogen atoms are all separate, instead of stuck together in pairs as in normal hydrogen. This is much more reactive, although somewhat tricky to keep it from reacting with other things (aluminum, plastic, oxygen, or even itself).
The hydrogen and oxygen react with decane in the fuel, causing it to split into ethanol and iso-octane.
The hydrogen doesn't burn or react with the gasoline, but instead reacts with a different gas in the air to produce a chemical that has an effect on combustion. What gas it reacts with was not specified, but presumably it would be reacting with nitrogen to form ammonia.
There is an extra electron on each hydrogen molecule, forming an electric current from the hydrogen generator to the combustion chamber.
Adding hydrogen to the air / fuel mixture causes it to implode instead of explode.

Tuning theories:

A steady flow rate of 1 liter of hydrogen and oxygen per minute is best.
A steady flow rate of 100 liters of hydrogen and oxygen per minute is best.
The flow rate should be proportional to the engine size and RPM. To find the best flow rate in liters per minute, take the engine size, multiply by the RPM, and divide by 2.
Because hydrogen speeds up the burn rate dramatically, timing should be retarded to a fixed timing rate in the vicinity of 10 to 12 degrees after top dead center.
Because hydrogen causes the air / fuel mixture to implode, timing should be advanced to somewhere around 70 to 90 degrees before top dead center.
Because hydrogen increase knock resistance, timing should be advanced 5 to 10 degrees ahead of the standard timing curve.
The air/fuel mixture should be leaned out to somewhere between 16:1 and 20:1.
Because hydrogen causes the air / fuel mixture to implode, the engine needs very different valve timing. The cam should be replaced by one with a much longer intake opening and a far shorter exhaust opening, and overlap absolutely must be cut to zero.

Now... can you spot the fake entries? This can be something of a challenge, as I'm not asking you to figure out which of these theories is false or which of these tuning approaches does not work. Instead, you'll need to figure out which three of the entries are not actual theories or tuning approaches used by somebody advocating hydrogen booster systems. I'll post answers after New Year's Day, or sooner if somebody correctly identifies all three.

Starting on a trunk mounted battery

2009-12-19T09:37:00.003-05:00

I've been having trouble finding time to work on the turbocharged Dodge Dart - things have been very busy at work as we were getting ready for the PRI trade show. (Which reminds me - I have pictures of that I need to post.) Today after work I found I had some time to wrench on the car, but it didn't feel like I had enough time to pick up a socket for the steering box to get it back on. I'd unscrewed the nut with a giant set of Channel-Locks, but wanted to use a proper socket for putting it back in place. So finishing that wasn't the best choice.

When a task looks overwhelming, often it helps to go over the individual, non overwhelming steps, and pick one thing you can do with what you have available right now. I decided I could mount up the trunk mounted battery box. The Moroso box I have mounts with bolts through the bottom of the box, but oddly enough, it wasn't drilled at the bottom of the box. You have to drill it yourself. I picked a spot over the right rear wheel and drilled both the box and the floor for the mounting bolts. Next step will be to get a battery and wire it in, probably an Optima red top. While I do the wiring, I'll plan it so I will be able to install a kill switch, but initially I will probably leave that out so I can get this running. Now that I've found that RTE Engineering has an option of converting a factory ammeter to a volt meter, I'm planning on going that route. Ammeter bypasses are pretty popular in the Mopar world (sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad ones), but I really don't like leaving a gauge that is just dead and sitting there.

Homemade Magic Erasers recipe?

2009-11-21T08:45:00.002-05:00

A while ago, I went through some MSDS sheets and other information to figure out how to make your own windshield washer fluid. Inspired by Dan's comment on Mr. Clean's Magic Erasers, I thought I'd do a bit of digging, not only to see if they contain formaldehyde, but to figure out what they actually are. The Magic Eraser MSDS sheet does state that they don't contain formaldehyde (my attempt at degreasing car parts with them might have been more successful if they did!), but it doesn't state what they actually do contain. A bit more searching, though, turned up that Mr. Clean didn't really try to hide their source for the Magic Eraser material - it's actually melamine foam, made by BASF.

Normally, melamine foam is used as a sound insulation, although it's also used as a fire retardant. At some point, somebody found out that if you cut this sound insulation foam into blocks, you could use it as a very fine grit abrasive. So the way a Magic Eraser cleans is mechanical, not chemical - it's like a polishing cloth or sandpaper. And, predictably, a little searching for "melamine foam" turns up a couple sources where you can buy the stuff cut into blocks for sound insulation use. Predictably, McMaster-Carr sells it. (If that link's broken, start at their main page and search for melamine.) It's worth noting this is a different grade of melamine foam from what Mr. Clean uses, and it would only make sense if you used Magic Erasers by the crate.

Removed the Dart's power steering

2009-11-07T18:52:00.002-05:00

I've been getting a bit more wrenching done on the Dart. Removing the power steering is definitely going to get me a lot more clearance for the turbo, but first I had to remove the up-pipe to get enough clearance to pull the box out. The biggest difficulty was probably that I didn't have a suitable socket wrench for the bolt on the steering arm. In the end, I managed to get the bolt off using a giant set of channel-lock pliers. I'll get a proper socket before reinstalling it, but I didn't feel like driving off to get a large socket in mid-pull. The old power steering box is out, and hopefully next week I'll have the manual one switched in. Got the box already mostly degreased and an adapter from Firm Feel, so it should just drop in.

Of course, "should just drop in" are pretty dangerous words.

It was worth a try...

2009-10-17T10:13:00.001-05:00

My manual steering box arrived this week, and I've been cleaning off the grease and grime before I put it in. When I took it out of the box, my co-workers first thought it was cast iron. I've been using various chemicals and a lot of elbow grease to clean it up. One tip, though - don't try degreasing parts with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. They're OK for use around the house, but serious caked-on grime erases the Magic Eraser faster than the Magic Eraser erases the grime.

It's a Dart update!

2009-09-26T08:52:00.002-05:00

I've had a lot going on and not been able to wrench on the Dart for a while. Recently, I've been thinking about what to do with the power steering lines, when finally it hit me: With a turbo that big, this is going to be a drag car more than anything else, and what's a drag car need power steering for? The A-body manual steering boxes are aluminum, too, and save a lot of weight. I've got a line on one from slantsix.org, and will be ordering an adapter from Firm Feel as the power steering column is shorter than the manual steering design. Friday, I made a start by taking the pump off. As a bonus, I see there's more room for beefing up my turbo support with not having to worry about power steering lines.

Not quite an A-body...

2009-08-29T15:06:00.002-05:00

Got a new car today to replace the Civic, which I'll be putting up for sale as soon as I replace a couple parts. The specs are quite similar to an early Valiant like the one Greg linked to, but not quite. It's a rear wheel drive convertible, has a 106.3" wheelbase, and it's powered by a 2.8 liter slant six. But it's not a Mopar - it's a '97 BMW 328ic. Happened to find one in really nice shape for a 12 year old car.

Sometimes I have to wonder - if Chrysler had kept the A-bodies in production, would they have evolved into something like a competitor to the 3-series?

It seems the universe does not want me to own a Honda.

2009-08-25T20:11:00.001-05:00

One of the reasons I haven't updated this blog in a while is trouble the Civic's been causing me. A couple weeks ago, it was a broken crankshaft pulley that made me worried I'd lost the crank too. Yesterday, the Civic got stuck in the middle of a five car pileup.

Luckily, I'm mostly unhurt, the car still runs, and the guy who caused the accident appears to have enough insurance to cover everything. The body shop estimates it's $1,700 to fix the damage if they do the work. Most of the problem seems to be confined to the front and rear bumpers, but the driver's seat is bent as well. I think I'm going to get rid of the Civic for something else... some kind of car that isn't carrying around a trouble magnet in the trunk.

Burried on a warning label

2009-07-22T19:59:00.002-05:00

A lot of times, we stop paying attention to warning labels. Too often, they seem to be written by Captain Obvious, stating things that anyone with any common sense would known not to do. Like the infamous story about the warning "Caution: Harmful or fatal if swallowed," on a hammer. But sometimes there's a truly bloodcurdling danger that is not remotely obvious. I ran across a cautionary tale on the Grassroots Motorsports forum, and I wanted to pass it along to my readers.

Don't weld any parts you have just cleaned with brake cleaner. Read the whole story and find out what can happen if you do this.

Latest Dart update

2009-07-18T07:41:00.000-05:00

Yes, I was doing a bit of work last week, but it was fairly boring. At the end of this week, I have the bracket to hold up the turbo almost finished. It's all welded together and drilled to fit the water pump and power steering pump bolts. Just need to drill it for the turbo flange itself, and maybe a bit of trimming, and it's done. Well, and paint it with some high temperature grill paint. Pictures should be up next week when that's done.

Cardboard bracketry

2009-07-03T14:11:00.001-05:00

So two weeks ago, I said I'd try to get a Dart update out weekly. Predictably, the week after, I didn't find time to work on it. This week, I started to do a bit of drilling to get my partially made bracket to fit, but realized it would set me back a lot if the holes were in the wrong spots. So I've created a cardboard mock up of the three pieces that currently make up the bracket, and I'll soon be adding a couple of additional sections. This way I can try out the bracket before I do any more welding or drilling to it.

Weekly Dart update

2009-06-20T10:53:00.001-05:00

I'm going to see if I can get something done on the Dart every week. Maybe not spectacular, but I figure if I keep the momentum going I'll get through this project eventually.

I've been wondering about how the Spectre intake piping is going to hold up under boost. The tubing itself is pretty stout looking heavy gauge aluminum, but it's smooth with no beads to hold it together under boost. I had originally been thinking I might as well try it as an experiment, just to see what happened, but this week I decided I won't run the piping as is under boost. So I took it to Suwanee Welding and had them weld the sections together into one solid piece, with beads welded to each end so that the silicone coupler won't slip off them. It may not look as good anymore, but it's definitely worth the peace of mind. And I'll probably get the thing powdercoated at some point - probably the same red color they used on the stock engine.

Sounds like my kind of car show...

2009-06-14T20:10:00.001-05:00

The latest issue of Hot Rod arrived today, and they mentioned a car show that would actually be an appropriate place to show off my Dodge. No, not the Dart... the D50.

Well, there is one thing about it that would make it less than an appropriate place, and that's that my D50 probably couldn't be trusted to make it all the way to California. I'm not sure if I should enter it in the "Soul-Sucking Japanese Appliance, 1970-current" or "Rust Belt American Junk, '64-current" category - or it might have a shot at "Most Effluent," awarded to the entrant that pollutes the most. Seriously, these are real categories in the show - the complete list of categories has to be seen to be believed. Some of the other classes include cars that have been kicked out of other shows, a category for cars from Malcom Bricklin's many failed efforts at importing things that didn't fit American tastes, bizarre special edition cars (it appears that counterfeiting even weirder special editions that never existed is encouraged), and a class specifically for all K-car based vehicles.

Maybe they'll have one closer to Georgia if this is a success - the same guys' 24 Hours of LeMons has inspired a nationwide series.

Turbos aren't the only way to make a slant six fast

2009-06-12T18:01:00.002-05:00

This video is pretty impressive - even though it fails to show the Valiant's e.t., which is somewhere in the 11's.

11 second slant six Valiant on YouTube

Found this one where Big Dad posted it on Bangshift, where he also posted a link to MoParts with some pictures. This Valiant is a naturally aspirated, tube framed, Lenco equipped drag monster. Wish I could find more details on it. There's custom parts all over this Valiant; even the valve cover is not an off the shelf item.

There's a first time for everything....

2009-06-11T18:56:00.002-05:00

And today was the first time I've ever welded together anything I was planning to put on my own car, namely, the start of the turbo support bracket for my slant six. I haven't welded anything since one time I tried to fill in a couple gaps on a machine cover at Amada, and before then the last time I'd tried welding anything was in shop class in college. Luckily, we've got a pretty good Miller MIG at the shop at work that we've mostly used for exhaust work on our in house project cars. It won't win any Riddler awards, but it looks like it ought to hold up. I'll have pictures once the bracket is complete.

A Dart update

2009-06-06T07:50:00.001-05:00

No, I haven't forgotten about the Dodge Dart with the turbocharged slant six. I've kind of had a hang up about figuring out how I'll support the turbo. Yesterday I decided I just had to do something to get around that, so I unbolted the turbo. And then I decided I could cut one bit of angle iron to extend from the turbo flange forward to the same plane as the water pump bolts. And another bit of angle iron going sideways. That kept up and I now have four bits of angle iron to weld together to make a bracket. It's a start.

Replacing the Achieva's radiator (and yet another rant on Haynes manuals)

2009-05-26T19:09:00.003-05:00

Spent a lot of yesterday swapping out the radiator in Kelly's Oldsmobile. It wasn't an easy task, and predictably, replacing the radiator in an Oldsmobile Achieva with a Quad Four is a lot harder if you try to do this the way the Haynes manual says to do it. For example, the manual states that you should remove the radiator fan, and that you can simply unbolt the fan and drop it out through the bottom of the engine compartment. Wrong. After a couple hours of fighting with that fan, I finally realized that it isn't physically possible to pull the fan out of the Achieva's engine compartment if both the radiator and the engine are in place. There is literally not a single gap it will fit through without cutting the front subframe up with a Sawzall. So I finally pushed the fan back and as far down as it would go, and gained enough space to pull the radiator out the top of the car.

This morning, I checked on Alldata, which is more or less transcribed from the factory service manuals. The procedure they give for removing the radiator fan shows the Hayes manual left out a critical piece of information: The only good way to remove the radiator fan on a Quad Four powered Achieva is to unbolt the front motor mount and push the engine back.

I mentioned this to a co-worker, and he noted that in the Subaru world, Haynes is notorious for leaving out a key note in the timing belt directions that results in one part being installed 180 degrees out. I can understand making a mistake. What I can't understand is that, when this mistake was brought to their attention, Haynes neither chose to come up with a second edition nor even include an errata insert noting this. Protecting a reputation is vital to ensuring your product's success. If you don't make sure your repair guides are accurate, word will get out, and people will turn to competition. That's why I make a point of buying factory service manuals instead, although this is the first time I've personally encountered a Haynes manual botch a description so badly that their procedure isn't physically possible. The Haynes manual came with the car, in case you were wondering.

A Memorial Day post

2009-05-25T16:23:00.002-05:00

Because this blog is mostly about automotive technology and the like, I'd like to open my post with this video:

This is a prototype of the Ripsaw MS1 combat robot, which I found out about via Popular Science. Will gun-toting robots replace human soldiers soon?

Not really. The Ripsaw is what's called a force multiplier. It's there to help soldiers, but it can't fully take their place. There's a need for somebody to control the Ripsaw and tell it what is and isn't a legitimate target. A Ripsaw can't fight insurgents house to house and leave the houses standing. It may have artificial intelligence, but that's not going to be a substitute for human intelligence. There's still going to be a need for American soldiers to put their life on the line defending her safety. And to those soldiers, I would like to acknowledge my debt of gratitude. Valor and courage are not obsolete.

One automotive related company may be going belly up - and I'm glad to see it

2009-05-16T11:10:00.004-05:00

Looks like the Feds finally got Transcontinental Warranty Inc and Voice Touch Inc. - the scum who are apparently responsible for those robo-calls announcing that your car warranty is about to expire. I had a run in with these guys a couple months ago, or at least someone with the same business model. I asked for a live operator when they called, and the first thing I did was ask for their company's name and contact information. The operator's response was "Very funny," followed by an immediate hang up. Now what sort of professionalism is that, training a company's reps to not even tell prospective customers what company they're dealing with? The only actual identification they gave was, "Warranty center, this is Matt," and I was able to trace the call to what may have been a spoofed number. I have to wonder what he would have done if had stayed on the line and found out the only cars in the household were a 1995 Oldsmobile Achieva with nearly 200,000 miles, a 1995 Honda Civic that sees occasional racing use and a number of dyno flogs at work, and a 1966 Dodge Dart.

For further reading, check out the FTC filings against Voice Touch and Transcontinental Warranty. My experience seems to be in line with item 14 on the complaint: "In some instances, Defendants expressly claim to be calling from the consumer’s automobile dealership or manufacturer. Defendants’ telemarketers routinely hang up on any consumers who question Defendants’ affiliation with the consumer’s automobile dealership or manufacturer."

Mad Scientist Matt's Lair: The Book?

2009-05-09T11:39:00.003-05:00

Well, not quite, but Jerry and I just finished up writing a book on fuel injection and sent it off to HP Books last week. Next it needs to make its way through editing, so it could take a year or so before it hits the shelves. Readers of this blog may be able to spot most of the cars I've owned that I mentioned here on this blog - the Civic, Corvette, Spitfire, and Dart all made it in either as illustrations or mentions in the text.

A follow up to the Dateline special on the HAFC

2009-04-06T19:23:00.002-05:00

One of the people that Dateline interviewed was Eric Kreig, a critic of these sorts of hydrogen generators who's even more vocal than I am. I had read his site in the past, and I'm pretty sure I've even quoted from it (Evidently it wasn't on this blog, though). But I couldn't find it in time for yesterday's post. Well, here's Eric Kreig's page on Dennis Lee and hydrogen generators. Check it out.

Chris Hansen goes after HHO scammer

2009-04-05T19:09:00.003-05:00

Tonight's episode of Dateline caught my attention. This time, they were going after something I've often gone after on this blog, the claim that putting a hydrogen generator on a car can boost its gas mileage. Their target was the HAFC system, peddled by convicted felon Dennis Lee. His system sells for around $1,000, with installation being equally pricey - or even more expensive. That's a pretty high price for an HHO generator - someone like Ozzy Freedom can get you the same whole lot of nothing for a whole lot less something.

You can read the whole episode write-up here. What I found especially interesting was that they tested the system at an EPA certified lab using the federal mileage tests. This is the very first time I've seen anyone do this, and as far as I've been able to tell, it may even be the first time anyone's ever subject an HHO generator system to one of these, with surprisng results. No, the surprise wasn't that the generator improved things. It got the exact same results before and after the installation. But then they turned the system off and retested the car - and it got better mileage than before. It sounds like the guys who did the installation also made some sort of tweak to the car, most likely running a thinner grade of oil, that produced a real improvement. And then the hydrogen generator caused the car to run less efficiently and canceled out their real gains. Although I'm not sure if the gains were more than the test device's margin of error.

Their "What's in the kit?" video, which wasn't shown on the air, is one I found particularly interesting. One, he's combined the hydrogen generator with a gas mileage magnet - I doubt that would be any more effective than the one the EPA tested in that link. The electronic box caught my eye, since it's very similar looking to a MegaSquirt, but a closer look showed it seemed to just be something else that used an off the shelf aluminum case. One other thing about the kit seemed pretty telling - that appears to be a sort of cheap PVC-based hose that isn't rated for underhood temperatures. That might explain why he commented it was pretty leak prone...

Civic Disobedience II: Revenge of the P28

2009-04-04T09:09:00.002-05:00

I didn't much like the original Civic Disobedience, and predictably, the sequel wasn't very fun either. But at least this time it was a low budget sequel. It started a week ago when I was leaving work. The engine turned over but wouldn't fire up, and then the Check Engine light came on. Then I smelled smoke. Coming from inside the car. The ECU was giving off a pretty good smoke show. More smoke than the time the Triumph Spitfire had an electrical fire, in fact.

So I unplugged the ECU and drove my truck home (I keep it there for junkyard runs and such). Went to a local junkyard and found a replacement Honda ECU for arund $100, about what they go for on typical Honda forums. I was kind of worried something else had shorted in the wiring and fried the ECU, but it turned out the wiring was fine. An ECU autopsy showed the cause of death seemed to have been a capacitor in the power supply having shorted out. I know what you may have been thinking, but I haven't made any changes to the stock wiring harness other than bypassing a faulty clutch switch. Ok, so I did put an Innovate LC-1 and a digital gauge on the Civic... but I didn't change any of the stock wires to do this. Honda makes it pretty easy to add circuits, as there's several connections on the fuse box put there for add on devices that you can hook up with a spade terminal.

Horsing around at work: Nova "blower" installation

2009-04-03T19:45:00.003-05:00

Usually I don't post that much about what goes on at work, but this time I'll make an exception. Yesterday morning, Jerry had finished up tuning a 350-powered, Megasquirt-II equipped Chevy Nova that's going to feature in our book on EFI. So we had the Nova strapped to the dyno, a little bit of uncommitted time... and a high powered leaf blower we'd been using to clean up the parking lot yesterday. You know how sometimes you know something may be a crazy idea, but you can't pass up trying? Well, this was one of them.

Leaf blower dyno test

I was kind of surprised at the results. Then again, it was a pretty big leaf blower. The hose running to the intake actually puffed up visibly when you gave the blower full throttle.

The WheelSkins steering wheel cover

2009-03-14T20:27:00.003-05:00

i

A while ago, I mentioned I'd ordered a WheelSkins steering wheel cover. Here are some pictures from installing it. Their directions really underestimated how long it would take, thanks largely to a waxed string that wanted to tie itself in knots. It took me three hours to get this sewn on to the wheel. But the results are pretty good - only the way it wraps around the spokes and the riceboy-red inserts give it away that it wasn't a factory item. And it definitely feels a lot better than the worn out factory wheel (chunks of plastic were coming off the top) or the cheap slip on cover I had been using. Note that I'm wearing gloves to install it in the top photo - that thread is murderous on your hands!

The mod on deck is a lighting upgrade kit from Dan Stern Lighting - I'm going to see if I can give the Civic some more lighting power without using HID lights. While HID conversions are the rage in some circles, to get a HID upgrade that actually puts light where you need it instead of throwing out light in semi-random directions is pretty expensive, usually involving grafting factory lights off an Acura of one sort or another into stock housings. I just want more useful light, not gratuitous technology here.

There is no kill like overkill.

2009-03-12T20:35:00.003-05:00

An interesting link I found at the BangShift forums. Taking a Trailblazer DOHC inline six and putting it into a rail dragster is unusual enough. But add a very large centrifugal blower, an air to water intercooler, and twin turbos, and you get something truly over the top. It doesn't say how much boost it's running, but I'm a little surprised the stock ignition system can keep up. (Edited to add - "dieselgeek" has reminded me to take a closer look at the coils. They're actually a set of high powered aftermarket coils that just aren't all that flashy.)

GM and Chrysler submit restructuring plans

2009-02-17T20:44:00.002-05:00

I've seen a couple articles about the restructuring plans that GM and Chrysler submitted to the government, but leave it to Fox News to post links to where you can find the actual plans online.

Chrysler LLC Restructuring Plan

General Motors Corporation Restructuring Plan

Naturally, both of them read like corporate propaganda pieces. For example, "GM’s Plan emphasizes the Company’s continued focus on great products" makes me immediately wonder, "Wasn't this the same company that rolled out the Aztec, and only killed off the long outdated Cavalier a few years ago?" On the other hand, I suppose you can't actually say, "We are now making a commitment to stop building outdated clunkers!" in a document like this.

Still, there are a couple things in there that do look like good choices rather than just a puff piece. For example, GM seems to have gotten that they don't need eight divisions and giving each of them copies of cars from the other division. Chrysler, I'm not so sure about, unfortunately. (You may notice that a lot of people who like vintage Chrysler products aren't exactly loyal to the modern Chrysler Corporation...) I'll have to wait until later to post more detailed reaction.

The blower fabrication wizard from Finland

2009-02-03T20:16:00.001-05:00

Found some interesting pictures on a thread on For A Bodies Only. The guy who kicked off the thread was talking about how hard it can be to get supercharger intakes for Chrysler W-2 cylinder heads. Well, it seems that in Finland, it's not too easy to get off the shelf supercharged intakes for any small block Chrysler, especially not if you are going with something other than the traditional 6-71 supercharger. A Finn who goes by the rather apt screen name of "Dartblower" stepped up and filled the thread with lots of photos of how he converts all kinds of intake manifolds to accept superchargers. Many of them were reworked for fuel injection or nitrous at the same time. Very impressive. This is what hot rodding is all about: Not accepting the limits of what you've got.

Wheel Skins: How did they do that?

2009-01-28T18:39:00.002-05:00

The steering wheel on the Civic is not in the best of shape. I had put a cheap parts store steering wheel cover on it, but that's falling apart now. So I decided that rather than buying a new wheel, I'd get a good quality cover. I'd heard good things about the leather covers from Wheel Skins (actually, one of their resellers, who had it drop shipped). So I ordered one of their covers last Saturday. It arrived today.

What really shocked me? This was a custom cover! Or at least it would seem to be, as it's a two tone cover, and you can pick out the separate colors, the size, which of the sections have perforations and which ones don't, etc. It seems like there are too many combinations for a company to keep these in stock. Or are they? Wheel Skins shipped this out on Monday, the next business day after I ordered. I'm wondering how they pulled that off. I can think of a few possibilities.

I was lucky and they had that exact size, color combination, and perforations on the shelf, ready to ship.
Wheel Skins keeps almost every combination that you could order in stock and ready to go.
The steering wheel covers are cut to length and stitched together as soon as they get the order, and they're just very fast about it. Gives "just in time manufacturing" a whole new meaning.

I'm not sure how they did this, but I'm impressed.

Using cookware on project cars

2009-01-27T14:49:00.000-05:00

Here's a tip if you need some cheap circular covers, heat shields, or similar items for your project car: Go to Wal-Mart, Goodwill, or other places that have really cheap cookware, and get your imagination going! Here's a couple good examples. First, we have MAZMAN of SupraForums.com showing how to make a turbo heat shield out of a cheap cooking pot. Next, check out the crew at New Hemi Racing as they fill their speaker holes and cover their steering column with $6.50 of goodies from Goodwill. Both projects turned out to look a lot better than they sound - you'll have to see the results for yourself.

The first rule of Mopar slant six turbo projects

2008-12-26T11:39:00.002-05:00

There's a fair number of people on Mopar forums looking to build a turbo slant six who aren't quite sure where to start. I've seen a lot of posts where someone has a link to a random turbo for sale, asking, "Will this be a good turbo for my slant six?" Correctly sizing a turbo can take a bit of sifting through turbo maps and seeing which one you should start with. (If you're interested, the maps and calculator at Squirrel Performance are a big help.) But if you have no clue where to start, and somehow stumbled across this blog, here is my first rule for picking a turbo for a slant six project.

Don't go with a factory turbo off a small four cylinder and expect it to work well on a 225 cubic inch slant six.

Now, this is a rule of thumb, and like most of them, there are exceptions. If you've found a turbo map that shows that the turbo off some particularly high winding four is a great fit, then go for it Same goes if you have carefully thought through an application that needs the boost way down in the RPM range. But if you don't have such maps and just plain aren't sure, look elsewhere. What's wrong with a too small turbo? Well, having built my first incarnation of the Dart's turbo with the Mitsubishi TE04 off a Chrysler 2.5, here is a list of things I've learned from firsthand experience.

I'll start by showing an approximate turbo map of what you'd get if you were running this little turbo on a mildly built slant six that's running around six pounds of boost.

This is taken from the Squirrel Performance calculator mentioned earlier, and it shows the first problem. The goal with matching a turbo map can be approximately described as "keep that red line as close to that peak efficiency island in the middle as you can." And this one doesn't sail anywhere near the island. It's in the 60% and under efficiency range. At high RPM, it's off the chart entirely, quite possibly below 40% if you could actually hit 5,000 RPM under load. Which my engine wasn't able to do.

The reason my engine wasn't able to rev to 5,000 RPM is likely due to the next problem: The exhaust side isn't designed to cope with these flow numbers any more than the compressor wheel is. It becomes a major restriction at high RPM, resulting in an engine that can get a massive hit of torque at low RPM but runs out of breath way too soon.

That massive hit of torque may be what you're looking for - but probably not in the way it played out on my buildup. The turbine housing wasn't the only thing that didn't flow enough; the wastegate was so small it was barely able to control boost. With the wastegate plumbed straight to the compressor outlet, the boost could build up to 10 psi at 1,500 RPM. And that is below the torque converter's stall speed. That's what happens when you pick a turbo that's too small: The power comes on at an RPM too low to be useful, and it starts taking away power where you need it.

I wouldn't leave you with a bunch of don'ts, however. I'm going to wrap this up with where I would be looking if I wanted a secondhand turbo. Well, the first possibility is that I'll bet two of those little TE04H's would work nicely. But if you're going with a single turbo, you will want to either get one off a gaslone engine that's close to your own motor's size, or a larger diesel.

Unfortunately there aren't that many gasoline engines close to the slant six's size that used a single turbo. But there are a few - the Buick 3.8 V6, the third generation Supra Turbo, Nissan's 300ZX from the '80s come to mind. I haven't run the turbo maps on all of these to tell you which one would work best for you, but these are all ones I'd consider worthy of further research. And when it comes to diesels, there's a lot of large displacement diesels running Holset HX35s or HX40s you could get a turbo off.

I would mention the second rule of turbo slant sixes, but any long term readers of this blog could guess it. Namely, it's that you should plan to spend a lot of time on this project...

Civic disobedience

2008-11-18T20:26:00.003-05:00

I'm tempted to get another Spitfire so I'd have a reliable daily driver.

Just kidding, but the Civic has been really getting on my nerves lately. Today I had one of the mounting ears crack off the starter. OK, so I had been horsing around with some things that might have made the engine kick back a little when I cranked it once, but it was quite a shock to turn the key and hear the starter spinning freely. Sounded sort of like a vacuum cleaner. Luckily Honda starters are somewhat like (stock) slant six starters in that you can just unbolt it without even lifting the car up and drop a new one in.

But last week I managed to discover that the Civic had been the victim of a crazy previous owner (not the guy I bought it from, but whoever had it before him, apparently) who had managed to inflict a hack job brake repair that's up there with the lamp cord wiring in the Spitfire I used to have. He gets a special prize for managing to make a creative hack job look like the car left the factory that way - right up until you start checking measurements.

About a week ago, the car started making a clunking / clicking noise from the front end. I was kind of sick of wrenching on it (in addition to the radiator and head gasket, I'd also had to deal with a burst heater hose and some other minor nuisances too trivial to post here). So I dropped it off at the Goodyear - Gemini Auto Service in Conyers, Georgia. Ray and the other mechanics deserve a big commendation for putting up with what the problem turned out to be and getting the car back on the road as quickly as they did.

When you hear that it was a clicking from the front end, you're probably thinking, "CV joint," right? Me too. Well, they found the CV joints were perfectly fine. The clicking sound was coming from the brakes, and they found a couple other things so they wanted to do a complete brake job. I said fine.

A couple hours later, Ray called me back and said that they had a problem: The parts they'd ordered only fit on one side of the car. It turns out that the Civic had been in an accident, and somebody rebuilt the suspension with parts they'd found in a junkyard. My Civic is an EX, and the one in the junkyard was a DX. Not too many people pay attention to those letters, so it would be reasonable to think that the parts fit, right? Wrong. My Civic had brakes on one side that were almost a whole inch larger than the brakes on the other side. None of the parts, not even the spindle, matched up between a DX and an EX. How it was able to drive without pulling to one side, I don't know. (And the same goes for why Honda didn't just make the larger brakes standard instead of having to design two separate parts.)

At least it's back to normal now.

Make an HHO system actually work, win one million dollars!

2008-10-30T19:49:00.000-05:00

Now here's an interesting site. A New Zealand engineer has thrown down a challenge to anyone who claims that he can get more miles per gallon from using an onboard hydrogen / HHO generator. If you can make such a thing actually work, he'll pay you one million dollars for showing your HHO generator can improve gas mileage. As they say, "Terms and conditions apply." Anyone entering the challenge would need to pay a testing fee to cover expenses, the device has to boost gas mileage by 25%, and it can't cause damage to the car. Like me, he's pretty sure nobody is going to claim that prize. The site is worth a read to anyone interested in hydrogen - or scams.

A Civic update

2008-10-27T19:40:00.002-05:00

The Civic is back on the road. It turned out the stock radiator tanks had started leaking. I am not 100% sure if I had misdiagnosed the head gasket or if the head gasket blew and caused a marginal radiator to start leaking. The stock radiator in a Honda Civic is an aluminum center section bonded to plastic end tanks. I hate this design. There's no way to repair one of these when it leaks, and it's way too easy for them to spring a leak. Now I don't like spending excessive amounts of money, but I also don't like replacing a part with a design defect with one that has the same flaw. I understand there is one fairly inexpensive parts store radiator that is all aluminum, but I decided to go all out, drive down to Summit Racing, and pick up a new Fluidyne aluminum radiator for the Civic.

You may be wondering how it fits. The answer is, "Pretty well." All the mounting tabs line up and it does drop in. There are a couple of slightly weird "gotchas" that can make for extra trips to the parts store, though. For one thing, the hose barbs are a slightly larger outer diameter. If you try to put old hoses over them, they won't fit. New hoses are a stretch but you can put them in. And don't reuse the stock corbin clamps - you'll need to get a set of conventional hose clamps to clear the barbs on the hoses. You also won't be able to reuse the stock radiator cap - not really a gotcha as Fluidyne includes one, but if you even need to buy a new cap, you can't go to the parts store and ask for a stock replacement. All in all it's a pretty good fit.

This radiator wasn't cheap, and it's definitely overdoing things for a stock Civic. If I ever decide to throw a supercharger or turbo kit on it, though, at least I'll have enough cooling power to handle it. I don't really know if I ever will do such a thing, but it's nice to be prepared.

Blew a head gasket on the Civic... (and how to set a '95 Civic motor to top dead center)

2008-10-11T09:13:00.003-05:00

So today I'll be seeing if I can change that out. One thing I've learned while working on this car is that if the manual calls for doing something that looks impossible, there's often a little secret to how you can accomplish it. And the task is easy if you know the secret, impossible otherwise. For example, the directions for removing the head call for setting the #1 piston to TDC. Now, it looks like it's almost impossible to turn the crankshaft with the engine in the car - the pulley is practically up against the inner fender, no good way to grab it or get a wrench on it when you look the engine compartment.

Well, here's the secret. Take a 17 mm socket and put it on an extension bar. Now, look at the plastic lining the driver's side front fenderwell. There will be a cutout in the plastic that looks like a six pointed star. Stick the socket in through this and you can get it on the crank bolt to rotate the crank.

The Fall of Great Eddy

2008-09-13T10:51:00.005-05:00

About ten years ago, GReddy was an icon of the import performance world. I saw their logo everywhere - even people who didn't have GReddy parts on their car would put GReddy stickers on, hoping to impress people who didn't look under the hood. But I haven't seen their logo that much recently. Now I've found out that GReddy / Trust filed bankruptcy.

Some people have blamed cheap Chinese knock-offs for GReddy's decline. The knock-offs did steal the market for things like wastegates and blow-off valves, and some of Greddy's basic cast parts. And the market for performance parts has not been at its best in the past year with the economy going the way it is and the whole riceboy thing falling out of fashion. But I think there was more to GReddy's problems than that - GReddy's looked like a sitting target for quite a while, and it wasn't just the cheap knock-off sellers that took aim at them.

I've been active in the Miata parts market for a while, as the company I work for sells a plug and play ECU for Miatas. GReddy builds a turbo kit for Miatas, and I had the chance to see this kit more or less get shoved to the sidelines in the US market. This looks like it was something of a backwater for GReddy and they may have handled other particular projects better, but this may have a rather exaggerated demonstration of where GReddy went wrong.

GReddy jumped into the Miata turbo market early, with a basic, affordable kit for the '89-'93 Miatas with the 1.6. It was smog legal, but it was a pretty basic kit. No intercooler, and the only engine management was a rising rate fuel pressure regulator. Greddy also offered a piggyback engine controller called the eManage, in a couple different versions. The eManage Ultimate was a pretty advanced piggyback, able to control fuel and timing.

The trouble is, they stopped there. They didn't offer kits for the later 1.8, come out with a higher powered kit with an intercooler, or anything. When plug-in standalone engine management came out, GReddy ignored the Link, Hydra, and MSPNP systems and stayed with the eManage. Meanwhile, American companies like Flyin' Miata and BEGi started building kits that offered newer turbos, bolt on intercoolers, and many other advances over the GReddy kit, built these kits to fit the later Miatas, and backed them with better technical support too.

GReddy didn't take any steps to defend their position and stayed with offering the cheapest kit out there from a reputable manufacturer. They could have tried to take on the American tuners by expanding their range to fit the 1.8s, adding a kit at a higher price point that could compete on maximum horsepower, or otherwise try to hold onto the market. They just ignored Keith and Corky, possibly figuring that the higher price tag on the American kits meant that buyers didn't comparison shop between the two. This ensured they still had a niche in the Miata turbo market - until BEGi rolled out a stripped down kit within striking distance of GReddy's, and the option to later order more BEGi parts to upgrade it to the features on their more advanced kits. On the other hand, if you wanted to upgrade your GReddy kit, you bought the upgrade parts from BEGi or Flyin' Miata - or sometimes from the Chinese knock off sellers.

I can't say for certain if GReddy fought a better fight on other battlefields, but the Chinese knock-off industry and a sour economy aren't the only things to blame for this bankruptcy.

(It's worth noting that Greddy isn't actually gone at this point. Just in serious business trouble.)

Cecil Adams vs Brown's Gas

2008-09-12T19:55:00.003-05:00

I've blogged about some of the dubious claims made by promoters of "Brown's Gas" or "HHO" before. Now it seems that master debunker Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope has gotten into the act, reaching a lot more people than I ever could. Check out the The Straight Dope about hydrogen generators here.

Truth in cheeseBay ads

2008-09-06T14:18:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite things to blog about (when I haven't found enough time to wrench on the Dart) is the myriad of questionable performance parts for sale on eBay. One common rip-off is the "electric supercharger," which is actually a marine bilge vent blower, in most cases. Usually the seller makes claims for these that are hard to back up. Not this guy. He posts a dyno graph of his product, and take a close look - the engine makes more power without the electric supercharger than with it!

It's worth checking out the auction for a couple other points. The dyno operator also made no effort to hide his contempt for the device, and the text is shot through with typos and bad punctuation.

The eBay gas bandits are at it again

2008-09-01T13:41:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I like to troll through eBay to see what the latest swindles are aimed at people who hate high gas prices. A recent search for "gas saver" turned up 8,200 hits. Perhaps one or two of them may actually save gas. Most won't, but there are a few that were good for quite a few laughs. I've noticed we're seeing a lot more "HHO" generators, which I've covered quite extensively in the past couple months.

One that I'd hoped would be a good laugh parade was this Petro-Mag attempt to influence gasoline with a magnet. I was pretty sure I'd seen an EPA paper where they tested the Petro-Mag and found it did nothing. Close, it's the Petro-Mizer instead. Not that many of the guys selling these are particularly creative.

From the severely delusional category, this auction promises "Up to 30+ Better Fuel Efficiency Guaranteed! 60+ Ft. Lbs. of Torque! Up to 100+ Horsepower!" (All capitalization is the original ad's.) And they're promising all these gains on... a Toyota Paseo. Adding 30 mpg to anything is quite a challenge, and adding either that amount of torque or horsepower to a Paseo calls for a well engineered turbo kit, not a 5 cent resistor in a 25 dollar package.

The Tornado Money Waster, er, Tornado Fuel Saver is bad enough, but look at this knock-off. They're too cheap to even bend it to shape; they leave it up to the buyer. Presumably that's so they can blame the installer when it self-destructs and the engine sucks the pieces. It doesn't look very sturdy. Another amusing point: They claim it affects the transmission's shifting. Maybe that's because it steals so much horsepower you have to give the engine more throttle.

Just a minor update

2008-08-30T13:37:00.003-05:00

I know, I should be updating this blog more, but my book has been getting more of the writing time. Here are some things I've recently been up to:

Fabricating an intercooler mount for the Dart. However, it's been getting less time and money because my other two cars have been grabbing that recently.

Had the Civic's AC refuse to cooperate on a long driving vacation. It's now been fixed - I hope - but it's still not super-cold. Then again, a lot of the early R134 designs were barely adequate.

Replaced the Ram 50's shocks and idler arm. The idler arm was almost shot, which explained the scary steering.

Autocross pictures of the Civic

2008-08-16T07:25:00.002-05:00

Perry Bennet snapped a few pictures of my Civic at an autocross last Saturday, including this action shot. You can see more pictures in this gallery.

Automotive Badvertising

2008-08-11T20:00:00.004-05:00

A while ago, I poked fun at Chevy for their rather creepy Super Bowl ad that appeared to be saying, "Hey, ladies, buy an HHR and you'll get mobbed by pervy-looking guys at every stoplight!" Well, for the Olympics, they've been running an even worse ad. The ad opens with a bunch of thought bubbles coming from gridlocked traffic, people thinking about how much they'd like to get more miles per gallon. Then it cuts to a Chevrolet showroom, and we find it's an add for...

The Avalanche, Tahoe, and Suburban! And they state the deals don't apply to the Tahoe Hybrid, either. The only way I could see an ad tying together those two halves would be if they said, "Well, if you're not one of these guys stuck in traffic, we have an incredible deal since nobody's buying these!" The media has been picking on GM for concentrating on trucks and failing to deliver enough small cars as it is.

This has got to be the second most clueless thing I've seen on TV during the Olympics. Luckily for GM, they'll have a hard time topping the number one contender, with the Chinese government at once proclaiming, "We're proud to be a totalitarian regime!" and "We have no idea how silly it looks to walk like this!" I'm speaking, of course, of their decision to start things off with a public display of goose stepping soldiers.

Still no Dart updates, but you may find this interesting...

2008-07-12T17:33:00.002-05:00

Laysons has been known in the Mopar community for hard to find parts at hard to swallow prices. Well, it seems the police busted them at Chryslers at Carlisle for as of yet unknown charges. I doubt many Mopar fans will cry over having been denied the chance to buy overpriced weatherstripping.

Speaking of weatherstripping, the driver's side window seal on the Civic came apart today, binding up the window. I've cut part of the offending seal away and will try to get a new one from the Honda dealer next week. I'm not aware of any Honda restoration shops out there just yet.

Ordered a factory service manual for the Civic

2008-07-12T08:15:00.003-05:00

It's kind of become standard procedure for me whenever I buy a new vehicle: I just went and bought a factory service manual for my Civic. This time I ordered it online from the publisher, Helm Inc. Right now the only motor vehicle I own that I don't have a factory service manual on is the Dodge Ram, and a manual for one would cost more than what I paid for the truck anyway...

Not again!

2008-07-05T20:23:00.002-05:00

I can't believe this: On July 4th, the Civic had a second valve stem failure, exactly a week after the last episode. This one very nearly snapped in half. And this time, my wife was along with me, so we had to call a friend to give us a ride home.

I'm planning to have the remaining two valve stems replaced, but I've also ordered a complete new wheel and tire set from Edge Racing. An overreaction? Well, sort of, but not quite. It currently has a set of "Warrior" tires on it. Finding information about these tires is pretty difficult, as even places that sell Warrior tires don't say much about who makes them. But I did turn up this article which identifies the manufacturer as Shanghai Michelin Warrior Tire Co., and they are definitely marked as "Made in China." They have full tread, but they have about as much grip as you'd get by wrapping your rims in strips of bacon. Slamming on the (non-ABS) brakes can be scary as the Worrier, er, Warrior tires let go way too easily. So I'm replacing the rubber. And the alloy wheels? Ok, that's just a luxury, but I felt like upgrading.

A rather crazy flat tire story

2008-06-28T10:30:00.002-05:00

It turns out the Civic had one surprise in it. I suspect it's the fault of the dealership that sold the car to the previous owner - the previous owner and I had speculated that the Civic may have been water damaged as it had new carpeting and a lot of interior shampooing done to it. But it's in good mechanical shape so I'm not worried about the water damage and it looks to have been professionally repaired for the most part. Except this.

I had a flat tire on the way home from work yesterday. That would normally have been pretty routine, but when I pulled over I found out that the Civic's jack was missing. The tire iron was there although badly rusted like it had been sitting underwater. So I called my wife and asked if she could bring the floor jack. A helpful couple pulled over in a Bronco to help, but they had a truck jack that couldn't go under the Honda.

Once my wife arrived, I got the flat tire off, only to find out that the spare tire was on a five lug wheel and the Honda's wheels are four lug. Looks like a dealer had the spare tire either go missing or get badly rusted, and grabbed a random spare tire to cover things up.

I know some of my readers aren't going to like this...

2008-06-26T19:57:00.003-05:00

But when I picked out a replacement for the Corvette, I ended up chosing a '95 Honda Civic. I got a low mileage one at a price I couldn't pass up. This car's the right tool for the job, when the job is getting me to work 40 miles and back.

Will this Civic end up modified? You've probably noticed my daily drivers usually don't have mods on them, but I may have to do something to compensate for the shock of going from a Corvette to a Civic. The first area I hit may be, believe it or not, the suspension. Sure, it's lighter than a Corvette and in some ways seems to react more quickly. But it also feels mushy and has a huge amount of body roll compared to the Corvette. Perhaps some good shocks and sway bars will clean that up.

Sometime down the line, I may need to do something about the drawback it has that Civics are so noted for, not making any torque. But on a Civic, torque's a lot more expensive than handling...

A send-off for the Corvette

2008-06-24T17:43:00.002-05:00

I sold the Corvette today. As it turns out, posting a Corvette on Craigslist at a low price can get some unusual offers - I had people wanting to trade a couple unusual things for it, from a Geo Storm (and cash) to a lifted Range Rover to an unspecified motorcycle. But today I had two Swedes drive down from South Carolina to meet me at work and pick the Corvette up there. They bought it and will be sending it on to Sweden.

To the buyers who bought it, happy trails and low taxes to you.

The plug-in hydrogen hybrid, part 4

2008-06-21T08:17:00.002-05:00

I was pretty sure locating a hydrogen generator on the car would be a bad idea, even if you powered it with battery packs instead of trying to drive it from the car's electrical system (after all, an alternator that demands 50 hp is going to put a big dent in your gas mileage). But I wanted to find out just how bad an idea it was, whether it was something that you could build but would be inadvisable, or some sort of monstrosity that wouldn't be able to move under its own power. When I calculated what size battery pack the hydrogen generator would need, it came out as something that looks like it would be technically possible but definitely not practical. Because an internal combustion engine isn't as efficient as an electric motor, this thing would have worse battery issues than an electric car.

The problem is that you're trying to plug it in before the hydrogen generator instead of after. Put the hydrogen generator in your basement and you might have something. So here's a few calculations to find out what it is you might have.

Gasoline has an energy density of 34.8 MJ/liter, according to Wikipedia. Some math turns that into 132 MJ/gallon, to 36.6 kilowatt-hours per gallon. So if you were making the hydrogen at home from household current, your cost for the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline would work out to this:

Price of a "gas gallon equivalent" = (Cost per kilowatt-hour) * (36.6 kilowatt-hours per gallon)/(Generator Efficiency)

Don't forget to factor in the energy needed to compress the hydrogen into the generator efficiency. You'd want to generate the hydrogen and oxygen separately, since you'll need to compress it in order to carry enough hydrogen to make a difference. So if you're paying 12 cents per kilowatt-hour and your generator's total efficiency is 50% including the power needed to run the compressor, you'd be paying the equivalent of $8.78 for a gallon. By the way, you'd also be stuck with similar costs on the plug-in hydrogen hybrid, although your generator efficiency would be up because you wouldn't need to compress the hydrogen nearly as much.

Still not good, but bring the price of gas up and the efficiency up and you might have something...

The plug-in hydrogen hybrid, part 3

2008-06-20T19:25:00.002-05:00

When I last blogged about the idea of a "plug in hydrogen hybrid" that had an onboard hydrogen generator powered by plug in batteries, things looked a bit crazy. The SUV needed 36.7 kilowatts to drive its hydrogen generator, and that assumes that it's a 100% efficient generator. I'd translated that to 2500 amps if the generator ran at 12 volts. In practice, it probably wouldn't - you'd use a higher input voltage and less current. But this figure helps because batteries are rated in amp-hours. Although these are over a 20 hour discharge period, we'll assume it can deliver the same number of amp-hours in a single hour. We need a total of 2500 amp-hours of battery.

Since these batteries are going to be drawn down very low and recharged, a good starting point might be to see what we'd need if we were buying Optima deep cycle batteries. From that chart, we see the D31A model puts out 75 amp hours. So we'd need 34 such batteries to run our generator for an hour. And 34 of these would cost $7818.30, and weigh 2033.2 pounds. Quite a lot of batteries to lug around.

Well, maybe our initial assumption, an SUV that got 20 miles to the gallon at a steady 60 mph, was a bit unrealistic. What if you have an economy car that got 50 mpg at the same speed? That's easy, multiply the number of amp hours you need by 0.4 and repeat the math. You come up with 1000 amp hours, 14 batteries, 837.2 pounds, and a tab of $3219.30.

And those assume that you're trying to get 50% better mileage with a 100% efficient generator, for just one hour. Realistically, you're not going to get a 100% efficient system. There's a good chance you may need a battery pack 50% to twice as heavy. Carrying around a a ton of batteries (literally) is going to drag that mileage back down, to say nothing for what it does to your acceleration.

At this point, it looks like the idea of a plug-in hydrogen hybrid can't be saved. Or can it? Here's a hint: This example is plugged in the wrong way.

That's one fast Cavalier! (Well, not really.)

2008-06-15T13:28:00.003-05:00

I took a test drive in a 2005 Chevy Cavalier this weekend, wondering if it would make a decent commuter car. Well, I can say the one I test drove definitely wouldn't without some work. I cranked it up and things were OK, right up until I looked at the speedometer and it said I was going 65 mph. It didn't feel that way, but I lifted off the gas a little... and the speedometer didn't slow down at all. So I pulled over and brought it to a dead stop, and the speedometer read 55. Next time I stopped it was at 75. By the time I got back to the dealer, the speedometer had gone past the 110 mark (the highest reading on the dial) and nearly made it 360 degrees around back to zero. I decided to pass this car up, even though this might have made the perfect excuse if I got pulled over for speeding.

Just wanted to share this comic strip...

2008-06-08T20:13:00.004-05:00

Found this in the paper yesterday - Mallard Fillmore takes a pot shot at people who expect Washington to solve gas prices, and the politicians who encourage them. Given that Washington let the Pentagon pay $600 for a toilet seat, it's hard to expect politicians to succeed with dealing with $4 a gallon gas. Expecting government to fix the problem is an even worse to try saving at the pump than putting magnets on your fuel line.

View it at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Sad decision - putting the Corvette up for sale

2008-06-08T19:42:00.003-05:00

Today I finished a round of electrical repairs on the Corvette. It started when the alternator and a fusable link failed while AutoFab was putting on a new smog pump (as I didn't want to spend my own time dealing with the car). Well, the cooling fan failed on the way home. So I tore into the wiring myself. Ended up replacing the fan motor, another fusable link, the positive battery terminal, and the battery itself. After confirming every one of the parts I replaced had, in fact, gone bad. Seems like it had some sort of mini electrical meltdown. But it's running now. Because I want the next owner to start with something they can confirm is, for the most part, in sound and operational condition.

I've decided to put the Corvette up for sale. I know it's the sort of car where 10 years from now, maybe 20, I'll find myself wishing I still owned it. But this car should be someone's project and weekend driver, not the car I depend on to get me to work. It's still got a few nagging electrical gremlins, including an A/C blower that only works when it feels like it and wipers that don't always turn off when they should. It gets 19 miles to the gallon in the city. And, I've got to face it... I'm not a very good racing driver, and a Z51 is not a very forgiving car to take around an autocross. It's the wrong car for me right now, and I know that I need to sell it.

But even with its foibles, I can't say I regret having bought the Corvette. It's a chapter in my life story written in iron and fiberglass:

I'll be able to tell people for years about how I owned a Corvette once.

I'll be able to tell them about the time it got me safely through a blizzard on the way home when SUVs were taking shelter in the nearest parking lot.

I'll be able to tell about the time I took it drag racing.

I'll be able to tell about how much fun it can be to cruise with the targa top off.

I'll be able to tell about the time I got it sideways repeatedly in a Six Flags parking lot. (In an officially sanctioned race, that is.)

I'll be able to tell about the funny looks I got using the Corvette to haul garbage to the dump because it could carry a trash can better than my wife's sedan.

And I'll be able to tell how it wasn't too much of a financial hardship to sell it, because I can honestly tell about how I was able to buy a Corvette with an envelope of cash.

Whew. Quite a memory. Now, anybody wanting to buy a C4 Corvette? I'm only asking $4,000 and I'm flexible on the price. It hasn't been abused all that much.

Tales From the Used Car Lot

2008-05-29T20:22:00.002-05:00

Get a bunch of car guys together talking about automotive horror stories, and the worst monster you'll find in these tales is the Evil Previous Owner. The one who inflicted horrible forms of torture on unsuspecting cars by repairing the wiring with lamp cord and wire nuts, ignored that the temperature gauge always stayed pegged, or hacked up an irreplaceable dash panel to install a cheap Pyramid tape deck. Well, today I was witness to one of the worst Evil Previous Owner tales I've come across in a long time.

I was making some adjustments to my wife's mountain bike when an old gray Lincoln Mk VII pulled up at the stop sign in front of my house. Two teenagers got out and started looking under the hood. I walked over to see if I could help out. Turns out the brakes had frozen up. A.J., the owner, said the previous owner told him he'd put new brakes on it.

So after a few false starts (it seems it made a funny noise under the hood about the same time, but that probably wasn't related), I went and got a jack and lifted the rear off the ground. Sure enough, the left rear wheel wouldn't turn. So A.J. grabbed a tire iron and we took off the back tire.

This is where things got weird. It clearly had the original brake caliper. And there was something funny about the wear pattern on the rotor. It was all shiny on the inside, but the outer edge was rusty. Not just surface rust - it looked like it had spent a year at the bottom of the ocean.

Since they needed to get this car out of the street and lived less than a quarter mile away, I figured it would be safe to just pop the old caliper off and let it hang. Not exactly safe but it was better than a car that couldn't move at all. So I got to work unbolting it. Had to bang on a crescent wrench with a dead blow hammer to get one of the bolts off, like it had been on there for years.

Eventually the caliper came off. I couldn't believe what I saw: One of the brake pads was gone.

I don't mean the friction material had worn off and it wore down to the backing plate. I mean the pad was gone.

The inner brake pad simply wasn't there. The caliper piston was wearing directly against the rotor instead of pushing a pad against it. A.J. said he'd driven the car for about a month and it hadn't given him too much trouble, although the ABS light was on.

I've bought a few cars with lousy jury rigged repairs, and heard tales of countless others, but that's the first time I've seen an Evil Previous Owner try a brake job with only half the number of brake pads needed.

The plug-in hydrogen hybrid, part 2

2008-05-23T21:22:00.002-05:00

I've been trying to do a few calculations to size a hydrogen generator for a car, mostly because it appears that nobody ever tries figuring out what size system they'd actually need. In my previous post, I tried sizing a hydrogen generator for a thirsty SUV. The calculation was that it needed to break down 2.2 gallons of water into hydrogen per hour, in order to replace a gallon of gas burned in an hour. If you've looked at some of the pages offering blueprints for a hydrogen generator, you may already suspect that this is going to end up being several hundred times larger than what you've seen advertised on the Internet - most of them claim you'd only fill a two liter tank every couple of months.

Now I'm going to consider the electrical requirements of this thing. You're making 0.93 kg of hydrogen in an hour. Remember when I noted hydrogen's energy density is 142 megajoules per kilogram? You'll need to feed this thing 132 megajoules of energy in an hour if it were 100% efficient. Since power is energy per unit time, this works out to needing 36.7 kilowatts to drive the generator. Converting that to horsepower, by the way, indicates it would take 49 horsepower to drive this hydrogen generator. See why this thing isn't driven off the alternator? You'd be wasting a lot of the engine's power, need a much larger alternator, and probably have to replace your serpentine belt with a chain drive to boot. If this thing were running off 12 volt batteries, you'd need to supply it with 2500 amps. Far more current than a starter draws.

It's obvious this design is starting to get into trouble. In further posts, I'll size up a battery pack for this thing (it's going to be huge) and see if there are, in fact, ways this hydrogen hybrid idea might be salvagable.

The plug-in hydrogen hybrid, Part 1

2008-05-21T19:04:00.003-05:00

This is a bit of a continuation of a discussion I had with a customer at work today. I've previously blogged about the trouble with powering a hydrogen generator from your alternator or the usual battery in a car. Short version is you're taking energy from the engine to make your fuel, and with inefficiencies along the way, you'd be very lucky to get 20% of that energy back.

But what if you powered it with a battery you'd charged from your home and recharged every night? Let's run a few calculations and spec out a system for a car. First, let's define what we want this system to accomplish. Suppose we are starting with a big SUV that gets 20 miles to the gallon when driven at a steady 60 miles per hour. And let's suppose we want it to get 50% better mileage, to 30 miles to the gallon of gas. Running a little bit of math shows that it would originally be burning 3 gallons per hour, and the improved version would be burning 2 gallons per hour. So this makes the math a bit easier to follow, at least up until this part. And let's add that this car will see 1 hour of use on a single battery charge.

The first question is, "How much hydrogen do we need?" Well, we'll need to supply the equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline in hydrogen, per hour. Now the math gets hard: We need to figure out how much hydrogen that is. And we'll also figure out the device's water consumption. We'll start with a couple key numbers pulled from around the Web.

Energy density of hydrogen: 142 MJ/kg (most optimistic value from this source)
Energy density of gasoline: 46.9 MJ/kg (from Wikipedia)
Ratio of hydrogen to gasoline energy by weight: Hydrogen has 3.03 time the energy of gas.
Fraction of water that is hydrogen, by weight: 1/9
Ratio of gasoline's density to that of water: 0.739 (source)

Using these ratios, we find that you'd have to break down 2.2 gallons of water to get enough hydrogen to replace one gallon of gas. The calculations for this are pretty long, so I'm taking a break now. Next up, we'll see how much energy is needed to do this, how much power this thing is going to consumer, and what you'd spend on batteries. And why you shouldn't call it an HHO generator...

Sequels

2008-05-19T18:23:00.002-05:00

I've put my blog back in the Absolute Write Blog Chain, where I follow posts from fellow bloggers, each link picking up something of the topic of the previous blog post. I'm following Elrena Evans's post about Ten Things to Do While You Wait for Your Book to Come Out. She concluded it with the note that what a writer really should be doing is writing the next book.

Well, I haven't reached the "waiting for my book to come out" stage. I have a book under contract, but my co-author Jerry Hoffman and I still need to complete the book. But hey, it's not too late to think about what I might do for a sequel. I have a couple other books in various stages of completion on my hard drive, including a fantasy novel and a sort of introductory text about car mods for the absolute beginner. But what if I wrote the next book on one of the topics that I blog about? After all, the book I have under contract is about electronic fuel injection, and I blog about that pretty often.

I could write about how to build a turbocharged slant six powered Dodge Dart, but that's a bit of a narrow subject, don't you think? And there's plenty of good books on turbos. I suppose I could see if Doug Dutra would be interested in a colaborative project for a book on slant sixes, but that still probably wouldn't have the appeal of a book on Chevy V8s.

One of my favorite things to write about has been gas mileage scams. But a book on gas mileage scams has its own problems. Who would buy it? Somebody looking to avoid getting scammed? Usually, the Internet is a pretty good tool for checking if an alleged gas saver is a scam, as you can often find people criticizing questionable gadgets. (Unless, of course, the scammers just haven't fleeced enough people for debunkers to notice them.) Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to write very much about real ways to improve your gas mileage that a normal do-it-yourselfer could do at home to a modern car, as it's hard to out-engineer the factory designers without spending more than you could save on gas. The number of bad gas mileage devices out there vastly outnumbers the ones that work, and curiously, the things out there that could save a tiny amount of gas usually aren't marketed as such. (For example, you don't usually see carbon fiber body panels advertised as fuel economy aids.) For some reason, it's harder to sell debunking than flim-flam.

I guess some topics are better suited to blogs and the Internet, when you get down to it. Odd niche material can reach a wider audience. I can expose scams without having to worry about a magazine's ad dollars or bookstore sales. But really big topics still belong in books.

Next up is L. M. Ashton.

Also, check out the other blogs in the chain:

Auria Cortes

Life in Scribbletown

Polyamory From the Inside Out

For the First Time

Family On Bikes

Writes in the City

Elf Killing and Other Hobbies

Rotating Bear

Fantastical Imagination

Asian Business

Spittin' (Out Words) Like a Llama

As Yet Untitled

Peregrinas

Delirious

Interesting gas mileage scam link

2008-05-18T16:46:00.003-05:00

Here's one I found surfing through a site called How to Spot a Psychopath. Modern Mechanix reprinted a Popular Mechanics article called Beware the Gasoline Dope Racket from 1936 about many dubious gasoline additives, including naphthalene, which some of the readers of my blog may recognize as STP Fuel System Cleaner. Some things just never change.

Happy Mother's Day! Here's another dubious gas mileage gadget!

2008-05-10T19:09:00.003-05:00

Ok, that seems like a total non sequitur, doesn't it? Well, my mother emailed me a link to Run Your Car With Water as another dubious gas mileage gadget. So I'm blogging about this one in honor of her. Mom, this one's for you.

The premise on this site is one I've seen before. So has Tony, the engineer behind Tony's Guide to Fuel Saving. The device takes electricity from the car's electrical system and uses it to generate a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (which they, and a lot of promoters, call "Brown's gas," after Yull Brown, a somewhat shady huckster), which is then fed into the engine and burned. There's an obvious problem with this: You're spending more energy to make the hydrogen than you are getting back when you burn it. If you could take waste energy, like from regenerative braking or the exhaust heat, and use that to generate hydrogen, then you might have something worthwhile. A waste energy system would probably need a good way to store the hydrogen, since the best times for generating the hydrogen are not necessarily the best times to burn it.

Their system, however, is one that rules out being able to store the hydrogen for later use. They mix the hydrogen and oxygen to make "Brown's Gas." This very interesting page on Brown's Gas gives a very good description of the trouble with storing a hydrogen and oxygen mixture:

Since Brown's Gas is an explosive mixture it would be hazardous to store any quantity of it at atmospheric pressure. To compress it for storage would be criminally stupid.
A standard cylinder used for storing hydrogen contains just over a cubic foot of gas under about 150 atmospheres pressure. At that pressure it would contain the equivalent of about 5380 liters of Brown's Gas. That is 2880 grams or 160 moles. At 242000 joules per mole a cylinder contains almost 39 million joules or 36700 btu. There are two ways of looking at this. One is that the cylinder is a poor storage device since, for all its size and weight, it contains about as much energy as two pints of gasoline. The other is that each cylinder is the equivalent of 21 pounds of TNT in a steel tube. This is not something I'd want to have around!

Another interesting tidbit about that site is the very small amount of water the device actually consumes. This claim on their website is an interesting one to examine, and not just for the excessive use of bold print and the poor capitalization:

Water can be used to fuel a car when used as a supplement to gasoline. In fact, very little water is needed! only one quart of water provides over 1800 gallons of HHO gas which can literally last for months and significantly increase your vehicle's fuel efficiently, improve emissions quality, and save you money.

The low water consumption claim would indicate that it doesn't inject very much hydrogen at all. They claim a quart of water lasts "months" in their system. A quart of water weighs 2 pounds, and 1/9th of the weight of the water is hydrogen. If a quart of water lasts two months, each month you'd get 1/9 of a pound of hydrogen into the engine. Suppose you used 30 gallons of gasoline in that same month. That's around 175 pounds of gasoline! The idea that such a tiny fraction of hydrogen in the system could improve mileage by 40% staggers the mind.

Some cool junkyard EFI parts

2008-05-01T19:03:00.001-05:00

Originally something I'd posted on the Car Junkie TV forums, but I thought this would make a good general purpose post too. Here's a couple of tips about good EFI parts to grab in a junkyard for your own project.

1. Turbo cars often have pretty large fuel injectors. My Dart has injectors from a 3rd generation Toyota Supra Turbo; they're 440 cc/min, or 42 lb/hr. Turbo Eclipses have similarly large injectors. The trouble with both is that they use weird mounting hardware and connectors; they won't drop right onto a Chevy TPI.

2. Ford 2 valve 4.6's not only come with good-sized (65 mm) throttle bodies, they put them on an elbow that makes adapting them to a carbed manifold easier. The Mustangs have little short elbows that are really good for this. Crown Vic elbows are taller and you'd probably need to cut one down and weld it to make it work for most applications. That was the case on my Dart's slant six turbo project, which uses a Crown Vic throttle body and originally used the CV elbow too.

3. Late '80s / early '90s Ford full sized trucks have an external high pressure fuel pump that's good for moderate EFI applications.

4. Chrysler distributorless coils from the late '90s are pretty hot, meeting almost exactly the same specs as Ford's EDIS coils. In fact, Ford of Australia used Mopar coils on their EDIS setups. Only the towers on Ma Mopar's coils accept plug wires with HEI boots, making them much easier to get plug wires for. LSx and '90s DSM coils are also pretty hot distributorless coil setups.

More on (ic) fuel catalysts

2008-05-01T14:48:00.002-05:00

Last month, I wrote up a post on why fuel catalysts won't help your gas mileage. Recently, some talk on the For A Bodies Only forum led me back to one of my favorite repositories of information on gadgets that supposedly increase gas mileage, the EPA's archive of test results where they've evaluated all sorts of gizmos that people claimed would increase mileage, and found few actually did. It's worth noting that most of the successful ones have found their way onto production cars as standard equipment. Well, as it turns out, the EPA has tested a couple of fuel catalysts, like the Vitalizer III, the Optimizer, the Hydro-Catalyst Pre-Combustion Catalyst System and Rolfite. None of them proved to be any more successful than Basko's claim to have made a mileage inproving paint.

New Dart progress pictures: Cold side intercooler plumbing

2008-04-25T19:44:00.003-05:00

More progress with the turbo EFI slant six. I've been making a little bit of progress in bits and pieces. Last week Jerry gave me a bit of a hand filling in some of the holes I'd drilled for the older intercooler brackets as we're rethinking the intercooler location a bit. I'll need to grind down the filler metal, but I probably would have done a lot worse. I definitely don't like leaving excess holes in the bodywork.

This week I routed and mocked up the cold side of the intercooler piping. You can see the welded elbow I mentioned earlier atop the intake manifold. The pipes and couplings are a weird mix of Spectre, CX Racing, and RacePartsSolutions plumbing components. I'd originally thought about routing the pipe under the alternator, but this route has a lot fewer twists and turns. There's a total of four 90 degree bends in this one, including the bend welded to the intercooler exit itself. Not ideal, but in most engine compartments you really have to work to get fewer bends than this. And I'd have needed two extra bends - either 45 or 90 degrees - to make the pipe go under the alternator and come out in a good spot for mounting the intercooler.

I may need to trim the alternator bracket to keep it from spearing my charge pipe. This may take an extra-short length of belt to make this work but it looks like I've got a decent amount of room to bring the alternator close to the engine while having enough room to pull the alternator back to tighten the belt. Maybe I'll secure the pipe that runs past the engine to the fenderwell too, although I'll need to see the engine running to make the final decision.

It'll be interesting to see how this charge pipe holds up under serious boost. It'll do better than what I had in there before - anything has to be better than my temporarily rigged piping made of pool hose - but the Spectre bits have completely smooth ends, and I had to cut the rolled lip off the CX Racing elbow on one end using a chop saw to get it to the right length. And the Spectre couplers are rubber while the RacePartsSolutions hump coupler and the CX racing couplers (blue) are silicone. So I may need to have the Spectre sections welded together and maybe put some tie bars into the plumbing or use some other tricks to make it hold together.

Both the CX Racing and the Spectre piping are polished aluminum, but as you can see in this picture, not all polished aluminum is created equal. The camera flash makes the difference even more glaring, if you'll pardon the pun. However, I've been thinking that once I get around to rebuilding the engine, I may have all the charge pipe powdercoated red and paint or powdercoat the engine to match. The couplers would be all black that time around. Kind of a rebellion against the excessive use of chrome on show cars.

Next step will be to make the brackets for the intercooler. Again.

Another minor Dart update

2008-04-14T19:48:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to keep momentum going with a little progress on the Dart each week or each day. Today I removed the headlights and front turn signals. This may seem like a strange thing to do with an intercooler and turbo installation. But this lets me move the wiring harness out of the way to clear the room for welding on the radiator core support. I also ordered some new bits of silicone hose for the charge pipe.

I also found that the turn signal bulbs (1) didn't match their colors and (2) were rusted to their sockets. Definitely time for new bulbs. Once I got them out, I found out that I didn't have to do this to remove the harness - there's a connector behind the front bumper that lets you pull back the main harness. But it was, like I said, time for new bulbs.

Dart progress update

2008-04-12T16:30:00.002-05:00

Been working on getting the intercooler mounted. I've rough-cut new holes for putting the intercooler with the hoses on the top instead of the bottom. The cold side charge pipe will come under the alternator. Sorry, no pictures yet, but I will have pictures when it's together.

How to make your own fuel catalyst (and why it would give you nothing but trouble)

2008-04-06T09:16:00.002-05:00

I've previously criticized the Tornado Fuel Saver, Vortec Cyclone, and similar gadgets as well as ridiculing their knock-offs on eBay. Up until now, I've left the Fitch Fuel Catalyst, another device that I was pretty certain was a rip-off, alone. It wasn't because I thought it might work, mostly because I didn't have that much information on chemistry and the effects of catalysts on gasoline. Well, thanks to some searching that SlantSixDan did on the slantsix.org forum, that's changed. And, of course, Tony's Guide to Fuel Saving has some very good analysis of the Fitch Fuel Catalyst already.

So, first, I'm going to mention the fuel catalyst that popped up on the slantsix.org forum: Copper has a very strong catalytic effect on gasoline, so replacing a length of your fuel line with copper tubing would put a catalyst in the fuel system.

The trouble is, what would a catalyst in your fuel supply do? A catalyst causes a reaction that would already happen to go forward at a faster rate or with a lower activation energy. Catalysts do not put energy into the fuel, or cause reactions that absorb energy to happen. Fitch claims that their catalyst is a metal alloy catalyst that reverses the reaction of oxygen with the fuel. Um, no. Copper and other alloys actually cause fuel to react with oxygen to form gum and varnish. In other words, a fuel catalyst would cause the very reaction that Fitch is claiming it prevents!

But if you wanted a fuel catalyst anyway, you could accomplish the same thing with five dollars' worth of copper hardline from your local hardware store that Fitch would charge you well over a hundred for.

Dart progress: New intake elbow

2008-04-02T20:16:00.002-05:00

So I went to Suwanee Welding today and picked up the intake elbow. They charged $50 for an hour's worth of work, and the quality of work was pretty good. So the end result came to pretty much what you'd pay for an Edelbrock cast intake elbow, but it's just right for my engine even if I didn't save money. The cast elbow I had the flanges welded to cost nearly $50 itself.

After work, I went and started mocking up the intercooler piping. I think I now have a pretty good idea how I'll route it. Things were easier when I removed the horns. I'll put them back in, though - I like having the original horns on my Dart and they still sound great. Just have to find a new location for them.

Pictures will be up soon.

A little bit of progress on the Dart...

2008-04-01T19:57:00.001-05:00

I dropped the intake elbow off at Suwanee Welding to be welded together for the new charge pipe routing. I'll have pictures when I pick it up.

Just a reminder...

2008-03-31T19:43:00.002-05:00

My side blog project, Motorcycle 4 A Month, kicks off my section of the project tomorrow. I'll be exploring a complete month of motorcycle commuting.

Got the Dart back, and I'm making a to-do list

2008-03-22T08:12:00.002-05:00

AutoFab had built a downpipe and an up-pipe for the turbo, and welded an elbow to the intercooler. But there's a lot more work to be done, so I'll make a list.

New throttle body elbow for over-the-valve-cover charge pipe routing.
Make the charge pipes.
Make the turbo support bracket.
Connect the downpipe to existing exhaust.
Finish mounting the battery in the trunk.
Finish the alternator installation.
Oil lines for the turbo.
Put the resistor pack back in. (Or switch to a newer Megasquirt and eliminate the resistors.)
Install electric cooling fans.
Plumb up the radiator.
Install a new coolant temperature sensor.

So there's a fair amount of work to do, but it can be broken down into smaller steps. I'm starting on the flipped throttle body mount right now. It's like the old joke about how to eat an elephant. I'll be posting each bite here.

A beautiful essay

2008-03-17T19:18:00.004-05:00

I hadn't heard of the Hoopty Rides blog before, but when I found a link to one of their posts on CarJunkie Forums, I had to pass this on. Check out this composition, All Hail the Ragged Edge. Mister Jalopy puts together a very interesting tribute to the history of hot rodding and the mechanical creativity behind it. Definitely worth a read.

I'll be getting the Dart back next week.

2008-03-15T14:24:00.002-05:00

Unfortunately, it won't be running. AutoFab has been kind of swamped with a couple other projects - some of which Jerry and I also had a hand in - and hasn't had time to work on it. So I talked with Thomas at AutoFab, and I'll be paying them for the work they have done so far. Then we'll push it over to DIYAutoTune.com were I can complete the rest of the work after hours.

Another project of mine

2008-03-05T20:29:00.002-05:00

Motorcycle 4 A Month, a blog I'm starting about motorcycle commuting. My goal is to ride my bike to work every day for a week this April and document it.

A Dart update?

2008-03-05T19:54:00.002-05:00

I've been helping AutoFab get two other projects wrapped up, which involved riding around in a turbo M6 with a giant gauge strapped to the windshield wipers to try to figure out a weird fuel cut-off, and some other stories. They're pretty intent on getting to work on the Dart as soon as these are out of the shop, and that won't be long.

So I've gone and ordered some new supplies from my favorite supplier of parts that aren't supposed to be speed parts but somehow get used that way, McMaster-Carr. This time I've ordered some Schedule 40 aluminum water pipe. A lot of cars have sewer pipe exhausts, so I thought I'd try a sewer pipe intake.

Well, not really. But Thomas and I have decided the intake elbow design needs some revision. It was pointing at the driver's side and we want to move it to the passenger side so the charge pipe goes over the valve cover. To do this, we'll cut the flanges off the adapter that's on there now, and weld this water pipe in there instead.

So, what does it take to remove a Bose stereo?

2008-03-01T17:14:00.002-05:00

I replaced the head unit in the 1986 Corvette using a Metra adapter kit, which got my CD player to look, if not like a factory installation, at least like what a decent car audio place would do. I also wired up a set of Sony Xplod 5 1/4" speakers and got them to fit behind the front speaker grilles. Right now the rear speakers are disconnected - I have a set of cheap 6 x 9 ovals I'll later add for rear fill.

It seems there are a couple myths about what it takes to replace a Bose system. You don't have to rewire the car. You also don't have to take the door panels off - something I only found out after I'd removed one and found it didn't help. I was trying to remove the Bose amps from the door. That would require completely disassembling the door. So I found that instead, you can reach into the Bose speaker box and cut the wires to the amp, then grab the stereo wires there. Makes things a lot easier. Now I just have to deal with some of the aftermath about taking the door panel apart - it's not as easy to get it back together.

C4 Corvette speakers - what really fits

2008-02-28T21:26:00.002-05:00

There's a couple little things on C4 Corvettes that their owners generally don't like - the skip shift feature in 6 speed transmissions, the Optispark distributor, and leaky weatherstripping are some offenders. But if I were to take a guess as to which part actually gets replaced the most often, it would probably be the Bose sound system. Many Corvette owners have dubbed it the Blose. That's a pretty apt description of mine - one speaker is blown, and the radio only turns on half the time. In all fairness, most 20 year old stereos have probably broken. But it's high time for a new stereo. I had originally planned on putting in a used one, but after having trouble with two used ones I went and bought a new if cheap JVC head unit.

Now, the trouble with the Bose system is that it's usually recommended you replace the speakers along with the head unit, because Bose put amps in the speakers. So I went speaker shopping. Unfortunately, the various stereo guides I've found online and in stores all say conflicting things. I checked at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Crutchfield, and no two guides said the speakers were the same size! So, tonight I went and measured the speakers to find out the truth. Here are the [i]real[/i] speaker sizes for a 1986 Corvette with a Bose stereo system.

Up front, Wal-Mart said the speakers were 4", Crutchfield said the closest size would be 6 1/2", and Best Buy said that the speakers were 6" x 4" ovals. The truth is that they are 7" square grilles with 4 1/2" round speakers behind them. So the win goes to Wal-Mart, with Best Buy's recommendation being close enough to fit hidden behind the stock grille without a hack job. The 6 1/2" speakers could possibly fit, but it would be tricky to make it look right as they don't look like they'd fit behind the stock grille or completely cover the opening. (It appears that a lot of people on Corvetteforum.com have made 6 1/2" speakers fit, however.)

In the back, Wal-Mart didn't list a speaker size, Crutchfield said that 6 1/2" would be the closest size, and Best Buy said the closest size was a 9" x 6" oval. The grille is a large irregular shape, but behind this was a set of 4 1/2" round speakers, again. However, they are stuck inside a 9" x 6" cutout with an adapter! And it also looks as if it wouldn't be terribly hard to cram a 6 1/2" in there while leaving the original grille in place. So Best Buy takes the win for the rear speakers, but this time Crutchfield's recommendation is easier to follow.

Some pictures of the Ram 50

2008-02-26T20:48:00.003-05:00

Here it is, in all its beaterific splendor, parked outside DIYAutoTune.com headquarters. The car behind it is "The Grapemobile," one of the many development mules hanging around the building.

I've found a pretty interesting forum at Project Zero G, a site dedicated to rear wheel drive turbo Mitsubishis. They've got the largest library of RWD 4G63 information I've found online.

One of the downsides to owning a Corvette...

2008-02-23T18:36:00.001-05:00

...is that you can easily spend $1,000 to get a new set of tires for one. On the upside, that did make that unnerving 60 mph vibration go away.

Mad Scientist Matt's Lair - The Book?

2008-02-21T20:14:00.003-05:00

Well, it's not going to be a book version of this blog, but Jerry Hoffmann and I just signed a book contract with HPBooks for a book on EFI installation and tuning. It's likely to be a while before you're able to buy it in a bookstore, and may even be a while before you hear anything more about it on this blog. But I just wanted to share this with everyone.

The Lotus of gas mileage?

2008-02-21T19:42:00.002-05:00

Philip emailed me this link to an interesting effort at building a 150 mpg car. It's not from one of the big automakers, but from an upstart called Loremo. This one isn't a hybrid, either. Instead, in the great Colin Chapman tradition, they've decided to "simplify and add lightness." It's not exactly fast since it only has 20 hp, but with a sub-600 kg (that's 1,320 lbs), it's not much heavier than a typical Lotus Seven knock-off. Only a Seven doesn't have a roof, or air bags, or a back seat - all of which are standard on the Loremo. It's kind of like a revived CRX in many ways, and might even be fun to autocross.

But one thing worries me: It uses a front-opening door, Isetta-style. This sounds like it would create the same safety hazard it did on the Isetta - if you're in a head-on collision, how do you open the door to get out? It looks like it may be possible to get out the hatchback in a Loremo, which could be a way around that problem.

I didn't really need another project, but it happened anyway,

2008-02-17T18:26:00.006-05:00

Yep, I've blundered into another car project. I have a friend named Roy who had an old Dodge Ram 50, a little pickup truck that Dodge imported from Mitsubishi. (They were also sold as the Mitsubishi Mighty Max.) He gave it about the minimum permissible maintenance, and it seemed like he was determined to drive it until the wheels fell off.

Yesterday, he had a wheel fall off.

Technically, he had a lower ball joint break, so the wheel actually stayed on the truck, but the wheel was canted over at a crazy angle. The police complained he was blocking the road with it, so he had pulled it off the road with a lawn tractor. Still, he was kind of worried that the cops wouldn't like it sitting on someone else's property with a broken suspension.

Roy wondered if I'd be interested in it. While Kelly didn't want it around the house (quite understandable; wait for the pictures of it), I thought it might make an interesting shop truck at work, and the price was quite attractive, since it was free. I originally thought I'd probably have to call a wrecker and have it towed. But when I got to the truck, I saw I wasn't really in for anything that difficult. The ball joints were simply attached to the control arm with three bolts, and the bolts weren't even too rusted. The weather report warned of storms coming in, but I saw my chance and went to work. I managed to remove the ball joint, so Roy and I then went searching for new ones. To my surprise, the local AutoZone had two. (I wanted a second one since I figured the other side has to be equally shot.) So I bought them and managed to get the broken ball joint installed on the side of the road before the storm hit. I'll take it up to work sometime later this week. Right now it's parked at Roy's house.

The truck had an interesting surprise. I checked it for stickers or part numbers under the hood to see if I could figure out what sort of engine it had. Sure enough, there was a sticker in the back of the engine compartment saying "Engine code: G63B." For those who don't speak Mitsubishi, 4G63T is the Mitsubishi engine code for the motor found in the turbo Eclipses and the Lancer Evolution. Wikipedia seems to think it had a different engine altogether, but I suspect that's about as likely as the claim it will run happily on E85.

I'll get some pictures up soon.

A fairly minor setback

2008-02-13T19:52:00.002-05:00

On occasion, I've been lending AutoFab a hand with some of the cars ahead of the Dart. Yesterday, they ran into a bit of a problem with a project with a Megasquirt installation on a Dinan BMW M6 (yes, you read that right). They were using monster 750 cc/min low impedance injectors, and concluded it needed the Hi-Res code. Trouble is, this code keeps Megasquirt from being able to limit the injector current, so they needed an injector resistor pack and couldn't whistle one up on short enough notice. So I let them transplant the Dart's injector resistor onto the Dinan M6, leaving the Dart's current V2.2 ECU unable to run the injectors on there until I can find a replacement.

Except that, given where I work, it makes a bit more sense to whistle up a different ECU out of our small collection of unsellable units than to go and hunt down a resistor pack. I'll need a V3.0 or higher unit to get that crank trigger working anyway.

The gas mileage evildoers of eBay

2008-02-11T20:24:00.000-05:00

The mad scientist is feeling a bit belicose today. So I thought I'd go take on a few of the automotive evildoers - those who use impressive-sounding pseudoscientific claims to convince people that a worthless trinket will improve their gas mileage. It's my opinion that the products they sell are scams, and today I'm going to unmask a few of these evildoers and show what is wrong (and often patently absurd) about their claims. So I decided to do a little bit of patroling on eBay to see what I could turn up. There's always a couple good automotive scams on eBay.

My first target is what appears to be a cheaply made knock-off of a product I've blogged about before, the Tornado Fuel Saver. Not only is it cheaply made, it's cheaply photographed, too. Seller couldn't afford more than 72 by 80 pixels for his photo. (This guy appears to be selling the same thing but with a bigger photo, allowing you to see just how poorly made this thing is.) I've blogged about the "genuine article" reducing performance when tested on a dyno before. Since there's already a lot of notes on why the Tornado and its ilk are scams, I only feel it necessary to comment on one particular issue with this knock-off. They've used slit bends to form the vanes. This significantly weakens the base of the vanes and invites cracks to form. There's a good chance that the vanes could break off and get sucked into the engine. Perhaps that's why "Peter Pan" used such a small photo. The Tornado may be flim-flam, but at least it's well made flim-flam.

This guy puts the names of some better known rip offs into his auction. So he's not only ripping off consumers, he's ripping off trademarks (couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of trademark holders, though, could it?). This one is good for a few laughs if you're into material science, such as "Made of strong alloy zinc." Zinc's mostly used for cheap castings where strenght is not a big concern, stuff like the metal emblems on my Dart. Extra giggle points for using the phrase "cambusting chamber." Sounds worse than getting metal shards sucked into your intake.

This auction is for another gas mileage scam that refuses to die, the gas line magnet. The EPA's tested these fuel magnets time and time again. And they never work.

Another classic rip-off is the "ebay chip," which isn't a chip at all, but a resistor that you splice into the coolant sensor line. This forces the engine into warm-up mode, making it add more gas. This seldom improves matters as many engines are tuned cautiously from the factory and run fairly rich as it is under full throttle; some motors even gain power when you lean them out from stock. Amazingly, this device that dumps more fuel into the engine than it needs is now being rebranded as a fuel economy booster! They're really too numerous to count, but I've chosen a few standouts that offer extra laughs: This one, for its claims of MPG and power gains being higher than Jerry Garcia, and this one, for inexplicably wading into the abortion debate.

Let the bidder beware!

A Super Bowl post: Delusional football fan, or prank?

2008-02-03T20:12:00.000-05:00

Found on CarJunkie Forums: an eBay auction that may be some sort of practical joke, or one of the most delusional asking prices of all time. You decide if someone seriously thinks a 1972 Ford F-100 can be worth $795,000. Apparently his basis for that claim is the odd paint color and some now-faded decals. That's right, the truck isn't even in show car condition - nicely kept for a '72 pickup, but pretty faded for a show car. It would probably be a 3 or 4 on the usual car value guide scale with 1 being pristine and 5 being barely functional but saveable. He even links to a thread where people are making fun of his own auction. I'm guessing this is a joke, but it's a very strange one indeed.

More parts for the Dart

2008-02-02T22:05:00.000-05:00

So today I ran down to Summit Racing Equipment and picked up a pair of Flex-A-Lite fans for the Dart. I decided to go with two of their pancake fans since there's so little clearance between the pulley and the radiator. These are some of their smaller ones, 2 5/8" thick. I also noticed from their catalog that Honda Civic fans are about that thin, which may be a solution for low buck projects that don't have enough engine compartment room. Too bad the Taurus fan I picked up earlier didn't fit; these are a pretty popular fan for people who want a lot of airflow and want it cheap. Flex-A-Lites aren't exactly cheap, although for the money you get American made parts and not something outsourced to the People's Republic of China.

I'll post the part numbers once I'm able to confirm they do, in fact, fit.

Wondering if there's any news on the Dart?

2008-02-02T11:24:00.001-05:00

There is, this week. I talked to Thomas at AutoFab, and it seems they're taking the business in a new direction and need to get all the project cars out by the beginning of March. So it looks like I'll either have the Dart running again by then, or just pay him for the work done so far and then take it over to DIYAutotune's shop to finish the work after hours. Either way, you'll be seeing more of the Dart on this blog in a month. Stay tuned!

Yeah, I definitely made the wrong call on the headlights...

2008-01-27T19:23:00.000-05:00

I was recently in Wal-Mart, and happened to walk through the car section. They had Sylvania headlights that were evidently almost identical to Silver Stars - same wattage and all - except they don't have the filter. And these unfiltered bulbs cost half of what the Silver Stars cost. Looks like I just spend $20 on what Dave Ramsey would call "stupid tax."

Popular Mechanics vs Big Ethanol

2008-01-26T15:12:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of Popular Mechanics had a cover story with a rant about the problems with corn based ethanol. It includes some very pointed comments, such as "There’s a simple reason that ethanol is popular with politicians: money." Very true. Mandating 15 billion gallons of corn based ethanol be used in 2015 isn't just a stupid corporate welfare law - it reminds me of Communist Russia's central planning, where it wasn't uncommon for the Party to set a goal to cut down X amount of trees, only to find that nobody needed that much lumber and they had to let the trees rot.

I'm going to have to write to Congress on this one, soon. When I do I will post a copy of the letter.

IMS Motorcycle Show pictures

2008-01-26T14:37:00.000-05:00

I went to the IMS motorcycle show in Atlanta, along with my wife Kelly, my brother Philip, and my sister-in-law Amanda. We brought back a few pictures, and as usual, I'm posting them a bit belatedly. But here's a few pictures from the show. Enjoy!

Amanda checks out a Yamaha TW200. For an itty bitty bike, it's got some really big tires. It was, however, taller than what Kelly would have prefferred.

Philip checks out a BMW sport bike. You can't see very much of the bike in this picture. That's probably just as well. BMW has been letting their bike stylists smoke whatever was in Chris Bangle's stash. They've also gone on a big assymetrical styling kick.

That's me on a Yamaha FJR. This one feels like it would make a great bike for long distance riding; it's very comfortable. Not like I could afford one right now, though.

Another Yamaha - this one's their new WR250R motard. Looks like it would be a fun commuter bike, or for just horsing around on back roads. Particularly ones with broken pavement. I'm just not sure how the pricing will go over with American buyers -something around the lines of $6,000 for a small bike. Still, it's an aweful lot of small bike, with a lot of high tech stuff packed into it. Seems like this bike makes sense if you want to flog your bike like a Roman charioteer without breaking the law too much.

Kelly really liked this little C3 scooter. Too bad it's not really able to keep up with traffic around here.

Kelly tries on a full faced motorcycle helmet for the very first time. This is a Scorpion EXO400, like mine but with graphics and, of course, in a smaller size. I also talked with a Scorpion rep and got him to explain what the vents actually do. They apparently circulate air inside the line to wick away sweat rather than directing the air to your skin. No wonder I couldn't feel them. I'm still not sure they do much of anything, but that does clear up a few things.

Here's an old school chopped Harley Sportster with a suicide clutch and wrapped headers. It looks a lot meaner than many of the bigger bikes. But with its low pipes and the shocks replaced with billet aluminum bar stock to make it a hardtail (why? Billet looks so out of place on this one...), I wouldn't want to ride it on the street.

It's racing, too...?!?

2008-01-24T19:59:00.000-05:00

I went to Monster Jam recently, and I've now had the photos developed. My digital camera isn't nearly fast enough to capture the action there; I brought an old school SLR with a huge zoom lens and caught it on film instead. And there was plenty of action. While Monster Jam is more about spectacle than most types of motorsports, it does have some real racing involved in the first half, where the trucks run against each other on identical courses. And monster trucks are quite impressive to a gearhead and engineer - you have to really know how to build engines and suspensions to get a 10,000 pound truck to leap into the air like this! Enjoy the pictures.

When they were advertising "autocross" on the radio and billing it as "half racing, half demolition derby," I knew it wasn't going to be SCCA Solo II type autocross. It was more like basic dirt track racing, except with a pair of jumps. And that they sometimes added some wacky twists. Here they're racing while towing trailers. This always means for a lot of carnage - in fact, this time they had a pile-up that took bulldozers to untangle, and they couldn't identify a winner when the dust settled. But if you've just seen jet skis dragged through the dirt after falling off their trailers, and a guy running around towing a Port-A-Potty around an oval track, who cares who won?

Blue Thunder won the racing portion outright. I felt this truck should have taken first place in the Freestyle, too. But when the judges are picked at random from the crowd, it's a safe bet that the crowd favorite will take the win in Freestyle. Not surprisingly, Maximum Destruction won that portion.

I later learned that while Ford put a lot of money into sponsoring this truck (you can't see it in this photo, but the flags have Ford logos on them), it's powered by a World Products Merlin engine based on a big block Chevy. I'm still scratching my head over that one.
It's Grave Digger! Check out the height on that jump. Hopping lowriders have nothing on leaping trucks. Seriously, I wonder how long it's going to be before someone figures out how to apply some of the lessons from monster truck construction to low riders? A lot of the low riders aren't really able to land from the height they can jump to, with broken suspension mounts and cracked frames everywhere. Monster trucks not only jump very high, but they're very heavy, around five tons. Sometimes getting a vehicle that high in the air isn't nearly as impressive as building it to survive the landing. And survive they did - I only saw one case where a truck broke from a landing, and that was a wheel that sheared off. Most of the trucks rolled over at least once, and usually that barely scratched the paint. It's Gunslinger. I don't know why, but I kind of like the paint scheme and the no-nonsense bodywork. Unlike Blue Thunder, this one uses a Ford motor.
But I also like over the top, fanciful designs too. This one's Monster Mutt. What can I say? Sometimes I just like to root for the underdog.

Sorry, couldn't resist. But you've got to admit that it's a fun truck to watch.

Monster truck ralleys are a spectacle every gearhead ought to see at least once, and bring your earplugs. There's a lot of things that I like about it as a car guy. It's not just the sight of something that big jumping that high, making a lot of noise, and breaking a lot of stuff. Ok, so that's the biggest part of it. But there's also a lot of what I call mechanical creativity. These aren't some NASCAR-ish spec racers here. Monster trucks show a wide variety of design, as they're allowed to run almost any sort of bodywork and use several different types of engines - all of which make around 1,500 hp in a top notch monster truck. And designing an engine and a chassis that'll hold up to this kind of abuse takes some serious engineering talent.

Ok, maybe I'm over-analyzing things. Jeff Foxworthy once said that the biggest thing that defines being a redneck is "a glorious lack of sophistication." And monster truck ralleys show that sometimes it is, indeed, glorious to get in touch with your inner redneck.

Not sure if I made the right call with headlights...

2008-01-24T19:28:00.000-05:00

I think I'm going to officially nickname the Corvette "Winky" because the way the left headlight's been giving me so much trouble. It's been refusing to pop up, had screws come loose making it not go all the way down, and on Tuesday, the bulb burned out. So I went to get a new set of headlights. I'd heard that "Silver Stars" were a good brand to get, so I went to AutoZone and paid $42 for a pair of them.

Then I did a bit of poking around and found I'd bought the wrong Silver Stars! You may be wondering how a major corporation could let people get away with taking their trademark. Well, as it turns out, the same company makes Sylvania and Osram lights. And for some reason, each of them make a type of light called the Silver Star... and they're not the same lights. The Osram Silver Stars are the good ones; they're a plain high output bulb with no gimmicks, just good quality.

What I have are the Sylvania version of the Silver Stars. These combine a 55 watt low beam (regular Sylvania lights have a 35 watt low beam) with a slightly bluish filter. I don't like filters; they cut down on the output, because they change the color of the light by absorbing part of the light. Lighting expert Daniel Stern (you may have noted I've linked to his blog at the left) has a very informative article on the troubles with legal bulbs with blue filters. Sylvania's cranked up the wattage to make them brighter than normal lights, at least on low beam, but that puts more wear and tear on the bulbs too from the extra heat. With their version of the Silver Stars, Sylvania appears to be selling a very well known cliche: the candle that burns twice as bright but half as long.

I went and installed them anyway. While these do have a blue filter, the light output isn't blue; it actually is a rather nice shade of white. And unlike some filtered lights, the color looks to be about the same in all directions. Back in the heyday of illegal "HID-look" bulbs, I'd often see bulbs that would turn from blue to purple to green depending on what angle you viewed them from. It remains to be seen how they work in the rain - a lot of people on some forums with owners who installed blue lights but were mature enough to look at them objectively reported they're a nightmare to drive behind in the rain. Since the Sylvania SilverStars are more of a pointless effort to make the bulb whiter than white, I'm not sure they will have that problem.

I'll probably leave them in for a couple years, then do what I should have done had I not been pressed for time: Give Daniel Stern a call and get some serious, safe, and powerful headlights.

The Corvette's a picky eater.

2008-01-12T14:35:00.000-05:00

The Corvette gave me a bit of a scare this week - it suddenly started running pretty rough. It turned out I'd got a tank of bad gas from a grocery store that also sold no-name gas. First time I've really had a car that was all that picky about gas brands (although I'm not sure about the Dart's current EFI trim). I'd figured that since the L98 engine isn't really all that exotic - low RPM, iron heads, Chevy recommends 87 octane - it wouldn't be all that picky about what sort of gas I put in it. Looks like I was mistaken.

The moral is that while an L98 Corvette will run quite happily on 87 octane, it has to be good 87 octane.

Also, I finally got the minor tune-up parts installed on the Corvette...Well, most of them; I'll get the spark plugs and O2 sensor later (and I may put something else in that O2 sensor socket than a stock part...). I used a set of Summit straight boot HEI plug wires. The fit isn't the greatest; several on the left bank had to go up over the valve cover to fit correctly. And the stock wires have 90 degree angle boots. But I was able to route them away from anything likely to burn them. So my impression of Summit's house brand wires is a bit mixed. Although if the #1 and #3 wires were a little longer I would be very impressed. They fit at least as well as many parts store wires I've dealt with.

My jaw is on the floor

2008-01-12T14:33:00.000-05:00

"Heckshemi" on the Slantsix.org board has built a slant six with a crossflow cylinder head made out of sections of a pair of new 5.7 Hemi heads. Absolutely astounding. I wonder if the reason I've been highlighting slantsix.org threads is how long my Dart's been off the road...

Nah. This one's just too impressive to ignore.

Another EFI slant six

2008-01-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

While my Dart's been languishing waiting for the big turbo project to get finished, "Runvs_826" on the slant six forum has gone and put together a very impressive, cheap, and effective TBI conversion for his slant six. Check it out. I was particularly impressed by his clever way of adding an in-tank pump. If I redo my conversion - and there's a good chance I will - expect to see a similar fuel pump setup.

So maybe it's not just me...

2007-12-22T12:45:00.000-05:00

About a week ago, I wrote about how I hope small sports cars might make a comeback. About five days after I posted that, CNN had an article looking back at one of the models that defined the breed, the Honda CRX. They noted that the CRX in HF trim even manages to beat the Prius when it came go mileage, with considerably less technology but also less weight. You just don't see too many tiny cars out there, and certainly not ones that have styling in the same league as a CRX or with any hint of sportiness. I have to wonder why manufacturers think that customers want miniaturized minivan looks on their small cars instead of something sportier.

Well, the government has finally decided to raise CAFE limits to 35 miles to the gallon, so it's possible we may see a revival of this sort of micro-rocket.

Random PRI stuff

2007-12-16T09:21:00.000-05:00

Just a bunch of random pictures of cool stuff from PRI.

A diesel with compound turbos. I've heard about these, but it was the first time I'd seen a compound turbo engine in person. You can get a lot of boost by feeding the discharge side of one turbo into the inlet on a second, smaller turbo - too much boost, in fact, for almost anything gasoline powered. But diesels can get away with it.

This is the mystery motor that's shown up in a few magazines. Ford's been making a big show of running this thing out at drag races and not saying what it is. All I could tell is that it's got overhead cams, a distributorless ignition, two injectors per cylinder, and it's really, really big and fast. Most of the speculation is that it's a future truck motor, which makes sense given its size. But it would be pretty cool in a Crown Vic, or maybe an Aussie Falcon. Whatever it is, I'm guessing it's meant for production vehicles and probably not meant to be race only. Not too many racing classes would let in a motor that's such a far departure from a production block, and if it were headed for something like LeMans Prototype I'd have expected it to have appeared there before anything else.

Garrett / Honeywell had a drag car on display fed by two massive turbos. The turbos on there make my GT4082 turbo look tiny.

I took this photo at the end of the show when everyone was packing up and going home. Somehow, I'd missed this Gasser-style coupe when it was on the showroom floor. But it sure looks pretty, even if it has to be pushed out on car skates.