strotter

I love the Tool Shed. Why, it's finest, the greatest, the top, the foremost, the leading, the preeminent, the premier, the prime, the first, the chief, the principal, the supreme, the highest quality, the superlative, the par excellence, the unrivaled, the second to none, the without equal, the nonpareil, the unsurpassed, the peerless, the matchless, the unparalleled, the unbeaten, the unbeatable, the optimum, the optimal, the ultimate, the incomparable, the ideal, the perfect; the highest, the record-breaking; the star, the number-one, the top-drawer, the Cadillac of, the Rolls-Royce of forums.

Greg, I'm fairly sure there's a fair amount of oil out there, but it may not be as good as you think. Also, it may not be a "proven" as many people think it is. Check out this Wikipedia entry. The Canadians believe they have about 5 giga-barrels conventional proven reserve, and a total of about 160 giga-barrels if you count the Athabasca Oil Sands. BP, though, says it's a lot less. Check the article, and also check the differences between "proven", "probable" and "possible" reserves. The problem isn't that "there isn't enough oil", the problem is that "there isn't enough cheap oil". Not to sound political or anything:mrgreen::mrgreen:, but most of the easy-to-get-to, easy-to-process stuff is found, and as soon as a billion Chinese guys & gals, along with another billion Indian folks start driving all the cars they'll be able to afford a few years from now, from our point of view it'll look like there's no oil at all. We won't run out of oil any time soon, any more than we'll run out of, say, bison; but bison aren't the kind of resource they once were.

The author seems to have a grudge against hybrids - and a fairly tenuous hold on technology. He uses quite a lot of "loaded" language, the first hint of bias, so I did a little research. A Google search for the author's name "Chris Demorro" turned up 2520 hits, the majority of which had to do with this article. The article is interesting as much for what it didn't say, as much as what it did. For instance, I found this as the Edmunds site: Not mentioning the battery recycling programs - which is the law in most states in any event - is misleading to the point of misdirection. (As an aside, the article praises Ford for creating a very "green" factory - it sounds like an interesting place in and of itself). As others have pointed out, lots of things use nickel - including the steel in all automobiles and structures, especially stainless steel. Check out the Nickel Producers Environmental Research Association. The mines are owned by two companies, Brazil's Companhia Vale do Rio Doce and Xstrate of Switzerland, not Toyota. The article seems to imply that hybrids responsible for the ecological damage in Sudbury, but the city's website tells a little bit different story - that most of the damage is decades old, and is being remediated. It seems like the thing we're running out of is petrochemicals, and hybrids are designed to minimize the use of that resource. Giant vehicles use more of it than smaller ones, regardless of the "actual" mileage you get. I seriously doubt that no matter how I drive my Z, I'm not going to use as little fuel as my little Honda - which averages 36 mpg for me in mixed city/highway driving, and it has 277k miles on it. It would be a mistake to assume that all Hybrids are bad because of this article.

Many years ago when I was in a fluids class, we did a series of tests using a liquid tunnel. It was strictly demonstration thing, but there were a couple of advantages to using a liquid: you didn't have to move the water as fast, meaning an aquarium pump did the job nicely; and it was possible to suspend a very fine material (some kind of soil amendment, as I recall) in the water, allowing you to make out the movement of the fluid. Now, water is a fundamentally different type of material, being incompressible and all, but as I recall it was possible to visualize turbulent flow very accurately and easily. Not the kind of thing you'll get good quantitative numbers out of, but fine for understanding the grosser flow, something I'm not clear on yet with regards to Z's. I'll dig out my Fluid Dynamics book and look it up.

Even with bad Reynolds numbers, isn't it possible to get go/no-go data? That is, model "B" shows less lift than model "A" - though we don't know how much less lift this will translate to, we do know it's an improvement or not? Or, if model "A" shoots exhaust out of the pipe and into a 1/12-scale driver's face, and some modification on model "B" prevents it, can we suppose a similar modification of a full-size car will behave similarly? Ultimately I would suppose any change would need to be tested at full scale, but could smaller models provide a "direction" for examination?

Jeffer, last night I was going to sleep and I was thinking "That guy's idea is really simple, why didn't I think of that?" I was pondering how to strap a capped pipe under the car, making a mental picture of it, when it occurred to me: you better not drive onto a military base with your car! They're going to be thinking "terrorist"!

Jonas, I used a program called "Vellum" on a Mac. I did some 3d drafting for a living "back in the day", I like to freshen up my skills once in a while. '55, I don't expect capacity will be a problem - the near "0" pressure on the low pressure side guarantees that the pump flows at its' max capacity, so a relatively small pump can handle the job nicely. To tell you the truth, I'm more concerned about packaging than capacity right now!

I came up with this over the past few weeks working on my little Honda and wishing I was working on my Z. My Z, and I'm sure many others, has been a fuel-system challenge since day one - day one of installing a fuel-injection-system, that is. I haven't really been pleased with the different things I've tried, such as a Holley fuel pickup system for f.i. (which I managed to mangle installing and didn't know until it left my high and dry), and the good old "To heck with it, I'll just keep plenty of fuel in her" technique. I couldn't find a 280 tank the right year that didn't have a couple gallons of water in it, nor did I want to weld a sump onto a fuel tank. Weld on a fuel tank = scary to me, and also they look funny. What I needed was a surge tank, as suggested by Mike Knell in his book. Welding one up was beyond my meager skills, nor could I find a container that was both the right size and heavy enough to tap into. Finally I have the answer, and that answer is: a receiver-dryer. In particular, a Honda Civic receiver-dryer, but I'm sure any would work. Behold its beauty: Here's the thing: receiver-dryers have to be heavy walled because they're located just downstream of the compressor and see quite high pressures - in a '93 Civic like mine, up to 360 psi, as opposed to an accumulator which sees much lower pressures and thus has thinner walls - too thin to tap. As the picture shows, there's plenty of meat both top and bottom for tapping fittings into. Note that the receiver/dryer is 6.5" long, so with the barbed fittings about 8" overall. Probably holds a quart or so. The only caveat is that there's some guts in there, including a "bag/filter" of desiccant and a tube which passes from the center pickup at the top through the dessicant. The "bag" is visible in the picture but the tube is not. The guts came out through one of those teeny little (1/2") holes. I drilled all the necessary holes in the thing first and managed to tangle the bag while punching the bottom hole, ripping it to shreds. Much hilarity ensued with hundreds of little balls - the desiccant itself - zooming out the hole at high velocity toward my face. Needle-nosed pliers ripped the remains of the bag/filter out the bottom, and the tube followed shortly after via grunting and cursing. Then I just used a normal tap to thread it. I'm as we speak designing a bracket that will hold all three of my cylindrical fuel-handling devices and their filters together, as per this sketch: Convenient, eh? The whole thing is going in back between the tank and the moustache bar, perhaps configured so that the whole thing can be swung down intact for filter/pump replacement.

Awesome compilation/animation. It's a little bit disconcerting at times, though; the "character" captured by each artist, even in similar time periods, varies so greatly that you find yourself sort of "hopping" around emotionally as they morph. It's those eyes - "The eyes of your woman turn upon you, and the moment opens to infinity". Plus, there's been some fine-lookin' babes around down through the years, eh?

I love this thread. Really. Love it!

I'm a bad person, I know. But I can't help it! I just love to see that little lock appear on a thread. Yeah, it's as character flaw, but I'm hooked. It's like watching a train wreck: I know it's wrong, the best thing is to just look away - but every single time I'll click on it just to see what stupidity, thoughtlessness, or idiocy has drawn the attention of the Admins, like the all-seeing eye of Sauron, to that particular thread. I just gotta know. Am I the only one?

"Fie"? Welcome to the 14th century! Let me show you it!

That's a Holley StealthRam intake.

Does anybody know the size of the fuel tank drain threads on a 240 (and I assume 260/260) off the top of their head? I've got a tankful of gas in a non-running car, so pulling the plug would be a messy problem for me right now.

Need a V-10? Got $750? This might be the deal of the decade. http://stockton.craigslist.org/car/324253023.html I'm tempted, and my project is finished. I can't use it, but maybe someone in central Cali can.

Oh yeah? How about... and this and then there's And who could ever forget

We should tell the guys at Reaction Research that these cars are so valuable ... http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/250-gto-replica-collector-car-vintage-ferr-ri-look_W0QQitemZ300106039656QQihZ020QQcategoryZ7251QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Want ... one ... sooo ... bad ... must ... resist ...

Just saw this on Craig's list. Looks sweet. http://stockton.craigslist.org/car/305122294.html

Maybe we should change the name of this site to "Turds to Diamonds". Yup.

You *know* we're gonna see that in a James Bond movie, don't you? Once he gets the VTOL thing down, it's on.

Before After

There used to be a site called "Great Big Engines in Little Bitty Cars", or something like that. Some real mutant vehicles there, but appealing. The section on Datsuns linked here, with the note "If you really want to get into the dirty details of doing a swap, HybridZ is the place to go." Dirty Details was enough for me, he was right. I probably spent every night for two months just using the search function and taking notes before I even registered to ask a question. This site saved me hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars - which is a wash because the car cost me thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars.