"Inspired" by gas prices...

Discussion in 'Gas Engines' started by die_dunkelheit, Feb 28, 2012.

  1. Angélique
    Joined: Feb 2009
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    Location: Belgium ⇄ The Netherlands

    Angélique aka Angel (only by name)

    Hey Bos, just saw your next car, a 1996 Passat TDI Wagon with a greasecar veggie burning kit installed..!!

    BTW, a 300SDL could (?) carry your oil tank instead of her backseat, she would burn half the fuel of the F-250, and the extra weight at midships would make her a massive tow car . . . adjust the springs . . . :idea:

    [​IMG] [​IMG]
    click for source


    :idea: weld a fire bulkhead behind the front seats if the oil tank replaces the backseat :idea:

    Good luck !
    Angel

    P.S.

    This Passat TDI Wagon is from 2005 but only converted (some seals I guess) to bio-diesel.

    More Passat's TDI Wagon, fill in the year in front to be more specific.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    If want to respond to this sliding aside please do it
    here where it's more on topic.
     
  2. PAR
    Joined: Nov 2003
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    PAR Yacht Designer/Builder

    If you really want to save some cash on your fuel bill, then a custom design is in order. You go long, thin and light, which means you can kiss off elbow room, but you can still have considerable accommodation, just stretched out along it's length. There are lots of designs that are quite stingy on fuel and coupled with reasonable power plants, rather then cobbled together concoctions that are bound to require you bring along Marv the welder, not really out of sight propositions.

    Bolger has several, Geer and just about every designer I can think of.

    Cars and other over the road transport can't go away in this country. Our society is literally built around, the ability to travel down custom designed roads. Entire communities can't exisit without the roads and the cars that crash into each other on them.

    Eventually, probably in a bout 50 years, a higher then 50% of the vehicles on these roads, will be completely computer controlled. You punch in "Work" and finish reading your digital paper, while sipping coffee in route. It really doesn't matter what the fuel will be. We'll use what we got until forced to use something else. Mass transit doesn't work in this country, we're just to large and spread out and rebuilding communities, to suit new technologies, isn't cost effective. So, we're left with cars, and trucks. Fuel conversions will pick up in the next 20 years, with full electric being a small, but significant portion of this market, particularly in cities.

    About the time we really start to see huge drops in the available oil (50 years), most major metropolitan areas will have complete infrastructure around the obvious alternatives. It'll be the rural areas that get screwed (as usual), but hopefully something will stand up in the next 1/2 century to ease the weening off oil.

    As far as boats are concerned, they'll remain fat and fast until the market nearly dies, then new more efficient designs will slowly emerge. We're Americans, so we'll die before you peel the guns and fat butted boats from our cold fingers.
     
  3. Fanie
    Joined: Oct 2007
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    Location: Colonial "Sick Africa"

    Fanie Fanie

    LOL... sounds right.
     
  4. die_dunkelheit
    Joined: Feb 2011
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    Location: The People's Republic of California

    die_dunkelheit NA Student

    That's a brilliant idea, kind of like the Chunnel, but PAR brings up the best point against it, hundreds or even thousands of rural communities would become ghost towns after being bypassed by these railways. It'd be worse than the towns & cities that disappeared when the freeways largely replaced highways here in the USA (think of the dead towns on Route 66).

    On PAR's other point about custom design, I've had a couple cars on paper for a while. I'm a speed demon at heart so they're pretty narrowly intended for that purpose. However, strictly on aerodynamics, going fast and going efficiently yield pretty much the same result in body/fuselage design. Simply altering my design from this ridiculous Wankel engine to a turbocharged diesel or the like and then I've got this super light weight aerodynamic 2 seater setting mileage records...
     
  5. PAR
    Joined: Nov 2003
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    PAR Yacht Designer/Builder

    Aerodynamics on a car is nearly meaningless until you're over 100 MPH. Cars with "ground effects" plastic adornments are a joke on a street car. They're just weight and curb catchers. I've built my share of fast cars and it's a simple formula of power, versus weight. You take a small car and shoehorn a monster into it and hold on until the parts break. Boats aren't much different in this regard, both power and sail. I put a 454 Chevy engine in an Opel GT back in the early 80's. It was an ungodly fast car, assuming you could launch it without dragging the rear bumper or have it jump sideways and smash into a wall. It weighed about 1,600 pounds and had about 650 HP. With a 2.5 pound per HP ratio, it was scary fast and a lot of fun. I've also put 100 HP outboards on 14' jon boats, which is also pretty fun.

    We are what we are and in America we can be a bunch of nut jobs in this regard, but the Australians aren't much different.

    Rail s dead in a country like this and the last half century proves the point clearly. Just too big and to geared around the highway system.
     
  6. Fanie
    Joined: Oct 2007
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    Location: Colonial "Sick Africa"

    Fanie Fanie

    This rail story sounds a lot like the figgin train they put in here at ridiculous expense - with public funds, so the government can make money out of us.

    Next they will put toll gates on all roads to make it so expensive you cannot drive anywhere to force you to take the f train. Of course here only the minority working whites must pay, the rest just strike or shout racism or whatever gets them off and they get it for free. Won't surprise me if this is one of obama's next moves. Forced public transport. Watch the disarmament - they want your guns which will make you soooo easy to manipulate and abuse.

    Yeah yeah the constitution - the constitution is a theory on paper - it is what is enforced what makes the difference. The constitution here is about to fly out the window, what does it matter if it is unconstitutional to modify it to suit the government.

    If you watch carefully, exactly what is happening here is repeating itself in the US. If you don'y believe me I can find the corresponding occurrences here and there - someone has already done a summary of it. First thing you must do when you got rid of the democrats is to hang the f UN in public, they are the bstrds helping the anc structuring the genocide in SA, they have the same planned for you ! It starts with an invasion to outnumber you then outvote you.
     
  7. die_dunkelheit
    Joined: Feb 2011
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    die_dunkelheit NA Student

    I fully agree on the point of the silly ground effect stuff you see on ricers, it's pointless, especially wings on the back of a front wheel drive Honda, wings that for the most part aren't even working airfoils. I understand what you mean about aerodynamics, but the point I was getting at is just making it a little less of a brick being shoved through the air, every little bit helps when you want to increase efficiency. The car design I referred to before will top 150, by a lot... In reality it's a car that should never be off of the track, but that's the point. At speeds like that and higher air under the car becomes more important, the less of it the better.
     
  8. die_dunkelheit
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    die_dunkelheit NA Student

    You're right Fanie

    We're closer to martial law here than ever before, the media is practically government operated, they're trying to take the internet next, and so many people have been trained to expect the government to supply their every need. It's sickening really, even when I was in school there were whole assignments about how to apply for government aide, our people are forgetting what it means to do for your country rather than the country do for you. Hell I'd be happy if it was just do for yourself rather than suck the government's teet, but hey at least they got that part of the strategy right, to control a nation start with its children.

    "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government"
    -- Thomas Jefferson

    "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have"
    --Gerald Ford
     
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  9. Boston

    Boston Previous Member

    I believe its total forward surface profile that make the difference at lower speeds. Lower that profile and you do gain some. But its rolling resistance and weight that really make up the bulk of the cost
     
  10. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

  11. BPL
    Joined: Dec 2011
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    BPL Senior Member

    Maybe barge is not as superior to train as the www.caria.org study says; in that case both trains and barges are both twice as efficient as trucking.
     
  12. die_dunkelheit
    Joined: Feb 2011
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    die_dunkelheit NA Student

    It's actually a mass-move towards dependency on public transportation. They're doing the same here in California, we're supposed to get a speed train connecting Sacramento to Los Angeles. 2.5 hour trip I think is what they quoted. Said dependency being the socialists' motive...
     
  13. Petros
    Joined: Oct 2007
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    Petros Senior Member

    cars are ultimately one of our freedoms. Consider without private automobiles, you would have little choice in where you live, where you work, where you spend your recreation time. let alone the freedom to drive what you like (at your own expense of course), where and when you want to.

    That I think is something the Europeans on this list do not understand about Americans. Both cars and guns are fundamentally about individual freedom, and responsibility. Artificially raise the cost of fuel for some kind of utopian ideal, and you take away our freedom. Most other places in the world have a history of tyranny, whatever freedoms you have are based on what the authorities grant you. Very very different, our constitution affirms the idea of liberty that is inherent in our existence, and our Constitutional government exists only to protect those liberties. How far our current government has fallen from that objective.

    I have heard many fools argue that it would be "good" for us for the Gov to raise the cost of gasoline so it would force us to stop using our cars. Use these costly boondoggle rail systems, or wasteful public transportation. That is a Marxist argument, force it on us even if we do not want it, because it is for our own "good" (which of course "they" decided what it good). So we are to tolerate a government that purposely rips us off for the sake of some utopian ideal that most do not agree with. That is tyranny. And products of leftists ideology. "Utopia" btw, is a term that Plato coined that means "no place".

    So I will pursue considering alternatives that protect my freedoms. I will not give in to a tyranny that tells me what kind of light bulbs, toilets, health care, and transportation and other things I must have. And never vote for any idiot that thinks a government is force for some utopian "good", and that they will determine what is good for us. That always results in disaster.
     
  14. Boston

    Boston Previous Member

    I'm curious how socialism got to be an evil buzzword with you guys but we're supposed to be refraining from politics. Seems to me that the replitard agenda is far more socialist than the democrapic one. I don't see either party as having a handle on sanity and both essentially acting in a manor exactly opposite of there talk.

    Oh well, personally I like being able to walk down the street and ride the train, I just don't always like the, lets just say, quality, of the people I have to tolerate sometimes
     

  15. Lister

    Lister Previous Member

    Hoyt, with all do respect, sleeping in an airport because your seat on the plane was given to somebody else, then after 48 hours you finally board the plane, to stay for 2 hours in the tarmac and finally landing on an other destination because of the weather is not fun either.
    So, do I will say: I don't know what is the love affair between the right and the airplanes except that it show them totally incompetents?
    No of course.
    So for once I disagree with you.
    Both have their shortcoming and good points.
    The train station is always in the middle of the city.
    Lister
     
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