Thread: Gas mileage eye opener--

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Brian, I swear I saw this in either Mechanics Illustrated or Popular Mechanics somewhere around 1950. It was an early Peugot with a Hibachi stove in the rear trunk area with a 3/8" copper tube running from the top of the cast iron stove up to the carb and the small car ran on carbon monixide (CO) as in

2 CO + O2 -> 2 CO2 plus heat.

The "fuel" was any combination of paper, wood, animal droppings etc. that would smolder in the Hibachi and produce CO. It was running as a Taxi in Tokyo. I wish I had the exact reference but the short article had a picture of the Hibachi and tubing. All you need is a large Hibachi in the Ranger bed and feed it leaves and such! A quick check of thermodynamics tables will show that carbon monoxide will burn but don't inhale! I have a Ranger with a V6, '94 I think' but I don't worry about the mileage in that since it is just used for gardening projects and hauling trash occasionally.

Don Shillady
Retired (?) Scientist/teen rodder

DennyW, Thanks, I have bookmarked that woodburning article. I would like to see a picture of the modified carb. That article makes a good point in that coking wood in a limited amount of oxygen produces a lot of organic compounds baked out of the wood in addition to the CO. There is a simple lab experiment for Junior H.S. where you burn a piece of pine and collect the smoke and it contains a lot of distilled oils from the wood which is flammable as fuel so this "Wood" be a good use for all those pine scraps that you don't want to use in your fireplace. In my 4.7 acre forrest we have lots of fallen pines which we don't use for firewood to prevent creosote accumulation in our chimney and we look for a few oaks here and there but this would be a good way to use up all the "useless" pine we have. I probably never will build this but I would like to see the homemade carb adapter picture. It must be an old article since they mention gas at $2.50/gallon. I recall an earlier MEN article that I did look at and almost built with an aircraft jet starter motor in a VW sedan with a lawn mower engine in the front running a charging generator to 12 batteries under the rear seat. That was also in MEN, those guys are "clunky" but really clever, maybe better than most rodders. The problem with the electric VW then was that the controller unit for the DC motor has to be switched through about seven positions instead of having a smooth rpm gas pedal, and besides I could not find the starter motor. As I recall that design got about 90 mpg but between the seven jerky positions on the throttle switch and the four gears, the driver would have to be a busy person to get through traffic. Interstate use might be easier, but my main objection to that design was that I couldn't find the recommended DC jet starter motor and the seven-position throttle switch looked to be really clunky to me. In science labs they have a thing called a "Variac" which is a smootly variable AC transformer so in principle there should be some sort of large sliding resistor for a DC motor which would allow continuously variable voltage to the DC motor but that would be hard to fabricate from scratch unless some surplus part could be found. Another problem might be that the weight of the batteries under the rear seat might make the small VW drum brakes marginal.
DennyW I got past the "twisted-light" chapter (90 pages) and moved on to other things but I'm still having to give up my work on the car for the summer till the rest of the book is done. I am having my 2" chopped windshield glass cut this week and I am looking at the wiring job to come, but I have to keep writing through the summer.

Don Shillady
Retired (?) Scientist/Teen Rodder