6/22/07

I got nothing today. I've been out bid on the Locost frame. It still hasn’t hit the reserve, which I assume from his e-mail is $1,200.00, so there is still a chance he and I will come to an agreement and I'll wind u with it. I'm not holding my breath nor will I be upset if I lose the auction. We’ll just have to wait and see. John and I are supposed to go to the shop tomorrow. I'll probably ask him to make me do the 4.11 R&P swap in George. I need someone to motivate me or I might blow that portion of the job off. Oh, I also bought on e-Bay a clutch master and slave cylinder set ostensibly for Barbara. I might wind up stealing the master cylinder for George though since I bid on another master as well. I'd really like to have new hydraulics in both of those cars rather than relying on the old crap that is in there. I guess I'll need to source another B-210 brake master sometime as well. I almost said I was beginning to have second thoughts about the blow-through supercharger on Barbara but then I remembered seeing several versions of centrifugal superchargers that blow through carburetors. The thing that might cause my system to fail is if the blow off valve doesn’t vent enough pressure at idle. We’ll see I guess. Back to George, I had a really bad idea of how I could fatten the mixture when the thing goes on boost. I was thinking of adding a secondary butterfly in the manifold behind one of the barrels of the DCOE. When it was closed the engine would only “see” the one barrel, the other one that is. Then, I could set the mixtures different on the two barrels of the carburetor, the “main” one leaner and the “secondary” richer. The auxiliary butterfly, the one in the manifold, would open with a boost reference signal only when the engine was under boost, duh. I thought about it for a while and was really getting excited about it until I realized that as soon as the thing made boost, it would be as if you slammed open the carburetor from half throttle to full. Oh sure, it would give a really awesome surge once boost hit but would it be even remotely drivable? I doubt it. Well, I just had a look at Hugh MacInnes’ book on turbocharging and it appears I've reinvented the wheel. Apparently, that system I just describes is not so far-fetched after all. He claims to have used it on several turbocharged engines with success. Perhaps I will give it some more consideration. I'll have to finger out a way to dump the boost when the throttle closes or the thing will hit boost once and then continue to run out of contr… no it won’t! The main throttle in the DCOE will still be there to control the airflow! This thing should work! It will have a hell of a kick when the boost comes on though. Hey, this is just what I needed, something else to slow the progress of this project. I think I'll have a look at the feasibility of it but plan to go ahead with the design as is. Besides, it’s not like I'm trying to make a 1,300 horsepower 1.3-liter Formula One engine here, I just want 125 or so ponies. That’ll be almost double the stock output of that engine. I think that will suffice. Well, I think I've wasted enough of our time for today. I'll be back in touch Monday.