Quote:
Originally Posted by Gravdigr
I say we put it at TW's house...
...or a lake in Cameroon.  |
ISWYDT, Gravedigr. Fizzy....
Note also tw's half truths, fanatically held and desperately chanted, re the American automobile (all American autos, he says) about some half-vast conspiracy to hold auto fuel efficiency and horsepower for engine displacement below some certain level -- for tw to complain arbitrarily about.
Tw's not the technician he poses as. Not even in theory. He won't shut up, and he doesn't put up. He doesn't even solicit clients here for the service in the next paragraph.
Fact is, if he were that good, he'd be personally reworking his car's engine so it'd run six weeks on ten gallons of regular, with water/methanol injection and running cylinder linings and valves at orange-red heat for high mileage. And not incidentally, delivering oxides of nitrogen enough to smog over all of Detroit. That's what really high combustion temperature in accordance with a large difference of heat from ignition to exhaust, yielding tremendous efficiency at making power from fuel, does -- if the heat-engine's an air breather.
A red hot heat-engine has a hellacious power output for its size and weight, but iron engines don't last any too well at those temps. The metal of the engine, valves, and pistons limit the temps you can burn gasoline at. And refractory ceramics are brittle, and have a short mechanical wear life to boot. Heat energy not propelling the vehicle is dumped via the radiator, circulating water through the block.
No wonder some car guys like turbochargers to scavenge energy from the exhaust.
Tw's horsepower posits all reckon without acceleration, which higher horsepower engine output adds up to considerably more than the power required to maintain cruise. Reading the tachometer in your dashboard will tell you as much -- the vrooom needle is well around the dial in max acceleration, more nearly approaching redline than at nearly any other time or regime. At 65-70 mph, reasonable highway cruise speeds, the needle's well back down: graphically showing you the engine is not generating as much to overcome air resistance and push the vehicle down the road at a pace established by equilibrium between engine output and wind resistance as it was when it was accelerating the vehicle. Engine horsepower rating is listed as a function of a certain RPM. You can do some math plugging in the lower RPM of cruise to give you how much horsepower the engine is generating then. Horsepower over and above that is not wasted; it is waiting, in reserve.
Returning to his half truths -- what our ole boy has done is built a conspiracy air castle from -- get this -- General Motors' management culture. It has a rather strange but legalistic root: General Motors was never prosecuted (nor even threatened) in an antitrust lawsuit. Yet for decades, it behaved as if in mortal fear that it would be. This defensiveness held back both on GM sales and GM technological innovation for decades, the one influencing the other: not having to push for the last sale, they had no push for innovations either. This, I think, affected only GM. Ford, for instance, never had to worry about it, and had a better idea. (This dates back towards the end of the GM tech doldrums.)
He wants us to believe it was all a malevolent conspiracy, glibly alleging it was for somebody to monetize. I put it to you: who needs a conspiracy when you have a culture? Aaaand, also note, how little tw is doing to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.