Another Viable alternative to The extremely High, gasoline prices is Fuel vaporization.... what got me started in this was an article I found in an old mechanics Illustrated magazine that showed a few pictures of this fell'a in Nebraska who converted his Model A ford pickup to run on gasoline vapor
he claimed a whopping 400 MPG ! I got close to 100 MPG once with my ford pinto but nothing even approaching the 400 mpg mark he claimed
my ford Pinto got 80 MPG and that was a unit I made up that had a coil inside a 3" steel plumbing pipe that was filled with hot water from the heater core of the car.... a 190deg. thermostat was put in and that was the jests of the vaporizer from the vaporizer it ran directly to a needle valve that went to the base of the carburetor at the vacuum port.... no fancy automatic metering here it was by guess and by golly running this system !
although I found later that I could have installed a propane carburetor and have had normal throttle control
the Idea was to start the car like normal and let it warm up once it reached operating tempiture you would turn off the gas going to the carburator and open the needle valve that restricted the flow of gasoline vapor....
it would stagger and run poorly for a few minutes but eventually clear out and run real smooth...
accelerating was a bit tricky as you had to turn the needle valve to the right position for that opening of the throttle.... not an easy thing to do so what I found I did was hold the throttle at a certain position and then adjust the needle valve to open, so the engine would run good I had it on the car for about 3 months and the problem was that it didn't have enough capacity to handle 65 mph on the main road and if I pushed it too hard vaporized fuel would get through the vaporizer and cause the engine to stagger and jerk badly..... the fuel line going to the vaporizer had to have a check valve in it
so the pressure of the vaporizer would not push into the fuel pump....
.... expanding on what I learned with that system I made a change and put the coil directly on the exhost manifold.... that worked fantastic I never ran out of vapor again with that method....
but it was a P.I.T.A. to use ! so I took it off....
later I made a completely diferent vaporizer that was heated by the exhaust
infact I ran the exhaust through a 1/4" steel plate box with a carb float valve in it and tried that on my toyota truck.... it worked but the vapor was recondencing before it reached the cylinders so it was only partially successful and the hand made butterfly valve to allow vapor into the air cleaner intake pipe was less than good by a long shot...so I built a heat rizer to end all heatrisers ! with 4 or 5 1 1/4" conduit pipes wrapped around the exhaust pipe... and fed the heated air to the intake... That worked !
at 65 mph it stayed vapor and the engine ran great ... **** hit the fan and I lost my job and I had to have reliable transportation so I took it all off there and saved it... I think I may still have it actually !
but i got it working real good about the time I had to stop playing with it !
and I never did get a MPG reading on it
...you see when the first jet engines came out the air force was very proud of their new technology but the flight time was terribly short ! 10 minutes !
hardly worth flying for that short of time.... however they came up with a process that vaporized the fuel and expanded that time to 30 minutes and they have been using vaporization on jet engines every sense !
so it would stand to reason that if I got 20 mpg before vaporization I should get as much as 60 mpg with vaporization ...so I thought it was worth a try
and that is using the governments data ...other privet parties of the time claimed 120 mpg and that claim was repeated by several people !
but no body I know of ever got the 400mpg that was stated in that article I found....
little tid bits I learned along the way
gasoline vaporizes at 110 degrees
gasoline expands over 600 times when it is vaporized
vaporized gasoline looses around 20% of its bang when it is vaporized
so the engine does have a little less power.
the ignition timing needs to be changed just like HHO gas as it burns much easier ... I think I set mine at TDC but I can't remember, or 5 degrees BTDC
instead of 12 degrees BTDC....being stock.
...
out of all the gas saving things I have played with fuel vaporization shows the most promise....
heat the fuel with the exhaust pipe and use a propane carb and a real good heat rizer ! LOL
....the problem with this setup is the engine needs to start on raw gasoline as everything is cold...
I got around that by running a 1/4" copper tubing from the electric fuel pump to a needle valve and then to the vacuum port on the base of the propane carb.... so when it was cold I would just crack the needle valve and hit the starter...and keep opening the needle valve till the engine fired up.
this was on my Old 1968 Dodge 318 V8 engine but I had trouble on that engine with the vapor re-condensing to droplets before it got into the cylinders ... an extensive heat riser was made and it cured the problem
the intake air needs to be at least 110 degrees and that is hard to do for the volume a V-8 uses !
Running vapor on that Dodge truck made the carburetor form frost all over it and also the intake manifold...
before the heat riser. and it didn't run very good as a result...
once the heat riser was installed it ran very smoothly but the Jet in the Propane carburetor was way too small
it would idle fine but when you tried to give it throttle it bogged and tried to die...
I never did get the propane carb to work like it should have.
the setup I used on the Dodge truck with a 318 single BBL carb and automatic transmition that got around 12 MPG
was a 3/8" copper tube about 25' of it filled with sand blasting sand and crimped off on both ends and wrapped around the exhaust pipe as close to the exhaust manifold as I could get it... it then was wrapped in insulation and tinfoil ... this truck had duel pipes so I used the other side for the heat riser an electric fuel pump fed a hand made check valve on line to the bottom of the coil a switch on the dash turned the fuel pump on and off and a rod went through the dash into the engine compartment to a valve just after the check valve so I could shut off fuel to the vaporizer and yet still have fuel to the idler circuit i made so I could start the thing....
i had another valve inline on the idler circuit so I could shut it off and then use the vaporizer ( I didn't bother putting a knob through the dash for that valve as I had the hood up anyways....
I was this close to having it running perfect and then My mother died....and Sh#@ hit the fan..we moved back to the Ranch and I never got back to it.
Bob........