Alternative Energy, getting higher MPG from todays cars.

When I was 12 or 13, was the energy crisis of the 1970's. My dad's car got 6 mpg and this made for an expensive change for the family, in filling the car with gasoline. Nothing though, compared to us paying $1.40 a liter, that we experienced recently for almost 2 years. I hope that the people who orchestrated this modern pillage of the North American economies, has made enough cash to just live on their salaries without figuring out a way to continue the rape, of the modern society.

Anyway, I was always mechanical in mind, as a kid and wondered how to increase the mileage of those old cars and trucks. First, I worked up detailed drawings of the present cars we owned and then set about figuring out how to increase mileage. Next was aerodynamics, even at 12, I knew a brick running down the road was no easy task, it had lots of drag, so I redrew the front end, smoothed it out and got something close to the Chrysler Intrepid. The car for this project was oour then new, 1973 NewPort, 400 cubic inch engine, 250 to 350 hp, 0 to 60 mph in 6 seconds or less. An 18 foot boat that ran 4000 lbs with no problem and although it would not spin the tires or another thing like than, it did run fast and would set you back in your seat and pull anything you wanted to attach to the hitch on the back. Still, it looked like a box of Kleenex running done the road.

After that was the engine. I came up with an idea to pull a couple of rockers out of the engine, to reduce the overall HP built up by the engine and therefore reduce the fuel used. I found the "Brake Specific Fuel Consumption tables" for the particular engine. [I think I had to go down to UNB Engineering sometime later to find this information, but it opened a whole new avenues of research then!]

Back to the engine, the only problem was working on vibration and setting it up so it would not hurt the engine. At the time, 100,000 miles was time to get rid of any car. I figured that if the oil was changed a couple of times, you could get 200,000 miles with no problem on those old engines. Look at the taxi drivers of the day. They bought the car and never changed the oil for the entire time they owned it.

Now I figure that everyone knows that a direct drive transmission, like a standard, is more efficient than the automatics that were prevalent in cars of that day. [not much has changed, 40 years later and trying to find a standard transmission in anything except the base model is impossible.] So I looked for standard transmissions that would fit the 400 engine. I found a whole host of truck transmissions that would fit and do the job, but they had close ration gears, nothing near an over drive. BTW - overdrive is a gear ratio which is less than 1:1. Such as the final drive in my 4X4 truck is something like 0.89:1. As well, those old engines were expected to turn at 3500 to 4000 rpm [revolutions per minute] while driving done the road. Today we know that the most efficient place is to have the engine turning at as close to the Max Torque produced by the engine; at the highway speed that you expect the vehicle; to be at, most of the time.

Besides as I continued to check on those old truck transmissions, and actually visited junk yards to look this stuff over, I figured out that they had been designed in the 1950's, heavy gears and large transmissions, heavy cases. Never going to be fuel efficient. It would take 20 years, and the advent of computer graphics and CA design which allowed for the decrease in weight of the parts, by designing closer to the mechaincal limits of the materials used. With this, we could get cars with 20 to 40 mpg.

Back to the kid design idea, so to start, we put in a manual transmission. Then we put in a high ratio rear end. 4.11 to 5.30 would not be a problem. In the normal setup for trucks and muscle cars, this would have been a vehicle that would get almost a gallon [or two] per mile. The RPM would be so high, that you would never be able to get anywhere. The engine would be running at over 5000 rpm and it would last about 50,000 miles, if you were lucky, due to the piston speed of the walls of the cylinder. This high speed on those walls normally is a killer of the engine in the end.

So the trick now is to take a second transmission and turn it around and hook it up to the truck trans and then put the input shaft to the rear end. In effect, you would now have 2 transmissions and therefore 16 possible gear shift combination's. As I did more research, I found that there were things like 2 speed rear ends. They were operated by air or electricity. They really did not work well, because the actuators were prone to failure. Fail and your stuck without a viable way to move the car or truck.

When I went through the hand math calculations, [No computers then or calculators either, all hand work] and through the actual gearing combination's, I did these charts with the gear ratios verses rpm, for each of the combination's. It was a lot of hand work. In the end, I figured that we could have a truck running at 60 mph, and rolling along at 1000 rpm. And if you wanted to increase speed of the vehicle, just step on it a little bit and you still could have another possible 4 gear positions available, as I wanted to have a top speed of 100 mph.

Today, I look at the Maximum Torque verses RPM for the engine and then figure out whether that is reasonable. Once this is on paper, I drive on a quiet road, with the engine sitting at that RPM and see how it responds. In the real world, there can be things, like a hesitation in the engine, due to some quirk in the fuel delivery system, that makes this impractical. You need to check it and make a decision without blindly saying that this so and so will work. Sometimes things just don't!

Maximum Torque is what pushes you up a hill, at the lowest RPM, so hitting that sweet spot, is the best thing to do for any engine. My Ford F150, has a max torque right at 2000 rpm. So I drive all the time, with the engine set right at 2000 RPM, and get 26 mpg in warm weather, less in the cold.

My motorcycle - a 1982 Kawasaki 750 twin, 48HP and a max torque at around 2800 rpm was way out of range when I got it. The rear gears were 16 tooth to 38. I spent 2 months doing calculations of the changes to the rear gears and came up with the rear gear of 30 teeth to the front 16 teeth. Before - I was running about 38 mpg at 80 to 100km/hr and at highway speeds, the engine was up around 5000 rpm and more. Red line was 8000 or 9000 so who really cares, except that I cannot stand running an engine, any faster than needed. So, in 2006, I changed the rear sprocket to a new 30 tooth gear and took it out for a week long test. The first tank of gas with just one rider was 64 mpg. 5000 km later, I get an average of 55 mpg when my sweetheart and I are traveling together. So for me, it is successful. Increased the MPG by almost 18 mpg with 2 of us traveling, almost doubled it when just myself traveling. Neat eh?

As for the truck. - I continue working on 2 projects. One is to add a mixture of alcohol and water to decrease the combustion and prevent spark-knock. If you need proof of the logic, look to the Alcohol Dragsters that run almost 100% alcohol and are running 1000 horsepower to boot.

Second I am working on adding a second engine, available to the truck on an electric clutch and locked to the rear axle to provide a separate drive system. I figure that I can run the truck along at 55 mph with less than 20 HP to do it. Engines in this size use something like 32 oz per hour, per the whole 20 HP being used. So if you are not using all 20 HP, your mileage will be above this. I am running the calculations on having a more [aerodynamic] drag efficient profile for the truck too. Speed and calculations of fuel consumption per HP needed appear to give me a real world MPG use of something like 35 to 70 MPG.

There is some basic wiring that needs to be added too, such as switch systems to allow me turn off the main engine when running on the road and when hitting a hill, hitting the starter for the main engine when needed, pushing in the clutch, dropping it and shoving it into 5th to climb the hill. Once over the hill, hit the kill switch and your back on the auxilliary engine and your electrics and all are on the smaller engine as well.

[Copyright - David Ryder - 1974 and 2009]