Smokey?

Speaking of magazines, does anyone know if Popular Mechanix has any of their old archived stuff available online?

I was fascinated in the late '70's, to read an article by a guy named Smokey back then, who claimed to have modified a Fairlane to get something like 85 MPG. That was back during the oil crisis then and the arab embargo.

I'd love to reread that article and have it evaluated in a modern context.

Reply to
Moon Goddess
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When you checked the magazine's web site, did you see any links to archives?

Reply to
JoeSpareBedroom

That would be Smokey Yunick. I remember reading his columns. There was some discussion of some contraption (the hot vapor carb or some such thing) but it never got commercialized and I doubt that it would have worked in such a way as to get 85mpg out of a Fairlane. Seriously, fuel injection does a pretty good job of getting fuel into the cylinders and burned effectively; it strikes me as more than doubtful that any air-fuel mixing device would do much better than that.

Reply to
DH

Google does.

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Reply to
Jeff

That would be Smokey Yanuck, a car guy and engineer (at least back-yard type) and I think race car driver.

Reply to
Hachiroku

I can't find it...

Reply to
Hachiroku

Yes!

Reply to
Moon Goddess

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Reply to
Go Mavs

Oh the good old days,

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Reply to
Moe

Strange, I can't find any pictures, with a wheat straw in his mouth and the cowboy hat...

Reply to
Hachiroku

This is what he's talking about. I thought that's what it was, but once I SPELLED HIS NAME RIGHT! (it's Yunick, not Yanuck! I guess I have some mental block with the way the correct spelling is pronounced! ;) I was able to find it. It's an abadiated engine (you superheat the gas before putting it into the carb). It's an old trick, used on civilian aircraft, but the drawback is the engine needs to be run almost continuously at a constant speed. That's why it works in aircraft engines.

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Hot Vapor Cycle Engine - HVCE The Adiabatic Engine

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Reply to
Hachiroku

I used to read Smokey Yunick's articles starting about 5th grade. Although he was a talented tinkerer, I don't think his experiments were done under controlled conditions.

Reply to
Ray O

One can bet the farm that if it was a commercially viable, patentable system being used on one of its cars, Henry Ford would have purchased the rights and cornered the market for its cars.

The conspiracy theorists however will tell you the oil companies bought the rights so that Ford, nor anybody else, could built the system LOL

mike

Reply to
Mike Hunter

Smokey was writing for Popular Mechanics back in the 60's when I was a teenager. I bought P.M. just to read him, some of the other stuff in it was interesting also. Anyway, I lost faith in him when he wrote about race cars not using air filters because anything smaller than a medium size rock would burn up in the combustion chamber and not hurt the engine. I figured that he really didn't know what he was talking about and I stopped reading his stuff. The 85 mpg Fairlane sounds like one of his pipe dreams.

Jack

Reply to
Retired VIP

If I recall, it had something to do with preheating the intake gases using the exhaust manifold to heat the intake? It's been some years. :)

Reply to
Moon Goddess

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