musing about fuel savings

We had 2 days that year where the high temperature was -25F.

I did have to go out one of those days. My (now ex-) wife's Dodge started fine but made the most God-Awful noises. I assume there was no oil flowing in the engine

I can remember clearly when my dad bought a new. 1941 Chevrolet Special Deluxe sedan just shortly before WWII. It came with beauty rings on the wheels, and backup lamps. The lamps operated with a switch under the dash. Easy to forget it was on. There was no radio, no heater, no nothing else, but we thought it was "fully equipped." My folks kept it until 1950 when we bought another "fully equipped" Chevrolet with no heater, no radio, etc. We really are spoiled now.

Dick

Well.... Not sure what you will do then..A 4 cylinder Grand Cherokee or Commander would be a hard sell. I guess they will have to drop the Wrangler's available engines to that 1 liter Suzuki engine or a solar powered electric.

What engine does Arnold have in his Hummers?

Hopefully with the energy crisis and all they will take away the right of states to have more stringent laws than the Federal. Already, any California buyer may buy any Federal-legal car and import it into the state, IF it has more than a certain nomber of miles on it, as a used car.=20

I hope your neighbors all buy CRD Libtys.

I just had to have my WJ inspected for its EPA certification.

The "test" last week was different than ones in the past where a tailpipe exhaust gas sniffer or visual examination was used.

In the current testing they turn your vehicle off, turn the ignition switch on to see if your idiot lights work, start the vehicle to see if any lights come on, turn the engine off and connect to the car's OBD outlet and see if any codes are stored.

So they don't actually check anything different than what you do every morning when you start the car.

My WJ passed but no one knows whether I passed by 1 point or 100. No one knows if I have an excellently maintained vehicle or one that will fail if were tested tomorrow.

The program is being cancelled December 31st because the state determined that the only cars that were failing were, generally, the ones that were exempt from the standards.

The test shows nothing, costs $19.50 (2 years certification), and I had to drive through two ghetto areas to get there.

They're looking for more than stored codes. They're checking to see if all of the OBD II monitors have been run. If not, you don't pass.

All the early 426 castings did, I can remember seeing a set in an auto machine shop in '79 or so and asking. All the fuelers had two plugs and some apparently had three. But NASCAR engines did too.

Road race Aston Martins and Maseratis did too. The street versions didn't, but the wealthy Europeans would promptly have them retrofitted. The port in the head was there, sometimes with a dummy plug and sometimes just undrilled and tapped. The hot setup was one mag and one distributor, for easy starting and excellent top end. But getting them synched was a bugger.

Now electronic ignitions put out way more zap than a mag at ANY speed. Magnetos are for museum pieces like vintage racers and Lycomings.

-- msosborn at msosborn dot com

A generator will self-excite when it is spun fast enough due to residual magnetism. Such as a car or truck being vigorously push started or an aircraft engine unfeathered in flight. The aircraft engine will light anyway because it has mags, but if all the other electrics are dead the alternator won't come back on. The generator will. The car with generator will put out enough juice to make the ignition work, sometimes.

That's why WWII saboteurs used a car generator as a dynamite blasting box. You hook up the wires and wrap a rope around the pulley like on an outboard, and give it a good yank. No battery, and if captured a car generator was a lot easier to explain than the old Wile E. Coyote Du Pont box.

Most alternators will also self-excite IF you pull all the load off it until it reaches breakover voltage. The soft iron rotor retains a small amount of residual magnetism. Not completely reliable or repeatable, but most I played with would come up if I used a voltage threshold on the regulator and isolated the load side. Not as reliable at it as a genrator, but I've never thrown a commutator segment in an alternator, either.

The first (and one of the very few) brand new cars I bought was a 1956 Ford Club Coupe. Radio, heater, hub caps ("wheel covers") were all extra cost options. With rubber floor mats, six cylinder engine,

3-spd manual tranny I th> I can remember clearly when my dad bought a new. 1941 Chevrolet

You obviously are not a pilot. Twin mags are real comforting when the closest thing to level ground anywhere within gliding distance is either a lake surface or strewn with 6 foot boulders. Just like cylinder head temp. We could get much better mileage and power if we could manually lean the mixture - but who wants to drive constant RPM and futz with it? Besides, even half the pilots can't get it right.