Thanks for all the info. I was just curious about the whole thing, I figured it wasn't true but I still like to know for sure.

 

Well, I guess that Smokey Yunicks Rabbit & Fiesta test vehicles which yielded a gain of almost double the hp & tq, all but eliminated but 1 pint of coolant, cranked out the 1/4 mile at around mid/low 14 seconds (IIRR) and both got 80+ mpg, reduced emissions by like something in the 50% range, which Hot Rod magazine did a feature on about 10 years + ago prior to his death. The company was established in Florida (IIRR) with financial partners from Transamerica life. IIRR again, GM purchased the company with the agreement in writing to bring the product to market in X number of years (which of course never happened). This epilog was well documented both in Hot Rod magazine during the final development stages and later written up in several high tech automotive journals.

With regards to the Pogue carb, the patent was purchased by Ford (IIRR) and back in the late 70's the family was selling copies of the blue prints with photos for $100. The Pogue carburator was built in limited quantity, installed on a Buick (IIRR or other large 50's GM car), by a family member of close friend on the Pogue's in San Pedro, Ca. The car was driven from California to Detroit stopping at pre-planned large GM dealers along the way. The mpg doubled and was well documented for it's day.....

Even the original Diesel engine...if Dr. Diesel could see what they have done to his engine he would be turning over in his grave! Considering all of todays technology, Dr. Diesel's engine was much more efficient in terms of SBFC than todays engines!

 

Show me the documentation. This is all anecdotal.

Take a class in organic chemistry, or better yet, thermodynamics. Then come back and tell me you believe all this stuff.

For under $400 today you can buy an aircraft carburator with no float chamber and no venturi. At least these companies do not make outlandish claims in order to sell a product. Put one on you car and see what happens.

http://www.revmasteraviation.com/pro...etor/index.htm

http://www.aeroconversions.com/carb_index.html

Jim

 

They would have to pass the class also! Those are some difficult classes to say the least.

 

I took two semesters of thermo, and passed, barely. These were not easy, but the knowlege valuable. The fun part was running the jet engine in the lab and calculating efficiency. It was only about two percent! This was a 1950's British helicopter engine.

Jim

 

RomerB2, A friend of mine had an '82 Chevy Citation that got 50+ mpg. He wasn't even a weekend mechanic (he changed his own oil/filter but that was about it), but his dad on the other hand was an engineer for some aeronautics contractor. When his dad saw his bright orange carburetor, he told my friend to never take his car to the chevy dealer for service because, "That's an experimental carb; they would be required to take off that orange carb. and put in a 'stock' carb."
Anyway, 50+ isn't the same as 200 mpg, but it was alot more than the 20mpg he should have been getting. Also, his dad explained that if you consider that the oil companies have changed the molecular structure of gasoline since the time of Pogue (and others, by the way!) it might bring you closer to 200 mpg than to the 55 mpg or so that he got. The oil companies made gas less volatile and less likely to explode and injure people (that was the reason they gave anyway ...). The volatility of the old type of gas allowed it to atomize almost byitself into very fine, very combustible particles. Gasoline IS such a low efficient fuel BECAUSE OF THE CHANGES MADE TO IT. So, no you can't go back to the 200mpg carb (I think his dad said it was likely closer to 250mpg ... ?) because the gas we have is different. But his dad said that if you got an experimental waiver from the government to make a legal alcohol stil, you can make close to 99% alcohol and experiment with that! Then, if you know what your doing inside the carb., you can surely get up over 100mpg!! Hope this helps. I don't have documentation of what he said, but in my opinion, he had no reason to lie, and too much knowledge to blindly believe engineering myths.

 

Gasoline today contains less, not more BTUs per gallon. Pure alcohol has much less energy content than gasoline. How is that going to result in more mpgs?

Modern gasoline is less volatile for emissions, safety had nothing to do with it. The other big difference is octane rating. Straight-run gasoline, right out of the distillation tower had an antiknock index of only about 70. There is not enough of that gasoline produced per barrel of oil, so other distillation fractions were "cracked" to get more yield of gasoline. By the 1940's, because of WWII aircraft, alkylation was used to not only make still more gasoline, but much higher octane. If one were to use 1930's gasoline in a modern car, regardless of carb or FI system, detonation would destroy the engine in short order.

Jim

 

Just think of all the brilliant engineering & scientific minds that work in the automotive & related fields. All this brain-power, but only some obscure guy from Canada's past has the solution to eeking out 100 mpg...

 

Pronstar,

Your comment made me think about, WW 11. Hitler, apparently, was wondering why Britain was coming up with all these ideas, like Radar, that was developed by one guy, not an Industry of top scientists an engineers.

His underling (weren't they all) responded by saying it was the culture of Great Britain that fostered individual resourcefulness and individuality that was the kettle that brewed many great ideas.

Old Henry Ford hisself, was no Rhodes Scholar Engineer, but he sure came up with a lot of ideas, like the assembly line, etc., that turned industry around in the world.

Occasionally there appears , someone with little formal training, but in nonetheless brilliant in his/her approach to problems, that comes up with magnificent ways of doing things.

I'm not saying Pogue, is such an animal, because I don't really know if he was or not.

But big brainpower, usually relies on 'conventional' knowledge, until someone changes that convention around. Ie; Darwin, Einstein, etc.

 

IMHO, these are essentially all scams, or at the very best, measuring mpg in a way that is not representative of real life usage. First and foremost, there is physics and chemistry, and they put certain upper limits on what is achievable.

If someone claims 10% or even 25% increase, that could be true. But 200 mpg can only be BS. I think some of the 2 seater Honda CRXs (late 80's or early 90's) were capable of 50 mpg as-is on a highway -- a small lightweight car with small frontal area and rerasonably aerodynamic body. Motorcycles with smaller mass, engine, and frontal area can do even better than that.

To get high mpg, one either need to reduce losses (frictional, air drag, accessories, start/stop, etc.) or make the engine more efficient. Some of these losses are more or less fixed and based on the size of the car, others like air drag depends heavily on speed and shape, and some are traffic dependent.

With everything else being equal (same car, same speed over a given distance) we can assume that these losses are constant.

That means that we need to raise the efficiency of the engine, like burn the fuel more efficiently. The maximum possible efficiency of an internal combustion engine can be deduced from the Carnot cycle, and the attainable efficiency depends on the temerature in the combustion chamber -- higher temperature means higher efficiency. So in essence, the temperature need to be raised in the combustion chamber to get higher efficiency. This can be accomplished (within reason, of course) with higher compression and less or no cooling (adiabatic engine!); however, there are some problems:
a) at high enough temperature nitrogen really start to burn ad create various NOx gases (they can be dealt with, however)
b) lubricants may not withstand that temperature
c) the engine itself may not withstand that temperature -- ceramic engines have been tried , but they had other problems

INHO, the NOx emission requirement pretty much limits the temperature of combustion chamber (although I've read about precisely measured NH3 [ammonia] injection into the exhaust gases to deal with NOx); and consequently, the attainable efficiency.

If NOx emission requirements weren't present, that could make engines somewhat more efficient (maybe up to 20% - 25%), but there's still b) and c) that limits how high an engine can go. Still not enough for 200 mpg, or even just 100 mpg.

 

I have heard this fable many times with different cars, always with a friend of a friend and sometimes with a colorful carb/distributor/etc supposedly to mark it as "different"... This type of story usually comes from too many hours doing the Budweiser curl somewhere. It is always repeated and repeated and repeated as the gospel truth however...

As many times and in as many variations as I have heard it there must be thousands of these "special" vehicles out there hiding...

I remember the experimental high efficiency engine by Smokey Yunick. It required materials to make it operable in real life outside the lab that are still not available today which is why it has not gone into production. I still hear of materials developments occasionally which are bringing the technology closer tho.

 

To believe much of this stuff, you must carefully ignore the yearly efforts of a whole bunch of engineering students to achieve record high mileages. http://students.sae.org/competitions/supermileage/
Funny all those talented and intelligent folks overlooking things as simple as Pogue carburetors and all the other gimmicks year after year. Not.

 

Torque1st, this was not a friend of a friend, this was my best friend and his father, I saw the carb with my own eyes and no, none of us were drunk ... I don't even drink beer. His dad is more reputable to me then all of the internet sludge combined. I spent alot of time with him and he is no phony. He knew his stuff. He knew a lot of classified stuff too (he worked for a gov't contractor). Besides, I rode with him in his 50mpg car all the time! Even if the rest of what his dad said was foo-bar, the money spent at the pump and the miles driven were experienced by me! We have shared these things with others and I'm sure that as the story got repeated the car changed or the numbers ... that happens with all sorts of things that are true.
The fact remains, gasoline has been changed since the 20's and 30's; present day studies can't match-up because it's a different fuel. It is now more difficult to burn and burn completely (you can still get into trouble with gasoline vapors ... but it's not like it used to be). Now that is simple chemistry.
My response was for RomerB2. I wasn't trying to antagonize anyone. He wanted some info. and I had some experience to share. So, for what it's worth ...

 

if they has 200 MPG carburetor, the Japanese would have it in there cars and sell it in the USA

 

Somewhere, you just know there's a huge warehouse full of secrets:
- 200 mpg carbs
- UFOs
- perpetual-motion machine
- fission reactor
- old socks
- the Ark from Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Macaulay Culkin's career after Home Alone