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AutoNotes #11, 02/08/94 copr. 1994, Dave Williams
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BIX: 'dave2' CIS: 72571,3542 [email protected]
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The sway bar end links on the '94 Ford Taurus are made of plastic.
"Ultraform copolymer acetal resin" to be exact. Yuk. Let me know how
it works when you hit a pothole on a cold Minnesota day.
BASF - yeah, the magnetic media people - are trying to interest Detroit automakers in their new plastic pedal assemblies. Yep, gas, brake, and clutch pedals, their pivots, and the bracket, all in one nylon plastic assembly. I don't care how much CAD/CAM software they used, you're talking about 400 pounds or more of pedal load on a panic stop, multiplied 4 or 5 to one to the master cylinder. A panic stop on a cold day, and I'd be worried about snapping the pedal off. No thanks, there are just some parts God intended to be made out of steel.
Chevy's 4.3 Vortec V6 gets plastic valve covers this year. Chevy says they're quieter, and they save money. How much money does Chevy save on a $15,000 vehicle? 35 cents per cover, or 70 cents per car. And they quiet engine noise by 3.5 dbA.
Chrysler's Neons will be using a plastic intake. They're claiming they're the first US-built automobiles to do so, but I guess they never heard of the Cadillac Northstar. Anyway, the Neon's manifold is made of Nylon 6/6 injection molded around a tin/bismuth core. The metal core has a lower melting point than the plastic, and is removed by simply melting it out, just like lost-wax casting. The nylon melts at 565F, the metal at only 300F. Why isn't wax used? My best guess is that it would tend to flow at injection molding pressures.
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Britain's Ricardo Consulting Engineers firm has developed a new type
of differential. It's a variable-torque posi, and from the drawing in
Automotive Industries it looks like a type of cam and yoke mechanism.
The text of the article says it depends on lubricant film and pressure
for operation. Looks like we'll have to wait for a better article to
find out how it works. Ricardo has been around since 1919 and Sir
Harry's book "The High Speed Internal Combustion Engine" is still a
basic reference, so it's not like these guys just got off the boat.
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Mazda has at least one 13B rotary powered Miata running around. It's
a testbed for their hydrogen fueled Wankel. They also have a 13B
powered 626 test car.
Nobody's said what the range is for the hydrogen cars. Hydrogen is bulky stuff, and Mazda is supposedly storing it in some sort of hydride form, heating it to release the hydrogen. Sounds even lower density to me. Besides the problem of *getting* hydrogen to fuel the car with, the size of the tanks are going to severely limit either range or cargo capacity. At a rough guess, a hydrogen car would have many of the same tradeoffs as an electric.
The hydrogen motor supposedly injects the hydrogen into the combustion chamber through a separate hydrogen port, apart from the air port. Thus, all mixing takes place in the chamber.
I mentioned Mazda's Miller cycle engine a couple of issues ago. More info - 2.2 liter, 4 valve V6, supercharged. Mazda claims a CR of 8:1 and an expansion ratio of 10:1, nowhere near as ambitious as the old Crower Mileage System. For all practical purposes, it's a supercharged 8:1 2.2 liter engine, therefore Mazda's claim of 50% more torque is reasonable. No Miller cycle engine will ever even match an Otto cycle engine for power output at lower RPMs unless it's crutched by a blower of some sort.
Actually, this whole "Miller cycle" thing is a farce. It's just a big camshaft, and those have been around ever since engineers discovered overlap. What goes around comes around, etc.
The Design News article on the Mazda Miller cycle engine gives all figures in metric, except for rating horsepower as "220 ps." Since when is anyone using old German "pferdestarke," superceded by metric watts long ago?
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Many of the car magazines are going nuts, ooh'ing and aah'ing
Mistibishi's new retractable hardtop on the 3000GT. Like Honda's Del
Sol, it's an old '50s Ford idea. I guess these new "journalist" types
running the car magazines now never heard of a Ford Skyliner.
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Off on a different tangent, Bede airplane kits are back. The BD-10
is $250,000 (and you put it together), plus another $100,000 for the
engine. It's a little jet, rated at 595mph, though Bede claims it's
"theoretically capable" of Mach 1.4. Bede also claims it's "the first
high performance kit-built jet." I guess he doesn't remember the
BD5-J, though he might not have actually sold any. My old ROTC unit
had bought a BD-5, and Bede never sent all the parts we paid for.
Caveat emptor, und so weiter.
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Budget Rent-A-Car just ordered 500 Jaguar XJ-6s for their rental
fleet. I guess they figure not everyone is on a budget. It's
reportedly Jaguar's largest single sale.
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Design News had an article on composites in race cars and sports
equipment, but when discussing the drivers of F1 cars, they used the
oh-so-politically-correct "he or she" instead of "he" (or "they",
which some English books suggest for unknown sex.) Get real - how
many female Formula One drivers are out there?
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GM has been quietly marketing their "Vision Enhancement System" to
police departments. It's a car-mounted infrared vision system
developed by Delco and Hughes. They're quite proud of their
invention, but I guess they didn't know a British company was selling
a very similar system about 20 years ago, for use by fire and rescue
teams.
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The proposed Volvo-Renault merger fell through. Volvo's shareholders
weren't real happy about giving a foreign company much control, and
Renault is still a ward of the French government, enjoying special
protection and benefits.
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Dave McClellan, the chief engineer in charge of developing the
current Corvette, has resigned from GM and gone to work for Porsche's
American design branch.
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Mercedes claims it has developed an "efficient" air conditioning
and heating system for electric vehicles. Its major feature seems to
be use of a dehumidifier. A plain old GM Harrison air conditioner
takes around 10hp to drive, and I have no idea how much heat is pumped
through the average heater/defroster. Car heaters generally use
"free" waste heat, but there's nothing free with electrics. I'd guess
2000 to 3000 watts goes for heat in the winter, not to mention the
juice it takes for things like electric defoggers, windshield wipers,
headlights, and the like. Now, if you could get rid of those
batteries and run a *real long* extension cord...
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Toyota's Japanese-market Carina sedan now comes with what they claim
is the first combustion pressure sensor used in a production engine.
This is a nice piece of technology - it's a sensor that's screwed into
the head, just like a spark plug. Monitoring combustion pressure is
a more accurate way of controlling the spark than by using a knock
sensor. Once it knocks, it's too late. Hopefully the sensors will
show up in US models soon, and we technoids can scam them.
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