Until Roadkill proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, the idea of a leaf-blower acting like a supercharger was one of the most pie-in-the-sky suggestions out there. There was merit to the idea of using lawn equipment to create a poor-man’s forced induction system, but really, who would try it? We all know the story: enter Freiburger and Finnegan, one beat but surprisingly snotty 1978 Chevy Monza, and quite a few leaf blowers. Done and done. But so long as the automobile has been around there have been theories on how to make things better, be it performance, economy, or drivability.
Case in point: I get a text message: This may come off as a newb question… does throttle response increase if you had a gonormous vacuum reservoir? cause i got an idea… the more I think about it the more it makes sense that it would have benefits.
Hmm…not that I’m well-versed in this, but ok, some thought has been given. Continue.
When i say a giant reservoir… I mean like 2- 5 gallon buckets.
…wait, what?
Seems to me that the point of an engine is to provide vacuum to the butterfly plates. So what happens when you stomp on the gas… and your vacuum doesn’t drop below 10 until your really movin’? Because you have some giant-assed reserve vacuum, or would this work better on a drag car with too small of a carb? Or is toying with the idea too far fetched or never thought of? Is this over both our heads?
…and we’ve de-railed straight into an orphanage, resulting in an explosion. I claim ignorance, and return to my pizza.
I don’t pretend to understand completely what is being asked here, but think about the surface question: Is there a way to create a vacuum reservoir using two five-gallon buckets for aiding takeoff? You guys can tell me below if it’s a legit concept or not, but I know this guy: there is a sketch right now on his coffee table that involves two 5-gallon buckets like you’d buy at a parts store, a ton of hoses, and fire coming out of the back end.
So what is the most outlandish, off-the-wall scenario that you’ve been asked? Have you or anyone else attempted it? And did anyone survive?
(And if someone can give me a solid answer to this guy’s theory so I can give him a proper answer, that’d be helpful. Thank you!)
There’s always the old standby: “Direct Exhaust Injection”.
I think it came up on a Camaro forum years back, a guy wanted a turbocharger but couldn’t afford it, so he reasoned that he could cut out the middleman and just pump the exhaust gasses in a closed loop into the intakes, thereby pressurizing the cylinders.
Being a Toyota 4×4 guy, I’d had the experience of seeing a newb on a forum blunder massively. On older IFS trucks the front suspension was torsion bar based, and a cheap lift was to crank the t-bars and drop in a ball-joint spacer. Well, the kid got himself a 2005+ Taco which had coil-over based IFS and didn’t know that there weren’t any t-bars. He ended up romping on the body mount bolts for the front sway bar and getting pissed that he did’t get any free lift. Turns out the kid worked for a major auto parts company we’ve no doubt all been to.
Oh yeah, and the guy who wanted port and polish but couldn’t afford a head job on his Audi, so he ran sand through the intake hoping the air pressure would sandblast the runners and combustion chambers.
I recently read that thread. Good lord…
I always thought that the cyclone unit from a Dyson vacuum cleaner would make an excellent supercharger – all you need to do is remove it, fit a pulley and with some neat bracketry mount it to the engine.
Remember, Bang Shifters – you read it h!ere first
I’m still trying to figure out what the fuel bubbler “ionizer” things the hypermiler guys want to fit up to their car actually do.
I’m unclear on this vacuum reservoir idea, vacuum goes away when you open the throttle. Is he wanting to suck a fresh charge of air and gasoline into the 5 gallon cans? Fire coming out of unintended locations does sound like a distinct possibility.
Wow……well, as I understand it, manifold vacuum is generated due to a restriction in the induction system (such as the throttle plate). Vacuum drops at power because the throttle is open, reducing the restriction. A 100% efficient engine would have 0 manifold vacuum.
Otherwise, why not just plumb a Dyson to the intake manifold?
I like the rubber camshaft idea. Centrifugal force at high rpm causes the lobes to grow, increasing lift and duration………
Well I’ve always wanted to mount a small displacement Wankel (the one I had in mind is what the Army uses on the Shadow drone) beside my Cummins. The Wankel would drive a super charger feeding the Cummins and the Wankel’s exhaust would drive a small turbo placed compound with the normal large turbo mounted to the diesel. throttles would be linked of course. I told my friend who is an engineer and he told me to quit sniffing brake kleen.
If that’s what it takes to come up with ideas like that, then we need more people sniffing Brake Kleen.
A compound-turbo Wankelcharged Cummins would be probably the most incredible thing ever.
Thanks. I thought it would be cool. Also at the time I could have got a couple of those wankels “real cheap” from work. (They get replaced based on flight hours). My friend’s point was valid, something about weight, complexity, efficiency ect. but it would be cool.
I know a fellow outside of Austin that has a Honda AC15, aka a 50cc Honda Dream, a tiny retro racing bike that has the build of a Swiss watch and the looks to back it up. He’s so full-on mental about speed, he’s supercharged this 50cc bike.
Yeah, you’re all like monotone “wow” and not very impressed. But there’s this:
The supercharger is powered by a tiny 10cc model aircraft engine.
Here’s the kicker: the 10cc engine has its own supercharger (self driven, lest this become a discussion on fractals). I love bonkers engineering!
Not very impressed nothing, I love anything that’s pretty far outside the box!
Running the blower on on its own motor is a great way to eke every pony out of the main engine with minimal load, and the tiny blower on the blower motor is just icing on the cake!
There was the Harleycharged dragster that was featured here sometime in the past.
I’ve wanted to take a Buick V6 and have the crank drive a screw or roots blower on a Buick 455 to take the torsional load off of the cranksnout in an effort to try and keep it together longer (or at higher power) for an all Buick AA Lakester/Streamliner LSR car.
I like the WankelChargedSuperCumminsThingy. Cost and complexity be damned, you should build it!
Former boss / ASE Master Tech told me we should ditch the sway bars on our (abandoned) LeMons racer so it would get more wheel articulation, making it faster around the track.
I have data logs to prove that a ginormous reservoir below the throttle blades can produce “interesting” results (in a very bad way) before you get anywhere near 5 gallons. This was from somebody who had tried to make an EFI manifold for a 1.5 liter British four banger, didn’t consider plenum volume, and ended up with a plenum about four times his engine displacement. It took about half a second from snapping the throttle closed until the engine started pulling any vacuum – and the engine power didn’t start going down until the vacuum came up. But that was more carelessness than bad theory.
The guys who think that they can get more fuel economy by using power from the engine to drive a hydrogen generator tend to be a pretty good source of wild theories. The one that takes the cake was the guy who claimed he was producing something called “orgone” that powered the engine by imploding instead of exploding. And he wanted to run 90 degrees of ignition advance to make this work “correctly”. Just out of curiousity, I did an engine cycle analysis of what sort of power output you could get with an engine where fuel imploded instead of exploding, and concluded that under ideal circumstances you’d have something like a 3 hp from a 5.0 V8. You’re basically re-inventing the Newcommen engine all over again, with the same inefficiencies.