On Cars

What is it with our love affair with cars? When you’re single you want fast, sleek and sexy, like the women you want to entertain. Then you get married, you get the van or the wagon or the four door sedan. Is that like “old reliable”? Your life doesn’t have to be over just because your woman wants a car that matches her.

I’ll keep my sports cars right to the end, someone will need to pry that steering wheel out of my cold, dead hand. I like to feel like part of the machine. When I drive my wifes Cirrus, it feels like I am piloting a boat. It’s smooth and comfortable but just doesn’t have the response I need. When I drive our Tiburon GT, it’s ok, but it’s still a little rice rocket. It is pretty well made and has a fair bit of push to it, but it just isn’t tuned to feel the road. At least not the way I want to feel the road. To make matters worse, it’s front whell drive. I was trained to do donuts and brake spins on rear wheel drive cars. And anyway, 330R40-17’s on the rear of a front wheel drive would look good, but are kinda pointless. I don’t like pointless.

Then there’s my Fiero GT. Now that’s a toy and it’s mid-engine, rear wheel drive. It’s like driving a go cart with a rocket engine. If you want to feel the road and really know just how lame our civil engineers are, run some 90/10 and 50/50 shocks on solid 400lb 2” lowered springs in a Fiero GT with 1.5:1 front/rear sway bars. On a good road, it’ll feel like a dream come true. On our roads, you’ll feel every crack, every bump and every pothole like your ass was riding the pavement..

I’ve had a few cars, some good, some bad. Some were sedans and others were sports cars. But I have worked on all of them. I build my own motors and transmissions right down to swirling the valves and shaving the cranks. I do my own programming with the ECM’s unless I need a quick fix using a Hypertech chip. I design and build my own supercharger plenum assemblies and variable speed drive systems to give me anything from 6 to 28 lbs boost. It can be tedious, it can be annoying, but when it all comes together and you hear the 8,000 rpm high pitched whine of well adjusted supercharged DOHC engine, it’s like heaven.

And then you remember, you’re going out on those poorly maintained city streets with the potholes. The streets that will tear off your 3” ground clearing body mouldings if you hit the wrong bump. You know, the streets your taxes were supposed to fix if it wasn’t for the lame ass civil engineers, regional planners, the government wasting your money and the politicians taking graft.

The first version of the quad drive dual bank air screw supercharger is being prepped for release during the 4th quarter of 2005 (I’ve been talking to the machine shop). This little beast will pump out 1000cfm at up to 2 atmospheres and runs at up to 30,000+ rpm (1:5 crank to supercharger). Total size without plenum adapter is about 2.5” high by 8” wide by 12” deep and should fit nicely on any 4 or 6 cylinder engine. A 6 drive unit is being looked at for 8 cylinder engines and single/2 drive units for smaller engines and motorcycles. These units will use ultra fast, predictive, stepped multiple gated solenoid plenum computerized pressure control to prevent boost lag and increase efficiency (and will be user adjustable), We will also be doing a couple of very interesting things to reduce heat generation in the supercharger as well as provide thermal decoupling between the block and the supercharger.

I don’t condone or participate in street racing, so don’t ask.

 

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