Curb Treasure MacGyver FE mod Challenge!
 

Hi folks,

Here's a bit of fun and an intellectual exercise....


A house down the block had some junk out on the curb, a gallon paint tin with something shiny in it caught my eye, shiny, shiny! There's a bunch of sockets and some other interesting looking junk in there thinks I. I like having a few junk sockets, good for making special tools, and for hammering onto heads that are rusted undersize (Don't wanna bust your good ones) and I like having some scraps and odds and ends to pick through for those awkward fix it jobs... Tipping out the can when I got home revealed an interesting assortment, nice haul :D I suddenly got a wild idea, and hence this thread, what, using mostly or solely this assortment of junk, could one do for gas mileage or maybe performance mods with it???


So here's the set up, the crew of Apollo 13 is stranded in orbit around the moon in a... uh... a '95 Ford Escort (or other econobeater) with only half the gas required to get home! Careful inventory of the... vehicle.. has revealed RW's can of curb treasure... a few tools... duct tape... JB Weld... (Presume you can use whatever reasonably available fixing methods for "glue") and you, Colonel MacGyver of Starga*cough* mission control, have to lead a team to figure out how to jerry rig some contraption to get the Apollo 13 crew home on much less gas than normal....

Here's what you've got ...

https://img35.yfrog.com/img35/7788/junk01s.jpg

From top left...

Electrical box with some wiring still in it, plate screwed to back.
Approx 15ft of soft metal wire, not heavy enough for solder, presuming it's aluminum.
Some scraps of aluminum flashing.
Random brackets
Section of aluminum carpet edging
Scraps of copper plumbing pipe
Steel strapping approx 18" to 2ft
Roll of solder "Acid core" think it's plumbing solder, not totally sure.
Sections of blade, saw blade and box cutter blade.
Zip ties
Assortment of sockets from 3/4" down to 3/16"
Assortment of nails and screws, some screws look to be brass, a few nails look to be zinc plated.
Random crap, pen, carpenters pencil, emery cloth (abrasive) burned out tea light candle, push pin, paperclip.....


There you go, get cracking, quick before they run out of air! :D

This is really just for fun, to stimulate some out of the box thinking, it's unlikely that I'll actually make up anything solely from these parts, have better materials to choose from, but might find an idea or two inspiring. Got some half baked ideas already, I'll reserve them for now or this post is getting wayyy too long.


Road Warrior

Edit: BTW you can also include the 1 gallon paint can with wire handle and a lid off a 2lb tub of margarine which was in the bottom.

Ok, I'll play. Take the nails. Beat them into the fuel tank with the copper pipe. Solder the nails in place with the solder. Then take the wire, attach it to the tank, and the Positive terminal of the battery. This will ionize the fuel, allowing you to get 180 MPG!


Sooo, do I win?

Well, I'm not sure if 12V enough to ionize anything, and since the naquadah generator is needed to run the hyperdrive on the Al'kesh*cough* sorry... since the ignition coil is needed to run the motor, you can't really steal high voltage from there...

However, presuming a road surface exists for our crew to travel back on (Yeah this is pretty stupid, substitute "moon" for "last gas station until Reno" with a sold out sign if you like.) then there is some items there you might be able to get high voltage with.

You do know I wasn't being serious? I was taking a stab at all that PICC stuff we get the people spamming the forums for. Yeah, its going to oinize the fuel, and I'm going to get nearly 200 MPG? Yeah, right.

I know you were joking, was just trying to steer it a tad more serious. A gas vaporiser (Plasmogrifier? :D ) is probably a little too ambitious with limited time and resources, not to mention that thinking of Wile-E and Marvin, they're port fuel injected, which complicates the notion of an easy solution.

Presuming one had at least a TBI, maybe a carbed car to mess with, then running the exhaust pipe up the middle of the paint can, injecting/inducting fuel into it and attempting to ionise the output might have some basis in reality. But it would be a hairy lashup unlikely to last long. High voltages for this, at very low currents could be obtained by using the saw blade, mounted close to a tire, across the tread, this would act like the comb pickup of a Van der Graaf generator on the belt, and draw off ions created by the tire's friction against the road surface. More than one could be made, by using the flashing or other metal pieces, and making lots of sharp points on them.

But... HV + gas/air mix + dodgy lashup = darwin award candidate.

How do you ionize a dielectric fuel?

Just curious :)

Come on! Don't let a little pesky thing like science get in the way of getting 180 MPG...

You keep charging it until you reach it's ionisation breakdown potential.

Dielectrics are not perfect, if gasoline was a particularly good one, you'd have fingernail sized gasoline filled capacitors, rated to umpteen gigavolts... but unsurprisingly, you don't, small caps likely to have 10V-200V breakdown voltages with the best dielectric the company can find! (Well, afford to sell for a few cents a pop.) Need 10KV? they get big.. this would be due to breakdown voltage applying per distance, i.e. volts per meter across the dielectric, need a 10KV capacitor with a poor dielectric? Use lots of it.

You put charge into a dielectric, by notionally displacing the electric cloud with respect to the center of the atom, you know that can only go so far before ~snap~ the electrons aren't in the atom any more.

Air gets ionised all the time, yet is also classed as a dielectric, air spaced capacitors were among the first types investigated.

Have you seen MacGyver? This seems about as credible as the single episode I caught.

Hey, give MacGyver a wad of chewing gum, a roll of duct tape, and a swiss army knife, and he can do anything...

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