Ahhh....what you forgot to mention is that you have a bunch of those mylar space blankets in the emergency kit. And we'll have to sacrifice the speaker wire going to the rear speakers. Take your duct tape (you DO have some duct tape right? Right.) Assemble the mylar space blankets (which were included to keep you warm when you got stranded ON the moon) into one large solar sail. Use those little clippie thingies in the picture for grommets. De-strand the speaker wire. Solder the erstwhile strands together with the acid-core solder to make the rigging for the sail. Don't worry that it's acid core, you're not making an electrical connection, and Heathkit isn't going to void your warranty. Soldering iron is, of course, the aluminum wire. Attach to front bumper of '95 Space Escort. Unfurl, and catch the solar wind.

Now, take two of those nails and your paint can. Put some of the urine from your holding tank into the paint can, covering with duct tape. Fashion a two-tiered outlet from the copper pipe. Hook nails up to the battery. Electrolysis will give you your oxygen and as a free bonus you have hydrogen for your hydrogen injection system, giving you double your gas mileage!

Should be able to get home with fuel to spare!

All the rest of the stuff should be lots of fun to watch float around under the weightless condition you are experiencing.

LOL, that reminds me of the show Boston Legal where William Shatner's character occasionally makes Star Trek references/jokes...

Now JoeBob saw the electrolysis potential, with having all that aluminum wire though, there should be away to do the "burning aluminum" kind of a electrolysis that inarguably produces net energy (providing you already have the aluminum). But then will 15ft of it last long enough to get home?

So there is the opportunity to use some of the those materials as consumables for short term FE gains...

Another example of that might be to use the hot dipped galvanised nails and brass screws or copper pipe in a wet cell arrangement to produce a small voltage. What good is a small voltage?? You could put it in series with the O2 sensor output to offset it a bit, I think you need about .2V to fool the ECU into cycling it around 15.5-16:1 instead of 14.7:1

However, there should be a non consumable method of doing that also. By using dissimilar metals in a thermocouple arrangement. With the hot side clamped to the manifold and the cold side hanging in the air, a wide enough temperature gradient should be there, such that even with non-ideal choice of thermocouple metals, you'd get a "useable" skewing voltage out of it.

Other methods that might be used to umm "assist" the O2 sensor are keeping it hot, specifically, keeping the backside air hot, if you do that the O2 from the backside is more reactive, making the cell over guesstimate the relative O2 content of ambient air, thus reading richer for a given exhaust O2 level, thus allowing the ECU to trim fuel back more. So to accomplish that the electrical box, strapping and flashing could be fabricated into an O2 sensor "stove" as it were, to hold a small reservoir of air at exhaust temperature, which the backside of the O2 sensor would draw from. (Basically you just box it in)


Depending on the particular vehicle you were doing this to, (I'd say it's implausible on Wile-E, plausible on Marvin) you may be able to use the paint can, flashing and strapping to make a manifold shroud for a hot air intake. It's only plausible or implausible for this amount of material, Wile-E would need a length of intake tube, Marvin would not.

Make vortex generators out of all of the sheet metal scraps and strapping :)

Would vortex generators work in the vacuum of space?

Good point- I missed the part about it being in space. Now that whole space blanket/solar wind comment makes more sense...

In the rocket exhaust, they'll do something...I don't know if they'll help...

Heh, the whole, Apollo 13 thing was to get the atmosphere of that situation where they had all the spares and capsule contents laid out in a room and had to come up with some workarounds... if they were in orbit around the moon in a '95 Escort, they're dead already, the battery would have outgassed and wouldn't even start a motor that had no air to run...

So presume normal terrestrial conditions apply, yup, certainly could make some vortex generators. I'm still figuring out Wile-E's arse end aero, it's far easier to screw up than improve.

ROFL. You could take the nails and give flat tires to all the cars surrounding yours. Then, as you drive away, you'd know you'll get better mileage than any of them for the next half hour or so ;).

that's a bit disturbing to say the least, even jokingly.