Gas is over $2 a gallon

yeah that toroidal rotary engine looks cool litle hard to follow but sounds like some damn good ideas. have they used that at all to power anything?

They have not powered anything with it to my knowledge. However, that may change in the next year or so. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] I will see if I can find some better pictures.

I hear that Toyota is coming out with a hybrid Tacoma in 05. It will be interesting to drive one.

I'm all into ethanol powered cars.

I wish the car companys would embrace the idea a little more. I know that the tanks would have to increase in size to keep the driving distances the same but hell, packaging problems are minimal compared to a battery setup.

All I know is that there are alot of out of work farmers that we could put back to work and a clean fuel source to use if it got more support.

Besides, it would be a little easier to convert the stang to alky than to battery power.[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_lol.gif[/img]

It's my understanding that it requires more energy to produce 1 gal of ethanol than 1 gal of ethanol contains. Your tax dollars are at work to keep the farmers head above water. Any savings you see at the pump are stolen back in the form of higher taxes.

Using corn and distillation is the most expensive way to produce ethanol, and there's not near enough farmland to sustain the USA for any length of time. Thanks to the miracles of organic chemistry, ethanol can be made much less expensively using other sources, such as natural gas. BUT, natural gas production is already close to being maxed out, is hard to transport, (we would have to supply pretty much all the gas ourselves) ....so it doesn't look so good. The drastic increases in NG prices lately would support this. (ours went up by 47% just this year)

In addition, the following was cut and pasted from this address... (and this site is rather 'optimistic')

http://www.eap.mcgill.ca/MagRack/SF/Winter%2091%20M.htm


Based on the high yielding 1988 corn crop of 119 bushels/ acre the energy generated by the ethanol exceeded energy inputs by 16%. However H appears we still have a long way to go to enable this technology to supply our North American oil addiction. In 1989, 400 million bushels of corn in the U.S were used for ethanol production which produced the equivalent energy of 21 million barrels of oil. The U.S uses about 16.5 million barrels of oil per day.

Therefore, the 3.5 million acres of corn would provide America with approximately 30 hours of oil.


Another site (not very positive) indicated 97% of our land would have to be planted with corn, and the cost of production is way more than what we get out of the ethanol.

http://home.earthlink.net/~annallen0...algasðanol.pdf
_________________
Mike Burch, 66 mustang real street
302 4-speed 289 heads, 10.63 @ 129.3
http://www.mustangworks.com/cgi-bin/moi-display.cgi?220
http://www.fortunecity.com/silverstone/healey/367

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: n2omike on 5/8/04 7:23pm ]</font>

If history repeats itself, we may soon see the end to modern muscle cars. Right when Ford and Mopar are getting their **** together they'll probably decide to stop production of the good stuff, just like the early 70's.[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_frown.gif[/img]
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$2.25 for cheap stuff this morning...
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93 just went up around $2.09 here. this sucks.
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I paid $2.07/gal today to fill up with 94 octane. I was very excited though, as my Galaxie averaged just shy of 15 MPG. My driving was 90% highway miles this time. I got ~14.9 MPG.

My front drums are on their last leg, so to speak. I believe one is out of round and rubbing a little. Once I take care of that I expect a small increase in mileage. I'd imagine if I drove for pure mileage I could squeeze 17-18 MPG out of it on the highway. With the original engine running on 7 cylinders I once managed ~17 MPG pure highway at ~75 MPH.

Sunoco must love me, what with how much 94 octane I buy. I got their gas credit card, the one they say has a credit limit high enough to cover most familys needs... In the past 3 weeks I've used up almost my credit limit of $250 so I had to pay them before my bill came. So single handedly I used in 3 weeks more than they say most familys use in a month. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_eek.gif[/img] I think I shoulda got the one with the $500 limit. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_lol.gif[/img]

Oh well, from buying all that gas I may have earned myself a tenth of a gallon. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_ghey.gif[/img]

Damn, I need to not drive so much.