The Car Enthusiast Thread

Apparently this forum is for blogging now so why the fuck not.

Fixed the problem with accelerator enrichment, drove the caprice 400 miles to the PA mountains and back. Developed a fuel delivery issue, seems the fuel line I tried to reuse just dumped a bunch of rust in my brand new fuel tank. Losing fuel pressure when I ask for a lot of fuel, so it could cruise, but not accelerate hard. Dropped it off with the mechanic cause after about 4 months of hard pushing it’s no longer fun to work on the car. I’m just burnt out on it for a while. I’ve been informed it needs another new tank and a new pump. $600 is the price of my lazy mistake. Live and learn.

Once I get it back I should be able to tune on it finally and have it stay tuned (as opposed to before where the tune wasn’t working right because the fuel pressure was variable). So we’ll drive it around, get it dialed in as best we can and then it’s off to Albany in mid November. 400+ miles in one direction, so double the previous trip. Wish us luck.

The car did Albany and back like a champ. 15 mpg average, which is not great, but I don’t have the torque converter lockup working yet. Got the fuel curve working better, and the tuned the accel enrichment a bit better. I started playing with the ignition curve, found out what pinging sounds like. Thankfully my engine is so under powered that I doubt I hurt anything.

I picked up a fuel injected truck manifold off ebay for cheap. I’m going to clean it up and swap it in the spring. The TBI required the least amount of parts changing, but it’s a total pain in the ass to tune. There’s just so much intake wall to wet. You have to dump a ton of extra fuel in it while it’s warming up and when it’s cold and any time you open the throttle. The truck manifold is not the best for power, but I have modest goals so it should be sufficient.

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I heard about this years ago and forgot about it.

Oh, they’ve been doing the Tweel thing for much longer than that. I remember first hearing about this from my mechanic back in 2005, showing me an article in a magazine where they were supposedly “Coming in the next year or two”, I remember him saying “If they’re out in ten years time, I’ll eat my own head.”

I’m guessing there will be side walls on those wheels? Being open to the elements like that is just waiting for stones and shit to fill the gaps.

Unknown. Every time the Tweel has been shown before, it’s been open at the sides, and the currently available versions(which are mostly for small vehicles, like golf carts, mowers, etc) don’t have sidewalls either, to the best of my knowledge. But, those smaller wheels also don’t have to hold up to the very different weights and stresses of road use, so who knows?

If there were side walls, they would bulge inwards or outwards when the tire compresses. My hunch is that would be a bigger problem than the danger of something getting into the tire. Cars have big holes in the wheels and anything getting in there is hardly a problem, so why would holes in the tire be any different? It’s ultra-rare for something hazardous to get in a bike’s wheel between the spokes. If the tire had a way through, I don’t think it would cause much of an additional problem.

I spent a huge chunk of my youth mountain biking, and in all my rides I had something get inside my spokes in a dangerous way exactly twice.

Once it was a log that I slid my rear wheel into sideways coming around a corner. Yanked me to a stop and I bailed over my handlebars.

Other time it was my own wrist due to a comedy of improbable circumstances. In that case two spokes broke around my wrist and, post-bail, I came out basically unscathed.

That’s in the woods. It’s ultra rare on a paved road.

Exactly.

Twice in heavy mountain biking over several years rounds down to a low zero in non-mountain-biking.

Of course, spokes are thin. If they were wider/flatter, a rock or other debris could conceivably get inside and bang around a bit before falling out. That could conceivably cause damage at higher speeds.

Well, at high speed it’s going to be very difficult for anything to get into that flexy tire. It will be spinning so fast that anything coming from the side is going to get deflected.

I can conceive of a scenario. Imagine driving at low speed on a gravel road, then accelerating once you get back to pavement.

Rocks could easily get kicked up in there and be ready to bang around once you speed up.

The big holes in car wheels aren’t functional in terms of providing a smooth ride. Image a stone getting into the side of the non-inflatable tire, and then once per revolution you notice that spot as the tire compressed less. It’ll be like having a stone in your shoe, but multiple times per second and at 100 Kmph.

Yes, I can see this as a problem. I’m guessing that the high rpms are going to dislodge any such rocks or mostly prevent them from getting in there in the first place.

At least dislodging the rock is a possibility and easy. Similar things happen to existing car wheels, like becoming unbalanced or misaligned. I’m sure this wheel is also not immune to either of those things either. The point I’m trying to make is that existing tires and wheels have flaws, and we accept them because they are rare and easily remedied. Yeah, maybe a rock can get in there. Well, a nail can puncture the tire you have now and that’s a hell of a lot worse.

I mean, you’re right, but also, those wheels are usually made of steel, or at least an alloy. They’re not made of a softer, more easily damaged materiel that’s intended to move and flex to deal with changes in the surface.You get a stone stuck in there, nice and wedged between two of the spokes, and it sits there. The wheel flexes, the spokes move as it’s moving, the wheel twists and moves slightly, it abrades and damages the materiel. I don’t know what’s going to happen with a Tweel when you’re down a spoke or three, but I can’t imagine it’s exactly going to perform to manufacturer spec.

Imagine it like, instead of having a nail in your tyre, you had a small bit of something stuck to it that slowly wore a hole instead of punching one itself as you drove, from moving against the wheel as it turned, flexed and moved.

(Well, that, and also it’s real bad to get something stuck in your wheels like that, it can cause all sorts of damage, from gouging up your brake rotors, to messing up your calipers, stopping your brakes coming on, damaging the wheel itself or breaking a wheel stud, etc, so uh don’t just kinda let that situation lie when it happens and trust it will sort itself out, because the consequences if it doesn’t can be pretty dire.)

Those are all valid concerns.

But imagine a world where Tweel was the design we were living with and after 100 years someone proposed the novel idea of having a wheel that was inflated with air. “But it will get punctured and go flat!” they’ll say.

I honestly have no idea which design is better. I’m just hesitant to write something off that seems feasible, at least in concept, and has the tremendous benefit of never going flat.

Oh yeah, I’m not saying they’re definitely bad and we shouldn’t do it - the opposite, I want them to try it, tyres are a pain in the ass, and nobody can tell me that we can’t improve on rubber doughnuts we imprison air in.

I’m saying, it’s a potential problem, much like getting a hole punched in your tyre. I’m in the same position you are, I’m not sure which is better, for what, and how it’s all gonna actually shake out in road use. I might have slightly more information - after all, GM aren’t the first to test them for road use, everyone from the Army to half the major manufacturers have, and none have been that enthusiastic about the concept, but we don’t know why, or what pros and cons they encountered - but not enough to make a judgement, even with everything I know about cars.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Senate-panel-votes-to-end-most-annual-car-13972248.php

Old car stuff:

Look at this whale!

Probably in no other body style is Cadillac’s new look of greater width and sweeping length more readily evident than in the new extended-deck Sixty-Two Sedan.

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