Strange mechanical theories?!?

Ever heard of injecting water vapor into the the engine using vaccum line? Supposed to run stronger and get better mileage. Sounds unlikely to me. The inches of vaccum drop as rpm increases, less vapor would be drawn in. Something like that, wish I knew what I was talking about! Read about doing this somewhere, just can't recall all of the details.

 

Totally real. I run water injection on my Ranchero.

The water helps convert more of the heat of combustion to pressure in the cylinder (by boiling to steam), yeilding a more effcient process. (Heat going out your exhaust doesnt do you a lot of good.)

My ranchero is turbocharged tho, so I primarily use it to cool the intake charge and prevent detonation. But it works fine on NA cars, too.

 

The one I always liked was the guys who didnt want to do a valve job because the rings would start pumping oil

That was a supposed truism when I was a kid. Theory was the engine condition was out of balance, the new top end had increased the compression, pushed the oil past the worn rings. I bought into it, never thought to question it.

 

Yes, any rotor wing driver from 'Nam likely had enough time under his belt I don't doubt it was smooth and even gentle. The ones I saw performed were done in the middle of the night at a civil airport near an air base (Merril Field and Elmendorf AFB respectively). I have no way to tell how much stick time the guy in the seat had, but judging from how it bounced (back up off the ground) I figured that wasn't soft or gentle. Not saying it can't be, just saying it depends more on the skill of the pilot than the machine.

As for the auto rotate V/S gliding in, every chart I have seen for fatalities in a crash for fixed wing were presented based on the stall speed of the aircraft. Above 67MPH stall, the survivability drops off dramatically. Of course the rotor wing charts were all referenced to the 'dead man's curve'.

 

Did the valves on an IHC truck that seemed good, slight miss at idle, low comp. on one cylinder, not a big oil burner. I never saw anything smoke like that sucker after that! Rolling clouds of the white stuff boiling out the pipes, it'd still smoke for as minute after it shut down! Tore it down again and did the block assy., same heads, runs clean now. I am a believer in that "myth" now!

 

GIANT oil pan.
External oil pump (dry sump)
NEW moroso Vaccum pump

=

Dry crank. Why?

The motor we were running had screens epoxied into place over the drainback holes. (to catch junk in the quite likely event of valve spring failure) The new belt driven vaccum pump pulled about 35 inches of mercury at 7k. there was enough vaccum on the top end to actually hold the comparitivley thin oil OVER those screens! and we aren't talking 7 or 8 quarts here. we are talking 12. how we figured it out was cool. see, with a dry sump oiling system, the motor doesn't have to be running to operate the lubrication system. we built a set up using a grinder motor to spin the belts. it was only by accident that we figured it out, because 1 belt wasn't quite short enought to get the pump only, so we stretched the belt over the vaccum pump, too. our pans and valve covers had lexan "windows" for inspection at the shop. once it hit 3k, the oil stopped draining back "down south" and filled the valve covers, and lifter valley ( I assume, we couldn't see it) almost completely up.

point being?
there's alot that can make a pan go dry. and volume versus vaccum is one of them.

 

Wow. I guess they don't have hills in Oklahoma.

What happens to your car when you go up a hill? You need to increase rpm to maintain the same speed, right? Wind resistance does the same thing.

~Scotch~

 

Only if your clutch,or transmission,is slipping.


You need more throttle opening to maintain
the same rpm up a hill,because of the increased load.

 

Why is it that tape measures can evaporate after 2 weeks use???

 

If that is true, why does everyone at Bonneville try to have th most aerodynamic shape? According to your theory, wind resistance does not exist

 

I knew a guy who was into cars his whole life. He bought a truck that he said had a built stroker motor in it but due to the high compression, it would deisel and ping real bad. I heard the truck and it didnt sound like a high compression, performance motor. I asked him what he set the timing at and he said he didnt know as he self timed it. I asked him to explain. He actually said " The thing I like about Chevys are that you can self time them, you loosen the distributer lock down bolt so the distributer is loose, then you take it for a hard run or you can just rev up the motor but a drive is betterand more accurate. The distributor will selfset the timing to what the engine wants and then you tighten the bolt to lock the distributor ". Oh my god!!!! I have learned that even though some people profess to be car guys and know cars, most dont know shit about the mechanical aspects of them. I volunteered to fix his truck but he died a couple weeks later from a heart attack. Anyway, I still cant believe that someone could actually do this?

 

OK, I wasn't going to get back in but...

I have conceeded that in an automatic the slip of the transmission will result in a change in rpm. But with NO SLIP and a direct connection from engine to rear wheels the RPM to achieve a set MPH is constant. May require more fuel due to resistance but the rpm has to be the same. A one to one ratio is a one to one ratio.

OK I'll shut up now.

 

Don't shut-up yet. You're absolutely correct on this.

 

When I was 16 a buddy of mine with a Chev V8 put a hole in a piston because of a head gasket leak. He paid a relative to replace the single piston. When my buddy and I got together a couple of days later I asked how the car was doing, he said that his relative was going to pick up a used starter and finish it in a couple of days (the starter wouldn't turn over the motor now). He showed me how the starter was bad, and it just didn't sound right to me. I went home and grabbed my 1/2 drive sockets tried to turn the crank, no go. So I rifled through the stuff on the work bench, and there were the boxes for the new std piston and rings and a new rod bearing -- 0.005 over. I wasn't too sure what was up with that (I was only 16) so we went and talked with my old man about it. He said the old bearing was standard and the new bearing was wrong. When my buddy's relative came back, he took the pan off again and put in a new standard bearing instead of replacing the starter. Said that he thought he should put in the oversize because of the expected wear on the crank. And that was just the beginning of the story I think we ALL learned a lot from that experience, the cool thing was that my buddy's relative was open to the suggestions, unlike some of the a**es that I work with now.

 

a guy i knew came over with a broken vavle cover hold down bolt on a sbc. when i asked how that happened, he said he wanted to get it real tight so as not to loose compression! had another buddy who refused to use a timing light, he said you couldn't set the timing "right" with one! it's amazing how many "car guys" don't have a clue about basic principles

 

the smoke one is still my favorite i remember hearing this, as a joke of course, from the instructor during electronics class

 

If you left the dizzy loose, it will "walk" in the direction of RETARD, not advance. So, the last thing it would do under those conditions is ping

 

I AGREE. More fuel/load or whatever, but still SAME RPM per MPH in a stick car

 

Just repeating what he said. Anyway, never in my life, I have ever heard this until this guy. I told him the distributor would either get caught on the intake with the vacuum advance or hit the firwall, but there is no way this method would ever work.

 

When I worked in a local garage in high school, one of the customers told me that if your car is in proper alignment, you can let go of the steering wheel halfway through a sharp curve and the car will track the rest of the way through the curve on its own. Anyone care to test that theory?

 

I'll bet they did compared to a fixed-wing aircraft falling out of the sky.

 

WRONG!!! That's not a theory. It's bad information. The angle in question here is Caster. IF the Caster angle is correct, and you let go of the steering wheel half way through a turn, the steering will/should try to return to center and encourage the car to go straight. If it did follow the turn as stated, that car would be dangerously "twitchy" or "nervous" on abrupt maneuvers at speed

 

One of my co-workers told me that my transmission would never work right again if I changed the transmission fluid. Why? He changed the fluid in his trans one time and it never worked right again. His theory was that the transmission gets adjusted to running with old fluid and new fluid would ruin it. So he said you should only change fluid if you have always regularly changed fluid.

I changed my fluid and it worked great.

 

Yeah, I don't know about this one. But, I can tell you that on more than one occasion, I've had tranny failures on TH400's shortly after a fluid change. A local race trans builder I've known for 30+ years told me that it's "possible" on an old, high mileage trans, that the new fluid, with it's detergent content can assault what little clutch material is hanging on those old clutch plates. I'll agree that you prolly shouldn't mess with the fluid unless it's already been changed regularly it's whole life. I'll also add that my post is more opinion than fact, but I believe it

 

In the old Ford Selct-O-Speed tractors, sometimes you could change the fluid and it would slip like crazy. The fix was to heat the discs up by locking the brakes down and running it through the gears to break the glaze off the discs. It worked. Don't know for sure why they were working with the old fluid, but this was a fix right out of the factory manual.

 

This is one of those that can go either way. We have 3 work trucks at my job, and all 3 of us had our trans fluid changed the same day. My truck is fine, but the other 2 are having trans problems now. Their trucks are newer than mine, so go figure.

 

I've had so many people tell me the same thing....and backed it up with stories of the tranny going out right after the fluid change. I think I believe that theory also...

 

There is no agreeing or disagreeing with it. It's just a fact - anyone who thinks otherwise needs to sit down and think long and hard about if this hobby is for them.

 

Here's one: In order for a car to run strong throughout its life, the original owner must drive the piss out of it from the moment it's new until some arbitrary interval. If the original owner doesn't push the car hard, it'll never be fast.

I heard this from an acquaintance who works at a tire shop. I would think that the engine that was babied by its former owner would be stronger than one that was pushed hard. Less wear and tear, better compression, less oil consumption, not? Obviously initial break-in affects how well the engine will perform, and perhaps some cars that never venture out on the highway can become "carboned up" (i.e. the ones that were only driven to church on Sunday), but this guy's comment was specifically referring to his late-model fuel-injected import.

 

I've heard that theory! More hogwash.