is a "GREEN" (environmentally speaking)hot rod possible??

Pretty simple really : Build a bad ass monster motor car using recycled parts and then just dont drive it . NOT !
Like it or not we humans by our very nature consume things and so we impact the enviroment no matter what . The very fact that we eat ,drink and shit does more to pollute the earth and drain its resources than your hotrod ever could . As for the so called green technologies just read up on what kind of nasty crap is spewed out of the factories that make Li ion batteries or solar cells.
Al Gore and his kind are getting very wealthy with the fear mongering snake oil carbon credit schemes and he's using his money to buy mansions on the beach while he warns us the oceans are rising . I would love to leave behind a perfect world for the next generation but until the aliens land and give us the plans for a mr fusion type energy source I dont see it happening .
As for the kids - they will by thier nature figure out a way to jazz up or hotrod whatever they have to work with when the time comes. It's what humans do.

 

Interesting topic was thinking this today while working on my latest OT sheme.

2000-up S-10 4 cylinders were 50/50 production split for "flex fuel" and can run E85. It's a 2.2 based on a cavalier motor. Not traditional, but proven and efficient even if it's just run on regular gas.

A guy could build a closed engine highboy or something similar with a complete FI E85 S-10 engine & 5 speed. This isn't a commentary on if E85 is good or bad, but merely an observation this combo is cheap & feasible.

 

yes, yes and yes. I contribute heavily by taking 1 to 2 full dumps a day; and boy do I off-gas! hmm...how about the extra feces and gas from the average american eating WAY more food than necessary?? why can't we go after fat people for global warming, why's it gotta be the hot rodders?! we're taxing tobacco and 'gas guzzler' cars, we might as well tax fat people, too...call it a 'food guzzler' tax.

 

***Plant Trees!!
When I took Auto shop in the middle '60's the teacher said: "If an engine could manage 100% combustion of it's fuel, all that would come out of the tail pipe ould be HARMLESS Carbon Dioxide and Water."

The problem isn't the CO2. it's the diminishing amount of green plants on the Whole Earth to recycle it into Oxygen!

Plant more trees. Replant the Sahara forest that the Romans cut down.
We need to PAY the eqatorial countries bribes to quit stripping out the rain forests.

I ride a bicycle a lot, and breathe in and out a lot doing it.
Has that exhaled CO2 been measured per mile compared to the shallow breathing of someone in a car?

Meat eaters (guilty) are contributing because of the CO2 and Methane produced by their food while it is being raised.
Especially considering all vegetables contribute to the cure by converting CO2 back to Oxygen.

I also think it's over population so I blame all the "religious extremists" (Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Muslims, BasketBall Pros, Etc.) who refuse to practice effective birth control.
And the Spears girls...

(No, I don't have any children, by choice, or bastards that I know of.)

 

Wow.
And did I mention, WOW.
Define green - My 500 Caddy powered cars ALL get better mileage than any new vehicle of similar weight. Even the ones approaching 500 HP. They also run cleaner than 1/2 of the cars that get smog checked in this county. The 500s typically use less than 1/2 of the fuel per HP of a similarly powered SBC. EFI


Someone asked for facts...
And I am long winded...

Err... Bullshit. Couldn't think of a nicer way to say it. There are plenty of mods that will improve both mileage AND performance, while lowering emissions. Like replacing your 200 HP SBC with a 400 HP Caddy engine. Improving efficiency often improves all 3 factors, and most production engines are not very efficient. As far as tuning goes, you can often get all 3 factors within 2-3% of their individual best, simultaneously. You'll pay $500 for a performance part, but not pay $100 to have the engine tuned to get the most out of your performance parts? That's not being cheap, that's being stubborn.

Electric vehicles charged from the power grid put many times the pollution in the air per mile than your average box-stock 50s car. I don't know the numbers, but they are double digit multipliers.
Although, they ARE traditional (though probably not traditional hot rod material). Electric cars have been around for over 100 years.

Amen

You read wrong. I think it may be a gallon of oil to grow and harvest enough corn to make 1 gallon of Ethanol, but not to produce the ethanol for sure.
AFTER the corn is grown and bought, it still costs a little over $9 to make a gallon of Ethanol last time I looked. That includes the cost of 2.8 gallons of petroleum fuels (mostly diesel), which make pollution when burned, plus electricity from the power grid (mostly coal based). Green fuels are anything but. Oh yeah, don't forget the 30% drop in fuel economy when switching to E-85, so even though it is subsidized down tot he price of gas, it still costs you a little more per mile.
I still intend to set up my next engine build for E85 - 104 octane for $2.85/ gal sounds good to me, and higher compression = higher efficiency. But I will not claim it is earth-friendly, because that is just so much hype and no substance. I want to do a test and see if a 13:1 E-85 engine vs an otherwise identical 10:1 gasoline engine gets better mileage. The increased efficiency may make up for the 30% increase in fuel/air ratio.

No, the VERY FIRST diesel (that I know of) was built in the late 1800s (I think 70's, but not sure), but some folks say he stole someone else's work. And, yes, the first IC engines were diesels designed to run on veggie oil, but when scaled up to run equipment, kerosene worked much better, and thus the petroleum fuel industry was born (Kerosene was already being widely distributed for heating and for steam powered equipment use by the 1880s). The peanut-oil thing was actually a plug for the peanut farmers association.

Our climate didn't take 50 million years to establish.
Global warming is real. It was also real ~20k years ago.
Geologists will tell you that the world has been getting colder for 10k years, then warmer for 10k years, back and forth in fairly even cycles since at least the time of the recovery from the ice age that killed off the dinos we hot rodders love so much. The current warming cycle began before homo sapiens existed. The warming trend has been accelerating for the entire time it has been warming, and (as it always has before) will likely hit critical mass and start cooling again in about 1500 years no matter what we do.
I'm not denying that there is evidence that we are having an effect that is speeding this process, but I have seen no evidence that our contribution is significant. Since modified vehicles do not constitute a fraction of a % of the miles driven in the US by light vehicles, I seriously doubt we as hot rodders are having any measurable impact. Not saying you shouldn't keep your ride in tune, and I do think that the recycling aspect is a big plus in our favor (though it doesn't apply to guys who have a late model daily), but I don't think we as hot rodders have any impact one way or the other.
I will keep my opinion about our impact as Americans, or as the human race as a whole in general, to myself, as it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

1 acre of hemp processes far more CO2 than an acre of corn (or any other 1-season crop that I know of)
1 acre of hemp = many acres of corn worth of Ethanol
Hemp fibers can be used to replace many synthetic fibers in manufacturing. Synthetic = dinosaurs. Your poly-blend club tee is 1/2 dead dinosaur. I'm not even sure that fuel for light vehicles is even a large percentage of our crude oil imports.

Save the environment, grow some weed?

Except that it probably still takes more than one gallon of petro to make 1 gallon of Ethanol, even from hemp.

Last but not least... Hemp is traditional

Chris

 

there really is only one power source on this planet and thats the sun, everything is powered by it, so if we were to use the suns energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen by running it backwards through a fuel cell, storeing it and then running it back through the fuel cell to create electricity to power an electric motor to run your car, then you are as green as your ever going to get, everything else is a compromise. as far as not having fuel to run an enternal combustion engine thats just not going to happen, as long as the sun shines there will be organic matter the can turned into fuel.

 

All this technology has potential, but it will NEVER get developed unless people start DEVELOPING it. I'm sure refining oil was a bitch back when they first started doing it. There are scientists right now trying to design solar cells that are small enough to put in AUTOMOTIVE PAINT! A monumental idea that's worth looking into I think! There are thousands of others...

A while back, somebody was working on putting 200 humans in a tube and shooting them from New York to California at 600 miles an hour. 3 miles high. Serving food and a movie. That fucker was NUTS.

 

How about water as fuel? No, not fuel cells. Check out patent #5156114 found at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm

 

That's the shit I'm waiting for, solar cell paint. I bet it would look cool! My Cad is a good sized solar target too! hmmm

 

We've heard of "water injection" or "Turbo Fluid" sold by GM? in the sixties, to counter engine knock. Consider for a moment, how common...and how stable water is. It is an amazing solvent, and will absorb or dissolve most chemicals. I do not know of...a lower energy state for 2H2O. Unfortunately this means that like the promised free lunch, you gots ta put energy in, before seeing even a modest return for your efforts. "Endothermic" in other words. Requires heat, in order to react or "combust". The fuel cells, which can very cleanly produce electrical power, yield water as one of their byproducts. One of the final products of the reaction, which I believe begins with methane gas. The typical combustion engine in cars of the previous century..always used available atmospheric oxygen...('cept for the nitrous boys!) So we look for ever more efficient ways to "oxidize" our fuels and liberate the heat into our "expansion" engines. Water? think I'll wait till after the IPO is listed for a while...before buying.

 

Correctamundo sir. There are 3 major nutrients required to grow a plant besides Carbon and Oxygen that need to be supplied. Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and potassium.

The Nitrogen is made from Natural gas and the price fluctuates with the price of fuel. Right now fertilizer is at an all time high in price. We actually ran OUT of anhydrous ammonia this fall. With China entering the game there is now GLOBAL demand for fertilizer. Potassium is obtained from minerals dug from the ground and comes out of Florida, Canada, and now Russia. Potash prices have almost doubled in the past few years.

Corn needs Nitrogen fertilizer whereas soybeans are able to fix their own from the atmosphere. The more Ethanol produced requires more corn which requires more fertilizer. There are indeed other crops that can produce more ethanol than corn, however, for everyone to go out and buy all of the equipment to handle and transport a crop with different physical properties (example: Hemp needing to be baled and transported much differently than a bin of corn) would be economically unfeasable. I am all for Ethanol and biodiesel (Made from soybeans). We had a lot of farmers switch to 100% corn this year so we are making a good living right now selling fertilizer and that translates into bubbletop money for me! Ha Ha Ha

Right now with the demand for Ethanol (the company I work for is even building an Ethanol plant right now) corn is at an all time high. Since corn is the major feed for animals the price of meat and all grain based products willl increase as well.

The demand for corn puts pressure on growers to increase yield so then we can get into the argument of biotechnology. Right now about 95% or more of all of the seed we sell is genetically modified. We are almost all sold of of "Triple Stack" corn right now for next year. That is corn that is resistant to rootworms, corn borers, and is tolerant of the Herbicide "roundup". The tree huggers want to scream about that too.

Basically the whole ordeal is one giant circle and you can chase your tail arguing it one direction or the other until the day you die. What it all boils down to is that some people are ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS and like to scream about this and that. Those of us that try and make the best with what we have and are in the trenches doing all the real work are ACTIVE ENVIRONMENTALISTS.

 

Stalkhugger!

Please clarify as to what you're referring to when you say "Those of us that try and make the best with what we have and are in the trenches doing all the real work are ACTIVE ENVIRONMENTALISTS"

Thanks,
Kurt

 

what I got out of his statement is that the people working in their own shops, labs, homes et cetera to optimize efficiency are making far more progress and positive impact than the people flying mansion to mansion in their private jets telling everyone else how to live conservatively.

 

I totally agree with anything that might make weed legal.

 

I'm with ya there.

.....and greasel you are correct, I didn't think my statement was so vague it needed interpretation. Ha Ha Ha

 

I think most of the country would agree with that at this point. Hell, when I got busted for pot in the 70's, my cellmates were pissed that they had to share space with a "pothead".
"Guard! Can we get a real criminal in here?"
I say legalize it all.

 

too long, didn't read but the thread name has me thinking, think i'll go home and add a carb or 2 to a couple cars and pour a few gallons of oil down the drain

 

The last paragraph didn't seem to fit with the rest of what you wrote. I wasn't sure if the part of your statement that I quoted (more specifically: "the real work") was referring to all the agribusiness stuff you wrote about and that you consider that as being an active environmentalist. Or, maybe there are other things that you do that you were referring to. Or, maybe you weren't referring to yourself at all.

Thanks,
Kurt

 

Sweet. I was just gonna say "Hydrogen"!! I've been thinking about and onboard converter for my 50 buick. Would love to here and see more on this!!