JamesSlusher.com

Via kos, this story hits all my little buttons.

It’s the story of Johnathan Goodwin, a 37 year old cat from the Great State of Kansas, who is making biofuel cars that stomp the living daylights out of the dinosaur-powered stuff out there today.

He makes Hummers (and other monstrous vehicles) that get better gas fuel mileage than my hybrid does and put out about 600 horsepower. Here’s a money quote:

Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!

That totally rocks. And I want one.

He made an Impala that runs on biofuel that kicked the mess out of a Lamborghini. Yes, you read that correctly. Lamborghini. Just watch it.

Okay, I want one of those, too.

I’m having a horrible day.  Sucky suckiness with suck on top.

I have an August 1st deadline to have the truck moving under it’s own power.  That means I have today and tomorrow to hook it up.

I started the day with 5 things to do to get it going.  None of these things should take more than 30 to 45 minutes.  I got 2 things done.  In 8 hours.

I needed to go get the new driveshaft for the truck.  There is no way in hell it would fit into my Honda Civic.  I mention this to my neighbor (who is helping me with drywall repair in my house) and I tell him that I don’t want to get his Tahoe dirty.  He suggests hooking his small trailer to the back and using that.

Sounds like a good idea.

We hook it up and I drive down to Master Fabricators and pick it up.  As I’m backing out of the parking lot, this Chow puppy that they have running around the shop comes jetting out into my path.  I swerve to miss it and the trailer swings around sharply and punches a small hole in the side of the SUV.  Not major damage, but noticeable and probably expensive.  And definitely embarrassing.

So this guy is working on my house and doing me a favor and I repay him by scratching up his truck.  Nice.  I go home and give him the bad news and he takes it quite well.

That is gonna turn out to be a very expensive driveshaft.

So the driveshaft, thankfully, pops right up into place like it should.  Thank God for small favors.  The transmission cooler lines take me forever to line up and tighten down.  The transmission linkage is a being a huge pain in the butt and I can’t seem to get the darn thing to pop into place like it should.  The transmission filler tube is designed for a lower riding intake manifold so I’m gonna have to get that bent somewhere.  And I still have to tighten down some crossbars.

So I have 3 things that need to be done tomorrow.

Let’s hope it is a better day.

I have thought about doing this post for some time and have just never gotten around to it.
There is a comment in an old post of mine that I have to call bs on. This was the post and here is the comment:

Fair enough if the Honda is saving you money but your eco footprint is ulikely to have changed.
The Rover will probably be good for at least 20 years whereas the Civic may only manage half that. During those 10 years it may go through 3 sets of batteries, nobody really knows how long hybrid batteries will last yet.
So for the Rover - Manufacture, 20 years use, scrap/recycling.
The Honda - Manufacture, 10 years use, 2 new battery sets ( and the recycling of the old batteries), scrap/recycling. Repeat the whole thing over.

Good luck anyway

With all due respect that’s a load. And a half. I’ve owned two Rovers and as much as I liked them, 20 years is ridiculous. Not the way they make them these days. I had to have significant internal engine work done on both of them and neither was over 5 years old. I’ve owned an Accord for 5 years and thus far we had to have a distributor o-ring replaced. Which they did for free and during an oil change. I have no reason to believe that this Civic will be any different. I’ve owned 3 Hondas ( the first was an ancient Civic hatchback that my buddy drove more than me) and I would stack their longevity up against any car on the road today. I would be willing to bet a sizable amount of money that those life expectancies are reversed.

Second, the ecological footprint is a valid statement. Those batteries get recycled, the car will get recycled (and since it is much smaller than the Rover it will require less energy to do so and have much smaller amount of scrap), and the entire time it is in use it will use less gas and give off a tiny fraction of the emissions the Rover will. Both are significant reductions in my footprint. So I stand by my statements.

P.S. I still love that Civic.

Via Wired News, this is a very cool engine. I find the concept of this engine highly intriguing and can’t wait to see what becomes of the prototypes due out next year. This could be the wave of the future. I hope some day to work on one of these.

I wonder if they are going to go public at any point. I’d like to get in on some of that. They have contact information for interested investors, but I doubt I’m kicking the kind of cash they are looking for.

Listen to this:

Indeed, that is the old F100 firing up. I ended up cheating and turning it back into a carbureated engine rather than fuel-injected. But I had to do what I had to do. There is still a bunch of work that it needs, I am steadily progressing towards full utility.

I’m excited.

I madethe F100 make noise for the first time in well over a year today. It is getting gas and it has spark but it hasn’t actually started up yet. The noise it was making was actually the cranking noise, but that is still better than the paperweight noise it had been making.

So I need to figure out exactly what is going on. There are 2 possibilities that seem most likely: first, the timing could be off. When I put it to top dead center to install the distributor, i might have put it on the exhaust stroke rather than the compression stroke. Second, the gas could be old enough that it is no longer any good. It is a year and a half old. I’m gonna get some new gas and pour it into the intake to see if I get any reaction. If not, I will try changing the spark plug wires around to see if I had it on the wrong stroke.

Unfortunately, I’m going into work some OT tonight (and tomorrow and the next day) and then I work my normal shift this weekend, so it will be a week before I get to try to delve further into the mysteries of the F100. But it made noise.

The Land Rover is no longer a part of the Slusher family of cars. I am now the proud owner of a 2004 Honda Civic Hybrid. You couldn’t have gotten farther away from the Land Rover than that and still had four doors.

I’m already thrilled to death with it. It is a neat little car with everything you expect from a Civic, but it gets 40+ miles per gallon. That’s roughly 3 times the mileage one could expect from the Rover. I did some quick and dirty calculations and figured out that at current gas prices, I can expect to save roughly $1200 a year in just gas. I’m not a heavy driver either. I would say that work and back is at least 60 percent of all my mileage.

Put it this way: I bought the car in Atlanta. I spent almost $55 in gas getting the Rover up there. I bought the car, drove around Atlanta and drove home for roughly $18 in gas. More miles on the Honda and roughly 1/3 the cost in gas. Part of that comes from the fact that the Land Rover is 93 octane fuel only and the Honda takes 87 octane.

So I’ve got a spiffy new (to me) car, I’ve put myself on track to save a bunch of money and I’ve lowered my ecological footprint in one stroke.

Not a bad day’s work if I do say so myself.

The 03/28/06 episode of The Chair and Automan is out. Download the MP3 directly here. Or better yet, get a podcatching client and subscribe to this podcast here. Or check out my Odeo channel.

In this episode:

I talk about my dusty podcast, Uplifting, the rover woes, my goddaughter’s cheerleading, renting minivans, Hondas and my life being a blur. And I play some songs.

The links:
Themselves (not a direct link, you have to look around a bit)
Ruskabank
The Movement
Uplifter.org

Audio feedback/promos are always welcome at jaslusher AT gmail DOT com.

I’m back at the beach. Quick turnaround time, eh? This time I’m in town for the first ever Uplifter Carolina meeting. If you wanna get in on some geek stuff, stop by. I’m excited by the whole thing.

I picked up the Rover on the way here after coming to the conclusion that it’s woes were worse than I could fix in the yard. Turns out I needed to get the heads remilled. That’s a huge bummer. I’ve had two Rovers now and both have needed internal engine fixes at less than 100k. For all the good things I can say about them, that’s not one of them.

It does run sweet though.

I’ve got everything back together, I just didn’t have enough time to test it out properly before work today.

I started it up for a minute and it sounded good, but again, it takes more than one minute of run time to declare success.

I’m going to drive her around in the morning for a bit and see what’s up.