My Bel Air still has an old oil bath air cleaner. I’d never seen such a thing, and my previous 1956 Chevy had a standard flat air cleaner.
The concept is that you get the air moving very quickly towards a standing pool of oil. When the air turns to go around the corners in the filter, the particles of dust in the air shoot into the oil and get stuck. This one is fairly simple, just one bath, and one path for the air to flow through.
The 1955-1957 combination shop manual and seals and other various parts showed up from Danchuk. The shop manual is very nice and descriptive! I was just reading through the carburetor section and it describes every possible piece of info about how it works, including different ways of talking about vacuum (as a point of low pressure) and on and on. Good stuff.
Since I had the car working perfectly, I took it on the freeway and when I got home I had the oil light on. Trying to find how to test the oil pump. Breona said her dad had a shop for me to take the car to for the engine, so I will probably do that to be safe.
As if I didn’t have enough to do, I ended up buying myself a 1956 Chevy Bel Air 4dr Sedan (that’s the one with posts in the center, ie frames on the upper parts of the doors, as opposed to the Coupe, which just has the roof floating above) a bit ago. I used to own a 1956 Chevy 210 4 dr wagon when I was in Boulder and I have missed it very much. This car should fill in the gaps a bit. I was about to just send a ridiculously long message to my dad and realized I’ll probably have a bunch of messages about the car, so I added a ’1956 chevy’ category.
The car is about in twice as good of shape as my previous one. I drove it straight for a few weeks there and didn’t touch my Saturn besides to move it every few days so it wouldn’t get towed. Had to tweak the carburetor a little bit, which took more time than it should have. I’ll be getting the shop manual to help with that type of thing.
White Zombie, World’s Fastest and Quickest Street Legal Electric Car
Here’s a comment I made on the NPR site about a story they did. A person from “The Detroit Bureau”, said that electric cars need to get up to 100 miles of range before EVs will be bought. Which ignores the fact that GM doesn’t try to sell EVs yet and so can’t actually have much data on this.
Here’s the show, so you can listen for yourself:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97295908
My comment:
“First of all, even if “The Detroit Bureau” is an independent auto news service, given their location, I can hardly believe that they would be anything but pro auto industry. What the industry doesn’t need is apologists, what it needs is can-do people that realize that in order to exist, not even succeed, they have to change with the times. Those times are coming to the point where it’s getting to be pretty irresponsible to own Hummers and Suburbans in their current condition. If you look at the average amount of energy expended by US citizens, it’s on the crazy side of high compared to other citizens of Earth and it’s not sustainable. For that matter, buying a Prius or Tesla isn’t sustainable, but they are at least steps in the right direction. What GM and the others should be doing is trying to change minds.
The people that have driven or even experienced in some way the EV1 and RAV4 want to buy these vehicles if they were only given the chance. After seeing my only EV1 in the wild and hearing shredding tire noise and no engine as the car left the stop light I was sitting at I also wanted one. That’s all it took. That’s your commercial. I had the biggest smile on my face. I would have bought any car that did something similar, but there was nothing available.
A pdf of the page with my photo on it.
I’m proud to announce that a photo of mine will be printed in the Spring issue of Yes Magazine! Their focus is on sustainability and positive things that are being done and that can be done. Too much in the media these days is negative, and it’s great to have people putting energy into getting all of the good things their fair share of attention.
I’m happy that my photo will be in the magazine for a couple reasons. One is that the photo is of the EV1. I think this car was a game-changer that GM let go. I really think it should have been mass-produced. I also happy that this is a photo above an article by Sherry Boschert. She has been a long-time voice in the EV world and somewhat recently put out a book called “Plug-in Hybrids, The Cars That Will Change America”. It’s worth a read.
Check out Yes Magazine:
yesmagazine.org/
I shot a bunch of pictures of one of the cooler cars out there, one which I think holds a lot of historic significance, a GM EV1 (though they would possibly rather none exist in any capacity). They let a few universities get a hold of some to use as test platforms and will only let them run in hybrid orientations, apparently.
This car is mostly functional, and will get some sort of small motorcycle engine tucked in that will kick in on the highway to be able to cruise indefinitely (well, with enough gas that is).
You can see that quite a crowd came out in freezing weather to see this car. I felt like we were having to clandestinely come see the car in an alley.
Click any of the images above or this link to see all of my EV1 photos on flickr.
I don’t know which university this is below, but it feels a bit crazy to be hacking apart 1 of about 40 vehicles in existence. The youtube post says that they have theirs running as a turbojet/electric hybrid.
(for some reason the first turbojet video address got changed)
A spreadsheet that I am working on which lists all sorts of information about various cars. This is to give myself some better comparative data while trying to figure out which kind of car to convert (hopefully in the near future).
It’s ridiculous how heavy most cars are these days. Hopefully that will start to go down with the use of composite materials and innovative uses of technology. For example, the Lotus Elise (link is to a great documentary about the creation of the Elise).