Auto Parity /Turing Motor birth
A Parity on old Cars from Slate Magazine-Why my Autism understands a car and built the Turing Motor.
My Life as a mechanic learning from a 1962 Pontiac.
Gearbox
I Hate My Classic CarThank goodness they don't make 'em like that anymore.
By Paul Boutin Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007, at 10:02 AM ET
My wife and I ditched our dull late-model sedans a few years ago. We adopted a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as our only car, driven once or twice a week from our downtown San Francisco home. I blame the Avanti's seductive powers for our infatuation. It looks futuristic even today—Ethan Hawke* drove one in the space-age fantasy film Gattaca—and the car is loaded with luxury options.
When we took our first spin, it was like yachting down the boulevard. Its engine is free of the emissions controls that hamper modern motors, so you feel a direct connection between your foot on the gas and the tires on the pavement. Without today's federal mandates on its construction, the Avanti sports chrome bumpers fore and aft instead of crumple zones. It serves a spacious, wraparound view to passengers, unobstructed by headrests, airbags, or complicated belts. The car's body, designed by the legendary Raymond Loewy, flips the bird to modern crash tests, while its interior is designed to resemble an airplane cockpit full of overhead switches—try that nowadays. Every grocery outing became a pleasure cruise. As many a passerby reminded us, they don't make 'em like that anymore. But several years with this rolling museum piece has taught me the truth: Even the best old cars sucked.
To begin with, they're hard to start in the morning. The Avanti doesn't have computer-controlled injectors to squirt the exact amount of gasoline into each cylinder of its engine at the precise moment. It doesn't have computer-controlled anything. Instead, it's got a carburetor, a comparatively crude device that passively mists fuel into the engine's air intake.
To the few of us understand a model T Motor that even Ford him self misunderstood the Carburetor is simply the most misunderstood devise besides the Model t motor it sets on. Carburetors are sucked on devices and if everything below them is in fine working order your car would run like is has fuel injection! If you have no sticking valves, late timing issues weak valve springs or a host of other unknown mechanic troubles it will not run good, and "gasp" carburetors will never cause an engine miss stalling or hesitation or backfire or rough running but of course it shows the results of those things and thus is blamed for all of those troubles. Autistically my keen hearing like that of a dog gave me a far different lesion in car than 99% of all mechanic ever got and I actually hear the valve stick and the resulting backfire or sputter. A normal mechanic or car owner would need a decibel meter to her what we do. In fact one of my car repair inventions is a combination inferred camera and decibel meter. It will tell the mechanic what I know. He will look at the TV type screen with a weather radar picture of a car motor on it and be able to tell from there just what the exact trouble would be.
The carburetor is dumb.
No, the reality of the situation is the very primitive Model T motor its mounted to is very stone age and is not near as high tech as we like to think it is.
It works great at full throttle but is bad at starting the engine. It fails completely when facing uphill in chilly weather,
Again if the motor were in perfect shape and even designed better it would run perfectly, like my Turing Motor will. My Turing Motor is not backyard tinkering and discovery of the obvious piston and cylinder it is designed from the start to be a very efficient motor.
a frequent position in San Francisco. It's not uncommon for our romantic dates to end with the hood open and me draped over the engine, trying to "choke it" by blocking the carburetor's airflow with my bare hands while my wife cranks the starter. When the engine kicks in, I spring back to avoid its big metal 1963 cooling fan, which doubles as a finger-chopper. This was all kind of sexy the first time I did it. Nowadays it's just an unnecessary risk, since whenever you turn the key on even the cheapest modern car, an amazing thing happens: It starts. Every time.
You have a point there but that is a result of tough emissions standards not the fact a car company cares how well it runs or starts.
Because the Avanti predates Ralph Nader, it's as devoid of modern safety perks as it is of emission controls. There are seat belts, but no air bags or crumple zones. No supercomputer-generated crash studies went into the design. We have friends who refuse to ride in it. And you can see their point, since the brakes have a habit of dropping out all at once,
I was few weeks out of Driver Education in 1980 and my Pontiac lost all of its brakes all at once and If I had not been Autistic I might have crashed! Autistic drivers those of us that know our proficient thoughts simply do what we are supposed to do, downshift, rub off speed and using the parking brake so my experience 1/2 way down Lancaster High School drive was uneventful until after I got it stopped finally.
just like in Hitchcock movies. Old brake systems didn't have backup cylinders in case one failed. After my wife lost the brakes three blocks above Fisherman's Wharf and nearly ended up sleeping with the sea lions, we decided that classic cool only went so far. Our mechanic cobbled together a modern brake upgrade from a mix of brand-new Mustang and Chevy truck parts.
This is where I learned to inspect the brake system every now and then and fix problems before they were problems! An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. or in this case a crash.
The Avanti is a sexy-sounding machine.
My Luella has a coke bottle styling and side spear and those odd "C" shaped lights out back and the now famous Pontiac split grille.
It doesn't purr, it rumbles like a big cat. Its exhaust tone, unimpeded by pollution controls, wows pedestrians and passengers.
Today most look at Luella and their mouth is wide open you just don't see any 62 Pontiac's on the road today ours sports a new frame a hand made rocker arm system and a working slim Jim Transmission all reasons why you never see a 62 Pontiac today. No one but an obsessed Autistic would care to fix and it and in the process learn all the details of a really poorly designed car.
But try driving the four hours to Tahoe with it. Today's cars have much better noise insulation, not just for engine noise but for wind noise and for rolling-tire noise from the road. Cruising Interstate 80 in a new Cadillac is like lounging in a living room with a wraparound view. The Avanti is more like flying a small plane. The car sails beautifully at 90 mph, but the constant rush of noise is sure to give you a headache before you get to wherever you're going.
I do turn the motor off when I drive in Ohio's Amish country at a light, when I have Amish buggies horses and people behind me Luella despite being perfectly tuned and running could still choke a horse. Her 35% Efficient Model T derived Motor is just not efficient enough not to be wasteful and stinky.
We've learned to live with all of the above—sort of—but the real miracle of modern automobiles is how long they go between breakdowns. After 10 years with a Honda Civic, I'm spoiled. Our car's cutting-edge 1963 tech is feeble and flaky by today's standards,
, Not at all Mechanics and owners are just as stupid as ever and I feel they deserve every problem they encounter. I get a lot of pleasure when some old heap with a dirty motor refuses to run and the owner is stranded someplace. A perfectly maintained car will always be dependable a properly designed car will always work. On the contrary I think today cars are far worse than those of the 1960's they might run better but they don't seem to last as long.
even with new parts. The electric windows are dodgy. The power steering leaks—this model was known for it, even when new. The car goes through a lot of oil
Luella now uses no oil and doesn't leak and she NEVER has dirty oil these days and the super clean laboratory environment inside her motor makes for a perfect running quite, leak free car that if it were not coupled to a slim Jim transmission would present as a fuel injected dream of today. There are no misses sputters, hesitations or backfires and you hit the throttle and you GONE!
And is prone to overheating in hot weather, where "hot" means above room temperature. Manufacturing processes have gotten so much better since the days of chrome bumpers that cars just don't break anywhere near as often as they used to.
This is true for quality makes but some makes are very bad. I say if the headliner is down, the wipers are up and it smokes and the paint is peeled off in sheets it is junk! How many new cars have you seen that look like that?
The Avanti now slumbers in our garage, broken again, while my wife and I ponder its future. Despite the new radiator we put in two years ago, it's leaking coolant and overheating. Friends we meet ask us how our car is doing, but we're not sure we're up for another multithousand-dollar round of maintenance for a car we can't trust for a 30-mile trip. The very last time I piloted the thing home, one eye on the road and the other glued frantically to the climbing temperature gauge, I nearly ran down a gray-haired man in a crosswalk. He gave the Avanti a long, loving look and chirped to me, "I haven't seen one of those in years! They sure don't make 'em like that any more." The poor guy clearly had no idea why I snapped back at him, "Be glad they don't."
It seems Henry Ford and other first pioneers left us in a pickle that is for sure. If he would have even under stood the engineering of his Model T he would have see just how lucky it was it even ran from and engineering point of view. We delude our selves we are cream of the crop as humans driving automobiles and we are not doing more than driving Roman chariots. I have been privileged thanks to my Friend Rick Lindner to touch and work on Henrys 1903 Model A (curved dash) and the Autistic engineer in me seen just where Henry missed all the points of the entire motor concept and ironically invented the carburetor as we know it to hide the faults of the engineering his designed lacked.
This Parity was on the blog of Rich Shull Author of Pre Rain Man Autism and inventor of the Turing Motor. The Turing Motor is a 70% Efficient Green triple hybrid Car motor (compressed air, electric and gasoline) designed from the flame of combustion backwards. A reasonable car will get 100 mpg with it and with emissions controls mean it will be nearly perfectly green.
Correction, June 18, 2007: The article originally and incorrectly claimed that Jude Law drove a Studebaker Avanti in Gattaca. Ethan Hawke's character drove the car. (Return to the corrected sentence.)Paul Boutin is a writer living in San Francisco.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2167797/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
My Life as a mechanic learning from a 1962 Pontiac.
Gearbox
I Hate My Classic CarThank goodness they don't make 'em like that anymore.
By Paul Boutin Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007, at 10:02 AM ET
My wife and I ditched our dull late-model sedans a few years ago. We adopted a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as our only car, driven once or twice a week from our downtown San Francisco home. I blame the Avanti's seductive powers for our infatuation. It looks futuristic even today—Ethan Hawke* drove one in the space-age fantasy film Gattaca—and the car is loaded with luxury options.
When we took our first spin, it was like yachting down the boulevard. Its engine is free of the emissions controls that hamper modern motors, so you feel a direct connection between your foot on the gas and the tires on the pavement. Without today's federal mandates on its construction, the Avanti sports chrome bumpers fore and aft instead of crumple zones. It serves a spacious, wraparound view to passengers, unobstructed by headrests, airbags, or complicated belts. The car's body, designed by the legendary Raymond Loewy, flips the bird to modern crash tests, while its interior is designed to resemble an airplane cockpit full of overhead switches—try that nowadays. Every grocery outing became a pleasure cruise. As many a passerby reminded us, they don't make 'em like that anymore. But several years with this rolling museum piece has taught me the truth: Even the best old cars sucked.
To begin with, they're hard to start in the morning. The Avanti doesn't have computer-controlled injectors to squirt the exact amount of gasoline into each cylinder of its engine at the precise moment. It doesn't have computer-controlled anything. Instead, it's got a carburetor, a comparatively crude device that passively mists fuel into the engine's air intake.
To the few of us understand a model T Motor that even Ford him self misunderstood the Carburetor is simply the most misunderstood devise besides the Model t motor it sets on. Carburetors are sucked on devices and if everything below them is in fine working order your car would run like is has fuel injection! If you have no sticking valves, late timing issues weak valve springs or a host of other unknown mechanic troubles it will not run good, and "gasp" carburetors will never cause an engine miss stalling or hesitation or backfire or rough running but of course it shows the results of those things and thus is blamed for all of those troubles. Autistically my keen hearing like that of a dog gave me a far different lesion in car than 99% of all mechanic ever got and I actually hear the valve stick and the resulting backfire or sputter. A normal mechanic or car owner would need a decibel meter to her what we do. In fact one of my car repair inventions is a combination inferred camera and decibel meter. It will tell the mechanic what I know. He will look at the TV type screen with a weather radar picture of a car motor on it and be able to tell from there just what the exact trouble would be.
The carburetor is dumb.
No, the reality of the situation is the very primitive Model T motor its mounted to is very stone age and is not near as high tech as we like to think it is.
It works great at full throttle but is bad at starting the engine. It fails completely when facing uphill in chilly weather,
Again if the motor were in perfect shape and even designed better it would run perfectly, like my Turing Motor will. My Turing Motor is not backyard tinkering and discovery of the obvious piston and cylinder it is designed from the start to be a very efficient motor.
a frequent position in San Francisco. It's not uncommon for our romantic dates to end with the hood open and me draped over the engine, trying to "choke it" by blocking the carburetor's airflow with my bare hands while my wife cranks the starter. When the engine kicks in, I spring back to avoid its big metal 1963 cooling fan, which doubles as a finger-chopper. This was all kind of sexy the first time I did it. Nowadays it's just an unnecessary risk, since whenever you turn the key on even the cheapest modern car, an amazing thing happens: It starts. Every time.
You have a point there but that is a result of tough emissions standards not the fact a car company cares how well it runs or starts.
Because the Avanti predates Ralph Nader, it's as devoid of modern safety perks as it is of emission controls. There are seat belts, but no air bags or crumple zones. No supercomputer-generated crash studies went into the design. We have friends who refuse to ride in it. And you can see their point, since the brakes have a habit of dropping out all at once,
I was few weeks out of Driver Education in 1980 and my Pontiac lost all of its brakes all at once and If I had not been Autistic I might have crashed! Autistic drivers those of us that know our proficient thoughts simply do what we are supposed to do, downshift, rub off speed and using the parking brake so my experience 1/2 way down Lancaster High School drive was uneventful until after I got it stopped finally.
just like in Hitchcock movies. Old brake systems didn't have backup cylinders in case one failed. After my wife lost the brakes three blocks above Fisherman's Wharf and nearly ended up sleeping with the sea lions, we decided that classic cool only went so far. Our mechanic cobbled together a modern brake upgrade from a mix of brand-new Mustang and Chevy truck parts.
This is where I learned to inspect the brake system every now and then and fix problems before they were problems! An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. or in this case a crash.
The Avanti is a sexy-sounding machine.
My Luella has a coke bottle styling and side spear and those odd "C" shaped lights out back and the now famous Pontiac split grille.
It doesn't purr, it rumbles like a big cat. Its exhaust tone, unimpeded by pollution controls, wows pedestrians and passengers.
Today most look at Luella and their mouth is wide open you just don't see any 62 Pontiac's on the road today ours sports a new frame a hand made rocker arm system and a working slim Jim Transmission all reasons why you never see a 62 Pontiac today. No one but an obsessed Autistic would care to fix and it and in the process learn all the details of a really poorly designed car.
But try driving the four hours to Tahoe with it. Today's cars have much better noise insulation, not just for engine noise but for wind noise and for rolling-tire noise from the road. Cruising Interstate 80 in a new Cadillac is like lounging in a living room with a wraparound view. The Avanti is more like flying a small plane. The car sails beautifully at 90 mph, but the constant rush of noise is sure to give you a headache before you get to wherever you're going.
I do turn the motor off when I drive in Ohio's Amish country at a light, when I have Amish buggies horses and people behind me Luella despite being perfectly tuned and running could still choke a horse. Her 35% Efficient Model T derived Motor is just not efficient enough not to be wasteful and stinky.
We've learned to live with all of the above—sort of—but the real miracle of modern automobiles is how long they go between breakdowns. After 10 years with a Honda Civic, I'm spoiled. Our car's cutting-edge 1963 tech is feeble and flaky by today's standards,
, Not at all Mechanics and owners are just as stupid as ever and I feel they deserve every problem they encounter. I get a lot of pleasure when some old heap with a dirty motor refuses to run and the owner is stranded someplace. A perfectly maintained car will always be dependable a properly designed car will always work. On the contrary I think today cars are far worse than those of the 1960's they might run better but they don't seem to last as long.
even with new parts. The electric windows are dodgy. The power steering leaks—this model was known for it, even when new. The car goes through a lot of oil
Luella now uses no oil and doesn't leak and she NEVER has dirty oil these days and the super clean laboratory environment inside her motor makes for a perfect running quite, leak free car that if it were not coupled to a slim Jim transmission would present as a fuel injected dream of today. There are no misses sputters, hesitations or backfires and you hit the throttle and you GONE!
And is prone to overheating in hot weather, where "hot" means above room temperature. Manufacturing processes have gotten so much better since the days of chrome bumpers that cars just don't break anywhere near as often as they used to.
This is true for quality makes but some makes are very bad. I say if the headliner is down, the wipers are up and it smokes and the paint is peeled off in sheets it is junk! How many new cars have you seen that look like that?
The Avanti now slumbers in our garage, broken again, while my wife and I ponder its future. Despite the new radiator we put in two years ago, it's leaking coolant and overheating. Friends we meet ask us how our car is doing, but we're not sure we're up for another multithousand-dollar round of maintenance for a car we can't trust for a 30-mile trip. The very last time I piloted the thing home, one eye on the road and the other glued frantically to the climbing temperature gauge, I nearly ran down a gray-haired man in a crosswalk. He gave the Avanti a long, loving look and chirped to me, "I haven't seen one of those in years! They sure don't make 'em like that any more." The poor guy clearly had no idea why I snapped back at him, "Be glad they don't."
It seems Henry Ford and other first pioneers left us in a pickle that is for sure. If he would have even under stood the engineering of his Model T he would have see just how lucky it was it even ran from and engineering point of view. We delude our selves we are cream of the crop as humans driving automobiles and we are not doing more than driving Roman chariots. I have been privileged thanks to my Friend Rick Lindner to touch and work on Henrys 1903 Model A (curved dash) and the Autistic engineer in me seen just where Henry missed all the points of the entire motor concept and ironically invented the carburetor as we know it to hide the faults of the engineering his designed lacked.
This Parity was on the blog of Rich Shull Author of Pre Rain Man Autism and inventor of the Turing Motor. The Turing Motor is a 70% Efficient Green triple hybrid Car motor (compressed air, electric and gasoline) designed from the flame of combustion backwards. A reasonable car will get 100 mpg with it and with emissions controls mean it will be nearly perfectly green.
Correction, June 18, 2007: The article originally and incorrectly claimed that Jude Law drove a Studebaker Avanti in Gattaca. Ethan Hawke's character drove the car. (Return to the corrected sentence.)Paul Boutin is a writer living in San Francisco.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2167797/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Labels: Autism/ Social, Turing Motor
posted by Pre Rain Man Autism | 5:19 AM
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