(first posted 12/22/2011) My gig is to wander the streets of Eugene and hopefully stumble onto something worthy of your attention. Sometimes, my wildest expectations are exceeded, and then exceeded again. Walking down Willamette Street, I see the distinctive rear hatch of what I take to be a Pinto. Nice enough. But no, this is a Mercury Bobcat; quite a find in this day and age. I start snapping away. And then the owner shows up and tops it all: he’s converted this Bobcat to a steam injection system of his own invention, and it’s going to pull twelves in the quarter mile and get 75 mpg. Incredible!
Incredible indeed. Oh, and I have a 200 mpg carburetor design that the oil companies paid me a fortune to not reveal. But let’s not jump to conclusions before we’ve given his years of (still incomplete) labors its fifteen minutes of fame. The fact that he’s using a 1978 Bobcat as the basis of his rolling experiment alone deserves attention. It also makes it a bit easier to imagine what kind of stereotypical personality this inventor is. Why didn’t I ask him to pose with his car?
Before you think this is all some BS hype to jack up our stats or some old recycled April 1 post, I did take pictures of his steam injection system from a photo in his album, and we popped the hood to confirm evidence of his currently partially-dismantled set up. There’s the steam “distributor”, copper lines, valves, etc…this is not just some glorified water injection system; the “steam” will be 500 degrees hot, and rapidly expand in the cylinder. Damn; in all my excitement, I forgot to ask him how he was going to heat it up, without using a boiler of some sort. I’m sure he’s got it covered though.
He showed me detailed drawings and photos of numerous valves, manifolds and other components worthy of an overly complicated home hot-water heating system. And I heard his sad story of living on disability income; how he was using food money to try to finish building the components so that he could qualify for a $270k DOE grant or something like that. And he assured me that when (if) the Bobcat was completed, twelve-second quarter miles and 75 mpg economy were a slam dunk. Sure, I see no problem; but he might consider some bigger rubber on the rear wheels before he sets out to prove his claim on the drag strip and vaporizes those little 13″ tires.
You might be wondering just what drove him to using a Mercury Bobcat for his little steamy wonder (I was), other than a quirk of personality. There’s a good reason. Well, it didn’t exactly have to be a Bobcat, just any of the millions of the Ford vehicles that used the 2.3 OHC Lima engine, which still powered Rangers until quite recently. The later versions of that engine had a twin-plug setup, and thereby held the key to fitting the steam injectors, which are clearly visible in the picture. His engine came from one of these Rangers, but because its fuel injection system was too complicated and thus not suitable to the inventor, he went to considerable length to convert it back to a carburetor set up. Steam injection: good; fuel injection: not.
It’s not like anyone makes adapter plates for that particular job (converting back to a carb intake manifold) either. He showed me pictures of his handiwork, and told me plaintively “you have no idea what it took to make that adapter by hand”. I didn’t ask what he meant “by hand”, but I hope some power tools were involved along the way. Moving along…
He anticipates a four-fold increase in combustion chamber pressure as the result of the steam injection. He made reference to the Crower six-stroke engine, which I’ve read about, but somehow he had invented the solution to incorporating the gasoline combustion and steam expansion cycles into one. Maybe I was just hungry and had low blood sugar, but his explanation is all a bit hazy today, despite this encounter taking place just yesterday. I’m just not going to make a good venture capitalist. I’m sure the DOE will have an easier time of getting it.
Or perhaps I was just distracted with his Bobcat. They’ve become almost as rare as six-stroke engines. Mercury’s “grille engineered” Pinto was offered to a less-than-enthusiastic public from 1975 through 1980. It was Mercury’s desperate response to the 1974 energy crisis, but never sold more than at a tiny fraction of the Pinto’s sales numbers.
1978 was a particularly inauspicious year to buy a Bobcat, if performance was even vaguely on your mind, which it probably wasn’t. It marked the low-water year for engine output: the 2.3 (pre-steam injection) made 88 horsepower, and if that wasn’t enough, you could spring for the 2.8 V6, rated at 90 hp. That probably represented one of the more expensive horsepower-per-dollar investments.
In 1981, the Escort-rebadge Lynx chased the Bobcat from the scene. Makes me realize I haven’t seen that species from the house of the sign of the cat in a long time. Maybe I’ll stumble upon one soon, and it will turn out to be powered by a cold-fusion engine. Otherwise, it’ll be hard to top this scalding-hot Bobcat.
Would you just look at the size of the bumpers on that thing?! I’m having a hard time remembering a ’70smobile that wore the 5 mph bumpers worse than this poor, rednecked Bobcat. The rear one extends out so far from the back of the car it looks like one of those wild Continental Kit bumpers from the ’50s! Somone pull a fiberglass spare tire cover off a junked conversion van and duct tape a spoked Bonneville Brougham hubcap to it and and give the man some Continental luxury!
Hmmmm… seems to me the subject of 5mph bumpers would make a good QOTD.
How does the scheme work, theoretically? If steam injection so awesome why no automakers have tried developing it? I remember reading an article about BMW working with steam as sort of helper to the gas engine by scavenging wasted heat (kinda like GM’s E-assist. S-assist?) but the steam is not injected into the combustion chamber. And isn’t water incompressible? I seem to recall that getting water into the combustion chamber is very bad, could lead to bent heads, etc. Or is it different if the water is in the form of steam?
As for the Bobcat, the frameless glass hatch is cool. Or it looks like it’s frameless, the frame might just be hidden.
Yep… both steam and water injection were tried in the 60’s and rejected… as one of my buddies, a mechanical engineer put it, “How would putting water, a non-compressible liquid, into a cylinder, increase power and fuel efficiency? Answer: it won’t.” My dad actually installed a water injection system, invented by his buddy, on our VW van back in ’68… the results? Zed.
Water isn’t incompressible. If it was, we wouldn’t need hydraulic fluid.
Water IS incompressable (barely compressable) as can be witnessed when your coolant freezes in the winter or you have a head gasket leak and get hydro lock.
Steam is a gas and is therefore compressable.
Water injected into an engine boils and turns to steam, the boiling lowers the temperature of the intake charge (reducing knock) and is compressable.
Messerschmidts ME-109’s used water injection to get more power out of their supercharged engines back in WWII.
I get how water injection works to reduce the temperature (and increase the density) of the charge, but how does injecting steam do that?
you’d have to keep the superheated water liquid until the very moment it enters the engine’s cylinders. at which point he’ll have invented James Watt’s steam engine.
I think it is an example of what is called a 6 stroke engine. The injection pump is injecting water into the hot combustion chamber where it expands into steam for an additional power stroke. See below
http://www.autoweek.com/article/20060227/free/302270007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-stroke_engine
THAT Crower? I’m prepared to consider it plausible.
The Wikipedia link should be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-stroke_engine#Crower_six-stroke_engine
I had never heard of this before…fascinating!
This Crower six-stroke is fascinating, thanks for the link. No boiler, just spray water in after the exhaust cycle and it flashes into steam for another power stroke, cooling the engine in the process. So much energy goes out the tailpipe, this would turn some of that into work. Better thermal efficiency in other words.
Aside from getting the pump to work with water, he’s got to machine a very strange camshaft. Four strong and four weak power pulses every six revolutions…each cylinder’s running in waltz time. Why isn’t he using a straight six? More friction and pumping losses per gas-fueled power stroke, plus the load of the water injector.
If it was practical and worthwhile, we’d all be driving them. So the interesting question is, what exactly is the problem? I’m naively guessing a) Corrosion and b) Not enough extra efficiency to be worth the extra overhead.
What I’d really like to know is this: Would it sound like a cross between a car and a steam locomotive?
This idea is making a comeback in the heavy truck world. The cost, weight and space calculus changes when you drive the vehicle 200k mi/year.
Paccar (Peterbilt & Kenworth) and Cummins have a prototype Pete 579/15L ISX with a waste heat recovery system. They show 51% brake thermal efficcency; over 10mpg on flat test loop with a combined vehicle weight of 65k lbs pulling a van trailer with full aero-kit.
Jump to about 2:15 for the combined cycle ISX.
This guy is going to have the cleanest combustion chambers and valves of any 2300 around! The other claims are shaky at best.
I really like the mismatched wheels. Tired of looking at the slotted mags? Just stroll around to the other side! .
Well, you can only see one side at a time!
That was my dad’s rule with hubcaps!
Yes, the engine pictures from the album appear to show a rotary diesel injection pump that will be injecting the “steam”. Don’t know how that’s going to work, since that style of injection pump relies upon the lubricity of the fuel.
Back in the early 1980s there was a guy down in Milton-Freewater (or nearby) who was also working with steam injection, using a mopar slant-6 engine. Our local newspaper had a few articles on him. He was reporting fuel economy in the mid-to-upper 20s, which is more believable than the projections above.
I knew a guy who, similar to this man, had lofty goals of building a working prototype of the radiant energy machine as invented by Tesla follower Thomas Henry Moray. He spent hundreds of hours building this thing (which was on a piece of plywood about 2 ft. square) but could never get it to work (he must have been missing the mystery element that made up the one-way electrical valve which was apparently the key to making the whole thing work).
Sounds like great recipe for bending conrods but hey if it works more power to him, where is the boiler going to sit?
Exactly.
My own armchair theory is that the water mist simply takes up space in the cylinder during the compression cycle; since water cannot compress, the rest of the mixture is compressed to a greater amount.
It raises compression, IOW.
The danger in that, of course, is that with too deep a drink of water it WILL cause a cataclysmic failure. When I was young and dumb and stoned, with my Pinto, (2.0 liter) I played a few games with a vacuum hose, including feeding water into it and admiring the steam plume.
Didn’t hurt the engine – a miracle. But knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t set it up to run that way.
Hmmm….. finding creative ways to supplement your income is always good. I have heard that in select parts of Oregon people have been farming a few types of recreational herbal supplements. Can peyote be successfully raised in the Eugene area? It would help explain how this inventor went about conceptualizing his steam injection method.
Might as well give it a try, he can’t possibly make a Bobcat worse. Looking at that interior reminds me of being a kid sitting in one, terrible terrible car.
The Bobcat beginned a bit earlier in Canada it was beginned to be sold in 1973 as a 1974 model. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ifhp97/4439402487/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/unclegal/3400413523/
Interesting trivia to note then Pontiac also introduced the Astre earlier in Canada as well.
http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/static/Canada/1974%20Pontiac%20Astre%20Brochure/dirindex.html
I cannot believe you don’t believe this guy. It’s hard to be a prophet and not be recognized in your own time. I should know.
Just last week I made a cold fusion perpetual motion machine. I was working on a patent when I went to the grocery store and read in the national enquirer on display by the checkstand that someone had beaten me to it. There went the fame and big bucks.
Maybe next week.
I wouldn’t mind the F150 in the background even if it just runs on gas.
Steam propulsion or no, this Bobcat with its miss matched wheels not withstanding doesn’t look bad after all these years.
I knew someone with I think a ’79 Merc Bobcat (or was it an ’80?) and it was white and I think the base model too back when it was brand new and rode in it once.
Not bad for a US subcompact of its day but nothing to write home about either. I’ve seen many more Pintos than I do Bobcats, even up here in Puget Sound over the years and still see the occasional Pinto running around. The last great example was a red late 70’s era Pinto wagon with the yellow and orange stripping and it had the louvers for the rear liftgate glass and was all stock too with the stock spoker wheels and that was a couple of years ago coming home from work one day.
I’m in the Tacoma, WA area myself and saw a Pinto just the other day as I was working on my van. It drew my attention by making an awful racket and smoking like a Chinese businessman. The sheer surprise of seeing a running Pinto took me quite off guard.
Wouldn’t the steam injection cycle blow the oil off the cylinder walls?
Oh yea. Clean as a whistle 😀 !
If my memory is correct, I believe that the featured car’s rear hatch made entirely of glass was a very rare option. I alos think there was an issue with them exploding/cracking if slammed.
This sounds like a facinating idea, at least as explainded by Bruce Crower who knows a thing or two about motors. On the surface it makes sense- let the heat of the exhaust cycle heat the water into steam for extra oomph on the down stroke. The idea of doubling down on the compression strokes sounds crazy until you think about independent valve actuation without using a camshaft. I read an article in one of the major car mags (can’t remember which) about using electric servos to control valve opening. Computers could control the valves producing cylinder deativication for economy, and provide variable valve timing for added power on demand. Without the friction of cams and followers and hydraulic cam advancement there should be some power realized. Cadillac’s original attempt with the V8/6/4 were unsuccessful until the technology developed that could provide the reliability. Smokey Yunick had developed and promoted a heated fuel vapor motor back in the 70s or early 80s. These motors used a turbo like system that ran much hotter than production motors. Smokey said that with the right materials there would be no need for a cooling system. That sounds crazy-right? Well, wheres the radiator on a jet engine?
http://www.hotrod.com/how-to/engine/hrdp-1009-what-ever-happened-to-smokeys-hot-vapor-engine/
Thanks for the link, I appreciate the follow up info. It appears that the technology works but needs alot of development. I remember seeing some ads in old Popular Mechanics mags that touted a device placed between the carb and intake manifold that had exhaust gas flow through it to help further vaporize the fuel. I know that the quality of the fuel was poorer at the beginning of the 20th. Century. Actually Detroit used heat ducts vented into the air cleaner to assist in vaporizing the leaner mixtures on cold starts. Kind of an aside on hot vapor- there was an article in Car and Parts that showed how some cars in post WWII Europe had been converted to run on coal smoke. There was something that looked like a four foot tall boiler attached to the rear bumper. I guess a very “rich” coal mixture was burnt and the smoke plumbed to the carb. Maybe a little gas was used on start up.
Here’s a link to a current article about wood fueled cars. It’s amazing what is going on under the radar.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-cars.html
Now that’s an interesting idea, combine the steam injection with a cylinder deactivation setup. So you still have a four stroke cycle, except that instead of half the pistons being moving dead weights in deactivation mode, the steam injection means the “dead” cylinders are doing useful work. Has it been tried? I’m still wondering what the net gain is after taking into account the energy used in lugging around a water tank and operating the pump. Also, what does one add to the water to prevent freezing in the winter, which does not interfere with the functioning of the engine and is also safe, for the catalytic converter and the environment, to send out the tailpipe as a mist?
For every genius inventors, there are a few genius wannabes?
I don’t know what to make of the “steam conversion” thing, but that is a cool car. Yes, the earlier models with smaller bumpers looked better. But to me the Pinto/Bobcat has a beautiful body style. Look at the curves and contours. Especially notice the side curve from the edge of the roof all the way down to the rocker panels. There is actually some 3D shape there, unlike today’s slab sided cars.
The transition from the Pinto/Bobcat to the Escort/Lynx shows just how bad things got in a single model year. The Escort/Lynx was basically a box, with no style at all, and worse yet, it was FWD. The second generation Escort was even worse, one of the first eggmobiles.
My rock solid 43 year old Pinto wagon is proof that these cars were not the junk they were often made out to be. It is almost the same color, and even has the same wheels as that Bobcat. They were a factory option, made by Appliance. I wonder where the owner of that car got the whitewall tires? I could not find 13″ whitewalls anywhere, and had to settle for blackwalls. Even Coker tire did not have them in 13″ size.
I owned a 76 Pinto, an 80 Fiesta, and a brother and sister had 3 or 4 Escort/Lynx….the Pinto and E/L came across as cheap, small Fords while the Fiesta was very Euro feeling. It’s possible that if the Euro Escort had been sold in the U.S. instead of that watered down/bastardized small car built from 1981 to 1990 the Escort would have a better rep.
When I bought my 76 Pinto the dealer also had a 76 Bobcat that he thought I would like. That Bobcat was really fugly. It was silver with a houndstooth check vinyl landau roof and the interior was silver with the same houndstooth check on the seat covers. To top things off….no pun intended, the vinyl roof on this new car was already peeling off.
In the past 6 months I’ve found 2 Lynxes on Craigslists “near” me. Unfortunately, both were equipped with automatic transmissions and I wasn’t looking to pay $2,500 for a mediocre small car with automatic. One of the Lynxes is that funky medium blue metallic over a light blue metallic….ugh.
Growing up I’ve never seen very many Mercury Bobcat’s on the road and I have once seen a white Mercury Bobcat (pre-1979 model) driving around Kennewick, Washington and the car appeared to be in good shape, for some odd reason I’ve always found the taillights to be uglier looking on the Bobcat than the Pinto, definitely not a car people seem to remember yet it was Mercury’s version of the infamous Ford Pinto
Still haven’t figured out where the “infamous” Pinto came from. http://www.fordpinto.com Yes, I’m a member. These cars have had a loyal (if not really large) following from day one. This was a cheap economy car I would have been happy to buy. And in fact did. I bought a ’73 sedan (with a trunk) in 1975, when I got my drivers license. I loved that car, even spent money to put a set of mag wheels and RWL tires on it. Look for a cheap economy car today, they still look and feel cheap, but now they are ugly. Nothing out there today I would feel good about driving. Maybe the Fiat 500 or Toyota Yaris 3 door, or a used Cobalt 2 door. I remember liking the Datsun B210 hatchback back in the ’70s, but they were also cheaply made, and unlike a Pinto, cost way to much to keep going when they broke down. The ’99-’04 Chevy Tracker convertible was a cool little vehicle. Most all of them have been trashed.
I had a 72 Pinto in 1980. Powder blue, stick with a crank sun roof. Loved it.
If the Bobcat had smaller earlier bumpers it would have looked good, in a Cressida kind of way.
That looks just like my Pinto wagon, other than the grill, the color (mine is a copper color) and the wheels (mine has the Appliance 5 slotted aluminum wheels. It also no longer has whitewall tires, because they are not made anymore) It is a 4 speed, and seems to have plenty of power from it’s 2.0L OHC engine. To me it looks way better than anything Japanese. The Cressida was a 4 door wagon. It is also much more boxy than the Pinto. Even for an economy car, the Pinto has a very attractive, curvy style. I was instantly attracted to it when they first hit the streets. Like I said, I love the big curved fenders, and the way the side of the body curves from top to bottom. It is more ( ) than I I. It may have been cheaply built (though mine is still going strong after 43 years) but they did style it well. Pretty much all American cars of that era were styled that way. And if you go further back, even several decades, you will find American cars had plenty of curves
Water injection does increase thrust in jet engines… basically by cooling incoming air thus increasing its density. I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar has been tried for turbo/supercharger applications instead of an intercooler….
http://www.kls2.com/cgi-bin/arcfetch?db=sci.aeronautics.airliners&id=%3Cairliners.1996.265@ohare.chicago.com%3E
Still “KUEL” !
So, did your investment pay off?
I have nothing to say about the owner’s aspirations, but looking at the front of this Bobcat, it strikes me that this may have been where the styling inspiration for the ’78 restyle of the AMC Pacer might have come from. The stand-up style grille doesn’t work in either application, though it offends a bit less on the Bobcat, as the Pacer was so great-looking (to me) out of the box.
Reviewing this article, I just realized Ford didn’t bother to share the refreshed ’77 Pinto nose with it’s Mercury cousin (or update the Bobcat tail lights…).
While the new nose wasn’t a huge improvement, I imagine Mercury dealers were less than delighted that the ’77 (and ’78) Bobcat carried on with the previous year styling, while over at the Ford dealer the Pinto offered a “new and exciting” look.
Ford did share the new 1979 nose, but only the texture in the two plastic grilles changed from car to car.
I had an identical Pinto. Bought it from my Landlord in college. Apparently it like the house I was renting was their son and his wife and they went off to be missionaries, so the house was put up for rent and they eventually sold the car to me. I drove it for several years and sold it to a kid that I had help me with projects. Unfortunately he totaled it after about a year.
I always thought the squared-off ’79-80 nose was a lot of new sheetmetal tooling for Ford to put into a model that had already outlived its’ planned lifecycle, had just weathered a major safety scandal (deservedly or not), was rapidly growing fundamentally obsolete in a sea of Rabbit clones, and was basically selling on price.
Wow! Just Wow! I remember watching this guy on a TV show that was at least 20 years ago. He was making the same claims. Seems to have a bit of perpetual motion idealism.
Just goes to show the influence of dark money and the power of The National Gumdrop Association. Just when the 200 MPG carburetor was perfected, they did away with carburetors and stuck us with much less efficient fuel injection. The same thing happened with 100,000 mile white wall tires. Now all we have is black wall tires that don’t last half as long. If you bump into an Eskimo or even Paul Revere, when it’s nighttime in Italy, it’s Wednesday over here!
Just yesterday, I was replacing a toilet and low and behold, an alligator came up the pipe and chopped off my left hand.
Within a minute of this guy opening his mouth, my pen would be making a check in the “VISIBLY IMPAIRED” box of a field interview card.
The wonderful thing about water/steam is the expansion rate. Water expands tremendously when vaporized.
Given that roughly a third of your gasoline energy is wasted by heating the cooling system, and another third is wasted as heat going out the exhaust; injecting water which flashes to steam reduces the waste heat and provides additional force on the piston.
Numerous problems:
1. It freezes. No damn good when you fill up with water then drive over a mountain; or just parking/driving during cold winter weather. The water in the reservoir freezes.
2. Water is corrosive. So is alcohol. Steam-turbine powerplants go to extremes to use chemically-pure water so there’s no scale build-up in the plumbing of the steam/water system. But then all the plumbing has to be corrosion-resistant.
3. Water is heavy. Gasoline is 6.x pounds per gallon. Water is about 8 1/3 pounds per gallon. Carrying extra weight reduces fuel economy and can cause handling and tire-loading problems.
Thousands of years ago, Oldsmobile sold “Turbo Rocket Fluid”; a water/methanol/oil mix to reduce detonation of the Turbo 215 aluminum V-8. This was not injected directly into the cylinders, however. And, of course, they got the idea from WWII aircraft which also used a water/methanol injection system to reduce detonation under heavy-throttle use such as takeoff and during “War Emergency” operation.
I worked with a guy that was working on the heated gas theory. He was plumbing hot water into the gas tank, then you use the vapor generated to fuel the engine.
We had a few of these wack jobs actually get their product in front of us at the DOT.
One was a pickup that had a chamber added between the throttle body and the intake manifold. Exhaust was routed thru the chamber super heating the intake charge and this was supposed to give us fantastic fuel mileage.
Another was using a mixture of water and diesel fuel with a catalyst plated pistons in diesel engines to get a 40% increase in fuel economy.
The one I really loved was the turbulence inducer that was fitted to the turbocharger intake on diesel engines. This was supposed to make the air more turbulent to better vaporize the fuel. Kind of hard to buy the BS. After the air has passed thru the turbo and intercooler I highly doubt any “added” energy induced into the air by the turbulence inducer will remain.
I was in the equipment purchasing section so all these crackpots got steered our way.
The final solution was requiring a 3rd party certified SAE Fuel Economy test.
I would give the party a pamphlet showing what was required and that was usually the last we heard from them.
My fav was the device installed in your fuel line to align the gasoline molecules for better combustion. Really sounds like we should start producing a modern Doble.