LongWayToFall

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Posts posted by LongWayToFall

  1. Sometimes I have misread my altimeter, but just continued to look at it until I knew what it was really reading. The only time I have pulled high was when I was on aff and confused my break off and pull altitude, 5000ft came around and in all of the excitement, I thought "hey, I'm supposed to do something right now" and pulled. I had already broken off, because I completed my maneuvers, I was tracking until pull time, so no harm.

  2. So whats the deal with Monterey? I tried calling today and nobody picked up. I heard that they are only open to fun jumpers on the weekend, possibly Friday and Monday as well? I want to go out there because I have some tickets from awhile back and love the view, besides, I did my aff there! So if anyone is in the know, what days are best to go and how many loads do they usually put out on each day if the weather is good? Do they still jump until sunset? Looking forward to 18k...... :)
    Edit: Sorry for posting in the wrong forum!

  5. If the car is driving straight and turns good (not allot of toe in or out) than it is doubtful that the alignment is what caused the bearing failure. It definitely is possible that you hit something and this damaged the bearing slightly, which over time is what caused it to go bad. You also could have damaged the seal with road debris which allowed dirt and junk to get in there. Don't let anyone tell you that because you didn't get your tires rotated you damaged major items. The only reason to rotate your tires is to get slightly longer life out of them, however if you pay someone to do it, you must factor this into the cost of the new tires. Personally, if the tire appears to be wearing evenly, I would not do it. Some front wheel drive cars love to eat up the outsides of the front tires though, and in that case it is worth your time. Don't feel bad for only fixing what is wrong, the manufacturer specifies replacement intervals for most parts that are pretty short, you might as well get your money's worth. The only things you absolutely must make sure you always do, is your oil changes and valve adjustments on time (its possible your car does not need valve adjustments). The rest of the fluids need to be checked for level and color, if the coolant or brake fluid gets discolored at all its time to change. When your wheels are off or hear noise when stopping get the brakes looked at, simple stuff like that. You just gotta be heads up with what the car is doing.
    The fact that you heard the bearing going out and didn't put it off until it came apart shows that you are above average in your competency with vehicles

  7. I wonder when it will be cheaper to jump from balloons, or maybe a big antenna? Imagine a tandem base....... ugly.
    I'm glad a nearby dz has $13 tickets to 13.5k when you buy in bulk. Cheap jumps are the shiz. $5 hop and pops are nice too.
    Hey, for $27 I could do a full altitude jump, and two hop and pops with enough left over to buy a 40oz and a candy bar.

  8. Time to move out west! Lodi is $15 to 13.5k, $13 if you buy in bulk. And for your same price of 27 (28), there are 2 dzs in the area going to 18k

  9. There are some slow ass checkers out there too. At my local bevmo, this guys takes FOREVER to ring up your stuff, probably 3 times longer than what is needed. The line gets outrageous, and I pretty much just want to kick him out of the way and ring it up myself. Big lines at the checkout suck, because at least in traffic on the road you can expect each car to take about the same time to get moving, with the checkout some people are just straight retarded

  11. Our military needs to be able to act quickly, and I doubt every soldier is going to learn arabic within a reasonable time frame. Besides, our troops are in groups that have translators with them to be able figure out what the situation is, not by themselves where they might be missing critical information because of the language barrier. There is a big difference between going to a country without the intension of living the rest of your life there, and with it.

  12. Wow that is a sweet design! I always thought that the setup only had one motor, not a second that controlled the gears. I can see something like this being used on motorcycles with very small Li-Po batteries, with great results. Learn something new everyday! Thanks for the informative and interesting conversation Bill, I will be very much looking forward to the development of engine design in the years to come. I think in 10-15 years the advancements in battery technology will provide huge dividends. Know any companies to invest in along these lines????

  17. 10% huh? Thats really good. All of the alcohol conversions I have seen in motorcycles and hot rod v8s get super lousy mileage, even with the compression going from ~9:1 up to 15+:1.
    Yeah it is definitely worth noting the different kinds of hybrid systems, if you do keep the engine connected to the wheels then you gain efficiency when cruising on the highway, thats for sure. But when you are driving around town, you loose it because you can't keep the engine at its best rpm, unless you had it in neutral and went all electric or a very complex transmission setup, similar to a continuously variable transmission. Thinking about it, when you want to go from very low power to very high power, you want to go almost to full rpm in a matter of a second, I think the CVT would be the only thing to allow that to happen with the wheels still directly connected to the road. In the near future, I think many cars will be using them, I saw a commercial the other day which advertised a car that was already out with one. The huge downside with them though, is that they have a short life, cannot handle large amounts of power without slipping, and I don't think they are very efficient compared to modern automatics or manuals. But hey, they might be a perfect match for a city-bound hybrid that is making starts and stops all the time.

  18. Nice trick! wonder which models it works for.

    If the light went out, there is nothing you can do until it comes back on, so just keep driving it and when it does come back on, go to an auto parts store like mentioned before and have them scan it for you. I highly doubt it is your catalytic converter, the only thing it could do to make the engine run poorly is get clogged up, the only time you ever see people changing them is when they are trying to pass smog.

  19. "Oh, hey, I gotta tell you about my dream. You're gonna get into this man. This is great. No, really, you see like the one thing I wanna do before I join the cosmos is to hang glide off of Mt. Everest. Yeah, but wait, this is the best part - NAKED - Ha Ha! Yeah man, born to be wild!"

  21. I still don't like referring to alcohol injection as boost, in the method that the article talks about, it is just switching fuels. The alcohol doesn't prevent ping by cooling the mixture (ok a small amount) but by the fact that the alcohol has a much higher octane rating. (or whatever type of rating they use for alcohol) Reducing knock only increases power by keeping the engine in one piece, its something that you don't want to have happening period. You act like this is some crazy new technology, all it is, is 2 injection systems trading off depending on engine load. Set the compression high enough, and you are definitely going to need a fuel other than gasoline at some point in the load range. This type of setup would be best used in a turbocharged application, low boost on gasoline, high boost on alcohol. I still think though, that if you want to run on gasoline, you should stick to it, and have a turbo engine that can shut down cylinders independently, all the while keeping the boost as high as possible for the cylinders that are still running. This way you can keep the engine as close as possible to ideal volumetric efficiency (rpm).
    I agree with you on the truck part, hybrids would help them get rolling. But the energy for the motors has to come from somewhere, and that is the engine. When a truck is taking off from a stop, he has to shift into a new gear every second or so, keeping the engine in a very narrow power range. This range happens to be very efficient, you don't loose allot of efficiency like a car which has a huge rpm band. The hybrid setup is going to be hard pressed to see gains over the current one. Also the size of battery needed to drive the motors would be outrageous, and way way expensive. That kind of setup is years away from becoming feasible. Trucks are cool though, in that they pretty much had the first regenerative braking system. The jake brake they use fills a tank which is used to start the truck and operate the regular air actuated brakes. I could definitely see an electric regenerative brake setup being used sooner than a full on hybrid one.

  22. That is a cool design, I have seen diagrams of those engines but did not know they were using them. I think though that even in the atkinson engine, when it is set to a higher compression ratio, will get worse mileage on alcohol. There is just less specific energy per unit of fuel, something is whack if it is doing more with less.
    The ability to change the power with the rpm is super cool, it eliminates pumping losses. The hybrid engine certainly has neat aspects to it, but you still loose efficiency generating the electricity, and then using it in the motors. Maybe the rpm throttle gets it to almost break even?
    The best variable compression engine though is a turbocharged motor, I would think that a turbodiesel overexpansion engine would be the ideal, not necessarily the atkinson, there is another design that has 2 pistons that I have heard promising things about. One piston is the intake and compression, the other power and exhaust.

  23. You are totally talking out your ass about alcohol. The stoichiometric ratio of ethanol/methanol is about half that of gasoline. Thus, you require twice as much fuel. The specific energy of alcohol is about 75% that of gasoline, so if you were burning the same amount, you get less energy. But, since the stoich is half, and you are putting in twice as much fuel, you see a power increase of about %50. Half the mileage though! Not more!
    An engine running on alcohol has a much higher resistance to detonation than gasoline. This allows you to increase the compression ratio, and increase efficiency compared to running it on an engine designed for gasoline (but you won't ever get past the crap mileage) So if you want to run E85, you should only run E85, and have an engine that has a much higher compression ratio.

    Your term of "boosted" is not correct. An engine that has boost means that the air coming into the engine is compressed, and is not at outside pressure. This is done by using a turbocharger or supercharger. Forced induction does increase the efficiency of the engine, some. Turbos are very useful however in allowing you to get the most efficiency out of the fuel you are using, the example above with the alcohol is a good one, you can leave the boost low while on gasoline and turn it up for alcohol. But how often do you need to go from 150hp to 400? To see an advantage while at highway cruising speeds (low load) you would need to have all of the cylinders shut down except for 1, and keep running that one at high boost.

    Also, you say that cooling the combustion increases efficiency. This is exactly opposite of the truth. The higher the combustion temperature, the more it will burn the fuel, extracting every last bit of energy it can. This is why diesels are much more efficient, they inject the fuel when the air in the combustion chamber is so hot, that it is literally white hot, and when the fuel hits it, it instantly ignites.

    Alcohol/water injection can be used in a gasoline burning engine to aid in anti detonation, maybe this is what you referred to when saying "alcohol boosted" however for your engine to be on the verge of detonating, you need to be under maximum load, or have your fuel leaned out to the point of detonating. The alcohol is only used to aid the water in evaporating in the intake system. A combination of alcohol/water injection and leaner fuel ratio will certainly see a decrease in fuel consumption, because it is giving the same output with less fuel, however every car on the road already uses a method similar to this. It is called an exhaust gas recirculator, or EGR. The combustion process is such that the exhaust leaving the engine has a higher water content than that of the incoming air, and when introduced back into the intake, allows a leaner fuel ratio to be used.
    There are other technologies being developed that will allow for much leaner fuel ratio to be used. The one that stands out the most in my mind, is the use of the intake valves to control the throttle, instead of the throttle butterfly valve. At low engine loads, the valves open a very small amount, and cause the intake charge to reach incredibly high speeds. This makes the air/fuel mixture atomize so good, that less fuel is needed and hence you can lean it out without detonating. BMW is doing lots of work on this type of engine. Direct injection gasoline engines are also seeing much higher efficiency.
    But the be all, end all of reciprocating engines is the diesel. The fact that the fuel being injected is what starts the combustion process rather than a spark, allows you to lean the engine out with no limit, because you will never have the mixture pre-igniting in the cylinder. The air/fuel ratio in a gasoline burning engine is 12-13.5:1 at all loads, but in a diesel at idle, it can be upwards of 100:1. Even when you see a diesel puking out black smoke, it is still not even hitting stoichiometric, so if you added more fuel, it would make more power. So no, diesel engines do not use huge amounts of fuel at idle.
    Your idea of a hybrid 18 wheeler is crazy, unless it was used in stop and go city type driving. But 99% of big trucks spend their lives on the highway, cruising at the same speed. Therefor, the electric motor/battery is not going to be doing a damn thing, except adding weight. The reason trains use diesel electrics, is as you stated, because electric motors produce 100% torque at zero rpm. If they used just a straight diesel with no electric, no clutch on the planet is going to last more than a few pulls. This is the only reason they are used. They are actually hurting efficiency, because you loose energy with the generation/driving the motors through heat. If a train only had to get moving one time, and its whole life was just cruising at one speed and it never had to stop, you can bet that it would be using a diesel engine directly attached to the wheels.
    The future of automotive engines that get insane mileage, will be light diesel engines, that can shut down cylinders and have them not even spinning when not needed. When you hit the gas from a stop, all the cylinders will fire, but when you cruise on the highway it will only run on one or 2 cylinders. Those one or 2 cylinders will have their own small turbocharger, operating at high boost continuously. In a regular car, we should be able to see mileage easily exceeding 150mpg at cruising speeds.

  24. Speak Spanish wherever you want, its a free country and nobody is going to stop you. But if you come to this country, and don't speak a single lick of English, then you need to learn or get the fuck out. A fireman runs into your home, and says "your house is on fire, leave now" or you are driving down the road and cannot understand the signs that say "slow down, accident ahead" or you need to find a hospital because your family member is spilling guts all over the inside of your car but you can't understand the directions some guy is giving you, and they die. The list goes on and on, we need to have a universal method of communicating in America, that method is English. English is also spoken in every country on the planet, if they have an airport, because that is the universal language that was chosen for tower controllers. I'm not saying the whole world should speak English, far from it. But if you move to a country, you need to be able to understand the language, for your own sake and the sake of others.