Tom,
Your smokescreen idea for British cars that uses old motor oil burning
on a hot surface, is environmentally, morally and ethically destructive.
I think it's a wonderful invention.
When in High School, I thought more than a few hours about another spy
system, the oil slick.
Here's how it would work:
Take a suitable length of thin-walled copper or steel tubing and place it
transversely underneath your trunk. It would have several small holes
drilled to face downward toward the road, with a greater concentration of
holes at the ouside edges. A reservoir in the trunk would feed used
motor oil into a suitable pump, (possibly a few SU fuel pumps in
parallel) which would then force the oil into the tube and down onto the
road. Then, when undesirables in old Chevy pickups are tailgaiting your
fine piece of machinery, you simply flip a switch on the dash and voila!,
they do the "slick dance" off into the weeds. It would be most effective on
corners. Only problem is, it would contaminate the road surface for a few
days to come, perhaps causing you danger if you were to happen by that same
spot in the future.
Of course, since the system uses SU pumps, you'd have to fit a solenoid
that causes a bell crank to rotate the handle of an old pozidriv
screwdriver to impact the points housing of the SU pumps, to get the
system to start. Perhaps a Fuel injection thermo time switch could be
employed to have the screwdrivers whap the pumps for the first few
seconds of operation.
I suppose there's always the problem of the oil dripping out of
the pipe for a time after you've shut off the pumps. This could be
allieviated by fitting in-line a fuel-cutoff solenoid as used in Jaguar
tank switching systems.
What do you think?
Greg
Greg Meboe meboe@wsuaix.csc.wsu.edu
Dept. of Mechanical and Materials Engineering
Washington State University, Pullman, Wa.
'85 XJ-12 H.E. (daily) '67 Spit-6 '74 TR-6
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