As a follow-up to some of the additional questions that arose in previous posts, the driving force for this project was both of necessity and practicality. The necessity part had to do with dealing with the fallout from work-related stress and needing something to shift my mental focus to. My doctor said that it would come down to taking medication or else get myself some involved type of a major mental diversion. The practicality side dealt with having a 318 gasser that really did nothing for the car except get it from point A to Point B in a mundane and non-economical manner. Being a farm kid who worked around diesels quite a bit, a swap to such an engine seemed to be the best way to clear my mind and bring the car into a more economical mode.
With regard to performance, the engine was bored 0.050” over and an intercooler was added to the package. The engine tag says 105 horsepower, but it’s probably five to 10 over such because of the fore-mentioned additions. I even went so far to wrap the exhaust manifold in order to keep the exhaust gasses as raging hot as possible in order to give some added spin to the turbo. This approach also keeps the engine compartment and passenger compartment reasonably cool. Acceleration from a dead stop is such that I probably wouldn’t challenge a VW Rabbit off the line, but the SlapStik shifter allows me to bring the engine RPMs up to about 2000 rpm and then bump it into the next gear while releasing the accelerator pedal a little bit. Of course the 2.24 rear end gears (out of mid '80s Diplomat) will never cause a strain on the neck muscles upon take-off, but all things considered the car breezes up to the desired speed reasonably well. Oh yes, and people do look at me wierd when the car is parked at the diesel fuel pumps with the big rigs.
In order to bump the performance a little more, I’m planning to blend either virgin coconut, sunflower and/or soybean oil with a little gasoline to serve as the base engine fuel. I’ve collected about 300 gallons of this stuff right now and the supply keeps growing. You might raise an eyebrow to such a concoction, but there’s a farmer in Kansas by the name of Daniel who is doing just that in order to run his diesel-powered combine and pickup. He claims that there’s an increase in power and a decrease in fuel usage by going with this approach, and you can follow up on his website by going to
http://www.oilcrusher.5u.com/index.html . There are some temperature and viscosity-related concerns regarding this approach, but being a summer car in Wisconsin there won’t be a great deal of times that it’ll be out of the shed when the temp is less than 50 degrees F.
Feel free to drop me a line if you have any more questions. I really enjoy seeing what others are doing in this forum – it’s a great community to learn from.
Brian
