Ron Patrick's Street-Legal Jet Powered Volkswagen Beetle (2006)
ronpatrickstuff.com
ronpatrickstuff.com
I always enjoyed visiting Ron's lab at Stanford and chatting him up. Between talking with him and Fritz Rinehart at the other engine lab down the hall in bldg 500 I always felt I learned something new about combustion.
Personally, I preferred his 572 hemi mid sixties Chrysler. Now that was a scary car!
edit: spelling.
It was a DOS program, written in C. Fritz asked me to write it for Windows 2.1, but I said: "no thanks, all I need is a frame buffer and a GPIB IO Card". I made my own simple little graphics subsystem with fonts borrowed from X11.
Here's a little picture gallery I have of the ICE lab from 1990: http://www.marinopoulos.net/gallery2/v/Cars/StanfordEngineLa...
Enjoy!
Speaking of engine research, kind of crazy what production engines do these days: http://www2.mazda.com/en/next-generation/technology/ https://www.infinitiusa.com/now/technology/vc-turbo-engine http://www.etagen.com/technology/
Speaking of EtaGen (your third link), two of the founders, Shannon Miller and Matt Svrcek, are from Chris Edwards's group at Stanford. I worked with Matt quite a bit during undergrad. I knew Shannon but didn't work with her much directly. They are doing some very cool stuff. Their generator been in development a long time -- I hope it can go to production soon.
The fact it turns on, is bolted to the vdub and so forth... mere details.
Converting a car is a completely different kettle of fish. As someone who's built a couple of personal electric vehicles I can attest, the US has plenty of regulations of what you can do on the highways and byways.
It depends. If you're starting with a rolling chassis that's already road legal 99% of the work is done for you.
In CA you can drive a death trap as long as it doesn't pollute.
In MI you can drive a vehicle that burns tires and is lubricated with whale oil as long as it has mud flaps.
It's not like some places in Europe where applying for a mortgage has less paperwork than installing aftermarket control arms.
I mean, I'm all for less regulation for DIYers but we do have it pretty good here.
I can apply for a mortgage online in thirty seconds. This is not an exaggeration.
If I wish to replace the original control arms on my Land Cruiser with something - anything - differing from OEM spec, I need to obtain paperwork from the control arm manufacturer as well as from Toyota stating that this will be fine, said papers will have to be brought to a control station where the vehicle will be inspected, documentation perused and the change hopefully being approved.
This process takes more than thirty seconds.
Picturing this monstrosity gave me a good, solid laugh.
That's what the US always stood for in my view. Doing crazy stuff that you don't see anywhere else.
He mentions using the afterburner on a highway. This is an accident waiting to happen. Who's to say he'll never make a mistake and put that massive fireball somewhere it'll cause harm.
Want perfect safety? Put everyone in a cell.
His freedom to swing his fist ends at my nose =] And honestly, more worried about my air, than my nose!
Love the pic of the cop scratching his nose wondering what to charge them with!
The way this guy fucks around with jet engines really puts a B.S. CompSci degree in perspective (and not in a good way!). Admittedly he did get a PhD from Stanford.
Did he ever build his wife that jet-powered scooter?!
Just tighter tolerances and potentially...nasty failure modes.
See second paragraph, first sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_engine
Rover actually produced the first car turbine engines back in the 40’s.
Impressive for sure though. Being reported to Homeland Security is funny.
Of particular note "you drive the car up to about 90 miles an hour and you spool up the jet"--it will just slide at lower speeds, and you will have no control. So the 0-60 and 1/4 mile times are just whatever you get in a stock beetle carrying an extra 300 lbs.
"So they wanted $2,000 for the missile," Patrick said, "and I had a bottle of ouzo and after a while I got them down to a grand." He still hasn't got the 35-foot-long missile, but he does know what he'll do with it once it clears U.S. customs. (Good luck.)
"I want to build a missile silo on my front lawn," he said. "It'll have those electric-opening silo doors and I'll have a set of lights for it. Then, at night, I open the silo doors and raise the missile up, with those lights on it."
This guy is a dream come true. He's like a version of Woz with a flair for surplus weaponry. It's fantastic.
Also, imagine having the connections to buy a Mach 3 missile that shot down Gary Powers for less than a Macbook. I wonder if a launcher is included.
Guessing he is single, close to it, or coupled with someone just as adrenaline powered :)
Looks like a Jetsons prop. Absolutely, positively beautiful.
Here in Scandinavia, some people have taken a more redneckesque approach - pulse-jet powered sleds. These Swedish blokes look promising:
This is a great example of why jet engines are used on planes - the power-to-weight ratio is far higher. The original flat-4 VW engine used in the "old" Beetle is already > 200lbs, and including the rest of the drivetrain is well over 300.
Um...
“It’s hard to say, because I just pin the speedo at 140 miles and hour, laugh hysterically, and then hope the cops don’t nail me.”
“Now, can you drive around the surface streets of California with that jet engine activated?”
“You could do it, but I don’t know what would happen. My runs are at night. I’ll leave the office late at night, and I’ll spool it up and nail it on a highway, and then sorta drive back on the gasoline engine and... go to bed.”
A fine engineer, for sure!
I should refer to this article the next time there's a thread on HN insisting that a college degree imparts useless knowledge.