someone talk me out of this idea please...(metro content)

While perusing the list of Craig, I stumbled across a firefly (pontiac metro/swift variant) 1ltr 3cyl turbo 5 speed. This got the wheels in my head turning, these things are supposed to be hypermile kings, granted I'm not in a position to snag this one, but after new years I would be able to snap one up.

But I can't get this out of my head.

Some aero mods, kammback, rear wheel skirts, front air dam, sideview mirror delete, pigspotters on the inside in place of the sideview mirrors, lower windshield air deflector to help air bypass the windshield wipers. Smooth the bottom of the car out, front grill block off.

2.5" mandrel bent exhaust, with straight through style muffler. Possible, tubular manifold to replace the stock manifold, (more for weight than performance) size/source a modern ball bearing turbo that starts spooling around 3k rpm. Megasquirt with dual maps, high/low boost tuned to run lean off boost, setup to let MS handle boost control.

Metro lsi (i think, the convertible model) camshaft and trans.

And the kicker, 1.5-2lpm hho generator fed to the intake side of the turbo.

The goal would be 70-80mpg driving nicely. Using hypermiler tricks should push.it to the 100mpg mark easily.

Am I nuts?

Two things: (1) Zomby is your friend for all things Metro. No doubt he will chime in. (2) What the heck is a pigspotter?

Tiny convex mirrors, its a brand of motorcycle mirror replacement that are more aerodynamic than standard mirrors. The idea is to remove the aero drag of the mirrors but not loose em.

Spinout007 wrote: And the kicker, 1.5-2lpm hho generator fed to the intake side of the turbo.

Check ecomodder for threads related to this I am sure

Been there, lots of reading over the last couple of days. Just hoping someone here might have a little different look on things. Ecomodder strikes me as, "do X our way or don't do it at all" as it's the only way it can be done.

Like the idea of HHO, apparently they don't like it much over there. I know one guy personally that is using it on a scooter and having GREAT results with it. So much so that he was working on building a system large enough to test out on an old motorhome last time I talked to him.

Make sense?

I'm confused. I can't tell what you would be trying to do with a build like that, but I can tell you this,

HHO doesn't work. There is no free lunch. Forums like ecomodder are very low on tech, so take stuff you read on there with a grain of salt. I know that car you're talking about. It's been for sale a bunch of times. The factory turbo cars are great. Excellent fuel economy, and 15 second quarter mile times are a reality.

This Metro won't help talk you out of it. It's a junkyard turbo setup that was built for almost nothing on an otherwise stock 3cylinder, it's a build that I wish he documented for others to see.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Sounds like a plan except for the HHO system, it won't help you.

Don't forget to put some magnets on the fuel line, install one of those intake turbulence generator things and add some mothballs to the fuel tank while you're at it.

For real-world stuff that might help, do some research on vortex generators. They make improvements on aircraft.

Spinout007 wrote: And the kicker, 1.5-2lpm hho generator fed to the intake side of the turbo.

At the height of the HHO craze (why do they call the gas HHO anyway? It sounds like they've got some weird misshapen water molecule where one hydrogen has detatched itself from the oxygen atom and locked onto the other hydrogen atom.), I got about one email a week from people trying to make these things work. Oddly enough, they seemed to have tons of contradictory claims and theories about how they were supposed to work.

One day I decided to write down all the claims and put them in the same place. For giggles, I'd like to present the list with three claims that I've come up with completely out of thin air alongside of them. See if you can tell which ones have seriously been put forth by HHO proponents and which of them I made up. I've never seen anybody get this right. (Hint: There are a total of three that I made up - ALL others are theories I've "collected from the wild".)

Theories of operation:

1. The engine burns fuel to drive the alternator to power a hydrogen generator that makes more fuel to be burnt in the engine. Appears to be the oldest theory.
2. The hydrogen generator doesn't create additional drag on the alternator because it is only taking up unused current that the alternator would be putting out anyway.
3. The hydrogen isn't extra fuel so much as a combustion enhancer that speeds up the burn rate and increases knock resistance.
4. It's not really the hydrogen that makes a difference, as much as that the generator also collects a mysterious sort of energy known as "orgone" that it feeds into the engine.
5. The hydrogen generator produces monoatomic hydrogen - that is, the hydrogen atoms are all separate, instead of stuck together in pairs as in normal hydrogen. This is much more reactive, although somewhat tricky to keep it from reacting with other things (aluminum, plastic, oxygen, or even itself).
6. The hydrogen and oxygen react with decane in the fuel, causing it to split into ethanol and iso-octane.
7. The hydrogen doesn't burn or react with the gasoline, but instead reacts with a different gas in the air to produce a chemical that has an effect on combustion. What gas it reacts with was not specified, but presumably it would be reacting with nitrogen to form ammonia.
8. There is an extra electron on each hydrogen molecule, forming an electric current from the hydrogen generator to the combustion chamber.
9. Adding hydrogen to the air / fuel mixture causes it to implode instead of explode.

Tuning theories:

1. A steady flow rate of 1 liter of hydrogen and oxygen per minute is best.
2. A steady flow rate of 100 liters of hydrogen and oxygen per minute is best.
3. The flow rate should be proportional to the engine size and RPM. To find the best flow rate in liters per minute, take the engine size, multiply by the RPM, and divide by 2.
4. Because hydrogen speeds up the burn rate dramatically, timing should be retarded to a fixed timing rate in the vicinity of 10 to 12 degrees after top dead center.
5. Because hydrogen causes the air / fuel mixture to implode, timing should be advanced to somewhere around 70 to 90 degrees before top dead center.
6. Because hydrogen increase knock resistance, timing should be advanced 5 to 10 degrees ahead of the standard timing curve.
7. The air/fuel mixture should be leaned out to somewhere between 16:1 and 20:1.
8. Because hydrogen causes the air / fuel mixture to implode, the engine needs very different valve timing. The cam should be replaced by one with a much longer intake opening and a far shorter exhaust opening, and overlap absolutely must be cut to zero.

The idea with the build would be to have my cake and eat it too. Keep the motor in a lean state as much as possible to hopefully squeeze the most out of it mileage wise, and with the flip of a switch have something that can been driven a little more aggressively and still put a grin on my face. The hydrogen generator was more for my own curiosity than anything else. I've built a table top one with a cell phone charger, and it was amusing. There's so much crap out there about it, I figured why not try it.

And thanks Matt for all that. It pretty much sums it up as to why I would rather try it on my own than to take someone else's word on it.

First gen Honda Insight would get you halfway there before you even turn a wrench...much better platform to start with if you want to hypermile. Also, "HHO" is snake oil in gaseous form. Unless you happen to have free electricity to start the process, you're not getting any free lunch. If you DO have free electricity, then you should be getting an electric car instead of burning "HHO" in your 3 banger.

Bryce

Find an insight for sub 1k prices in a city that is full of tree huggy shiny happy people.

With MS you don't need two maps. With the right setup, one will do the job. A small turbo, like the one on the factory turbo cars is perfect. In fact, a stock factory turbo car will do pretty much what you have in mind. I talked a good friend into buying a Metro to use for his commute, and it has become a real hobby for him. He's getting an easy 3.8 l/100 km, saving a pile of cash, and loves his new hobby and his new car.