Jan 24 - that didn't work

So between my last post and this one I did try some stuff.  I'll tell you about it here so if you get that idea, you know what to expect.... not much.  :-)

So this was around the fumes part.  I had the idea that I was going to warm up the vaporizer box by putting heat on the outside of it and the aluminum working like a big heat sink would draw that heat into its interior and warm the whole box up.  Umm, no.  That's not what happened.  It wouldn't draw in heat as it was dissipating the heat too quickly to be useful.  The cool thing that I was using, because I wanted it to work so badly, it would have been cool to say I have a magnetic induction heater as a heat source.  Complete with a Tesla pancake coil.  But it wouldn't come to pass.

So what I did do was go back a re-read all the Smokey Yunick stuff and realize that I was already about 50% of the way there previously just missing the turbo.  (Overall)

I have decided that I would go back to Smokey's work and replicate that in a new way.  He did carburetors on his, I'll keep my fuel injection.  He did all mechanical controls, I'll keep my digital ones.  But where he used a turbo as a mixer instead of a turbo, I'll be having me some of that please!

So now I'm back to working out electrical heat.  I want it as a pre-heater for the cold starts and I want it to be my primary heating unit until I do the turbo/mixer thing.  This was another fail.  I tried again to put heat on the outside of a tube and heat the inside.  During a test run of the temps it could reach, I found that even with wrapping header tape around it, it lost too much heat to the outside and didn't bring enough heat to the inside.  Plus I melted a perfectly new air filter in the process.

Now I know the heat HAS to go on the inside.  I also know this element will get hot enough to cause an explosion.  But I'm betting that the cool air of the intake will keep this device from getting too hot.  I'm also considering how to put a K-type thermocouple on it to see how hot it does get and do some smart switching of this resistive element off and on to regulate its temperature inside the tube.  Initially I'll just hook it up and spray (with a fire extinguisher handy) and see how it goes.  The controls will come in as more of a precaution for a hot day than what you would worry about when it is cold outside.

So here are some pics of the fail of the external electrical heat.

Here's what it is looking like now that I have the cooling system of the motor plumbed into the box.  This is more like what Smokey did do, just on a lot larger scale than he did.  The way I look at it, I'm doing a V8, he did this to 3 and 4 cylinder motors, so I need more area to heat (because, more air flow coming in).

This is where I Tee into the line running back into the water pump.

I did do my EGR delete again as I will not be using this method to introduce heat into the cold side anymore.  I will do that via the turbo once it gets here.

I managed to get the contactor switch installed for disconnecting power from the batteries to the 2kw inverter I'll be installing tomorrow.

I put it in the fuel door that the Diablo of this year would use.  thought it was a clever way to hide it and have it outside the car in case of fire and need to disconnect the twin Opti red-heads.

Here are some additional pics of where I was checking out the wild and varying temps I was getting with the external electrical heat that failed the air filter.

Should be another post tomorrow.  I plan on working on the car more then.