Stupid Speed
I have a question regarding stupid speed. For starters, I love small, light cars. There's purity in driving them. I've driven a few second-gen CRXs. WOW! Put them in a corner and hold on tight! I'd love a '88 CRX HF with a motor swap but I'd want more power. The K20A puts out strong numbers without even being warmed over. Intake, exhaust, cams, a valvetrain to match, and a good tune would be sweet. But what about the bottom end? How can you make it rev more? Lightweight everything and upgraded rod bearings? Could you bore it out? What about sleeves? I'm thinking about a sleeved and bored K20A at about 2.2 liters, titanium rods, and lighter pistons (maybe a little more compression). Does that sound good or should I leave the bottom end alone?
Nathan S. Kalaskie
Springfield, Ill.
Honda makes a damn good engine out of the box. Those guys have done their homework and are smarter than we are. That basically means that the K20 is the best balance of power, emissions, economy, and driveability. High revs and bored sleeves are all the makings of a race motor that won't be worth a crap on the street since you'd be spending 90 percent of your time trying to get to a rpm where the engine actually makes power. The swap itself will liven up the car more than what most people know to do with. Keep it simple and make sure the car runs before thinking about tearing into an engine. -JC
Hydrogen Fuel-Water Gas, Brown's Gas, my A$$
The fact that a 2.0L motor would burn 78.5 liters of hydrogen gas per minute can't be right. There are 3.7854118 liters per gallon, so you're saying that a 2.0L motor would be burning 20.738 GALLONS OF HYDROGEN PER MINUTE?! No way.
I found specs for a '95 Ford Taurus 3.0L V-6 rated to burn 7 liters per hour idling and roughly 21 liters per hour when traveling at 60 mph. That would mean that it burns 0.117 liters per minute idling. Now if we use that air/fuel value of 33.43:1 for hydrogen, and for the sake of simple math we just divide those liters by two, we would use 0.0583 liters per minute of hydrogen idling. WHERE ON EARTH did you get the 78.5 liters or 20 gallons per minute for a 2.0L motor?
I've had a subscription to SCC for years and I went back to read your article because some guys at work were talking about water gas. Please let me know if your 78.5 liters or 20.738 gallons per minute was a typo.
J. R. Crosby
via the Internet
Didn't I say, "Don't ask me how I calculated this"? I thought SCC readers were supposed to be smarter. Did you not notice the number of times I mentioned MASS RATIO? And you just had to email me when people finally stopped responding to this article and I threw away my paper calculations. The reason that you're wrong is called MASS RATIO. Just to be sure we're all on the same page, let's hold hands like little boys and girls and go through this again from the top.
Here's how it goes: Let's assume that the engine has four cylinders and is exactly 2,000cc in displacement. That means that at WOT, and assuming 100 percent volumetric efficiency, 500cc of air will be sucked in for every two engine revolutions (since it's a four-stroke engine.) At a high idle speed of 1,000 rpm, each cylinder is ingesting 250,000cc per minute or 250 liters of air per minute. You get this by multiplying the air sucked in per cylinder times how many times it's sucking in a minute, which is half the engine speed (500cc times 1,000rpm divided by 2 revolutions per cycle). Multiply this by the number of cylinders in the engine and you have 1,000 liters of air per minute. But this is as if the throttle was wide open and the engine held at 1,000 rpm.