Originally posted by Josch: Yeah ok, let just go salvage a Caterpillar starter off a D-12 Earthmover, and then you can put 2 big batteries in your trunk to spin it up and create your boost, and the instant you floor it (and your WOT switch engages the motor's solenoid) and your batteries rapidly drop in voltage as your motor spins up to speed, then your alternator (if sized correctly) will put your same 10hp load on your crankshaft thru the alternator belt as it tries to keep the batteries charged.
The whole point of using electricity instead of a belt is that you avoid putting that load on the engine... I've never heard of any car having a ten horsepower alternator. Ours is two horsepower.
Originally posted by Josch: If your alternator is too small (like stock amperage), it will just full-field your alternator for a long time to try and charge your batteries and will overheat and likely fry the diodes in it....
It's simple enough to protect against that, if it's a real risk.
Originally posted by Josch: Ok, (you think) why not just rig up a simple WOT switch to shut off the field current to the alternator (shutting it down) for while you get on it?.... so then after you put that on, you floor it and watch your voltmeter drop down to 10 volts as the boost kicks in and your ignition system gets very weak and combustion becomes less complete (especially at the higher rpms when you need the hottest spark under those boost conditions). You don't believe me? Try it and see....on a backyard budget even?
A simple matter of sizing your batteries to the job. A single Optima red-top can put out something like 15 horsepower, and if I use two, I doubt you'll see enough voltage drop to worry about. Or, I could isolate one battery at activation time, keeping the rest of the car at 14V. I'm also considering possible 24V arrangements (though this might require finding a way to reconfigure the coils inside the motor), which would reduce the need for a ten pound thyristor. There are all kinds of options.
These are all issues that are quite manageable with a little care and foresight. I don't know why you make such a big deal out of them. You already posted some really unrealistically pessimistic stuff before, and I don't see you revisiting those ideas once the mistakes were pointed out...
Originally posted by Josch: Even more impossible. Automakers couldn't even do it.
What do you mean, couldn't? When did they try? It's not that they couldn't, it's just that they didn't. For probably very reasonable economic reasons.
Originally posted by Josch: Big diesel engine companies really could profit from this method if workable.
Your thought processes are pretty confusing here. Big diesel? This is a technique for small engines. Two liters is about the most I'd want to try this with.
Originally posted by Josch:They still can't figure it out either. And you hope to acheive this on a shoestring budjet?
Sometimes I wonder why I bother trying so hard to reason with the unreasonable
Which one of the two of us is doing any actual reasoning here? Like, where in any of your, cough, reasoning have you come up with a single number that means anything?
Originally posted by Josch:But if you DO do it and succeed, then you can market it, sell it to all the automakers and big diesel companies, get rich, and then come back here and laugh at all of us here and you can tell the world how wrong us stupid skeptics were
No, I'll simply tell owners of small engine cars that they now have another choice. For anyone who thinks bolt-on NA performance is not enough but a multi-kilobuck turbo setup is too much, this is a nice option in the middle, where we currently don't have much of anything.
Perhaps I should also mention that I half intend to get me an actual electric car some time in the next five years, and a project like this is good practice in that direction. It's like a miniature model of an electric drive train.
