Bud,
Thank you so much for taking time out of your assumedly busy schedule to commiserate. You have brought up some good points, none of which are lost on the bystanders.
Anyway, the long and short of it is that this little experiment came to an abrupt and fiery end last night.
It came to me last night that all that exhaust energy dumping out the tail pipe was the answer to my question - why not harness it?
So I plumbed in an old exhaust header cutout from my junked Impala drag car so I could redirect the exhaust from the underbody to a more energy-recyclatory spot - that's right - to the Baja SporTub. This involved running about 2 feet of left over 3" stainless mandrel bent tubing from
www.burnsstainless.com. Then I had to use about another 15 feet of gutter downspout to actually finish the run to the hot tub.
Anyway, the exhaust was bypassed in the right direction and then run into a submerged heat exchanger I pilfered from my neighbor's Earnhardt-memorial-mobile, a 1978 Winnebago. This allowed the exhaust to dump its heat directly into the tub without actually being submerged. I didn't want to submerge the pipe because I know the stainless pipe I got (SS409) will surface rust a bit. I guess next time I should just get SS304 or 18Cr pipe instead.
Then disaster struck. Apparently the hot pipe was too close to the neoprene tub cover, which lit on fire. Luckily I saw the flickering of the flames when SpeedTV's NASCAR pit crew show ended and jumped out before the fire got real bad.
Anyway, the tub burst from the heat and dumped its entire contents all over the deck and septic field. So now I have other problems to deal with. What a bummer.
I guess I will try to log back on when I get the mess cleaned up. On the positive side, I still have a working Contour engine. I hear it is essentially a Porsche engine, so I figure at least I can try to sell it on eBay to all those 911 drivers with blown motors.
Argh....
-Harden Thomas
