skreidle: (Default)
skreidle ([personal profile] skreidle) wrote2004-02-10 12:34 am

Latebra, BushGuard, VW Shame, Spybot, and Top Fuel dragsters

Evening featured: Latebra, fruitcake, Coke, chat with Jillian and Steve about various amusing and/or intellectual topics (including languages and a Falun Gong pamphlet I was handed earlier), other people watching Trainspotting in the next room, and us plus Oscar watching Queer as Folk on another TV. Post-Latebra featured: checking for the St. Vinnie's van, gone already.



Links!

From [livejournal.com profile] macguyver, a more authoritative examination of the gap in Bush's Guard duty back in the 70s.

In response to my drool over the VW Touareg the other day, [livejournal.com profile] xviragox offers an entertaining Shame On You story about its inability to actually tow an Airstream trailer. :)

From a post (about nasty new spy/ad/malware behavior) linked from a comment to a post, I learned of Spybot - Search & Destroy, which is apparently a better program than Ad-Aware for finding/removing ad/spy/malware, and the two combined will find just about anything.

And now, from Brooke's boyfriend Simon, some freaking amazing statistics about Top Fuel dragsters, that you don't have to be a revhead to appreciate:

>Subject: FW: Top Fueller Dragsters..
>
>So you think your car is pretty impressive.
>
>For all the revheads....and even those who aren't.
>Some quite amazing statistics.
>You don't have to be a drag racing fan to appreciate these statistics.
>Some Interesting Top Fuel Dragster Facts:
>
>* One dragster's 500-inch Hemi makes more horsepower then the first 8
>rows at Daytona.
>* Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 1 ∏ gallons of nitro
>per second, the same rate of fuel consumption as a fully loaded 747, but
>with 4 times the energy density.
>* The supercharger takes more power to drive then a stock hemi makes.
>* With nearly 3000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on
>overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into nearly-solid form before
>ignition.
>* Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock.
>* Dual magnetos apply 44 amps to each spark plug.
>
>This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.
>
>* At stoichiometric (exact) 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture (for nitro), the
>flame front of nitro methane measures 7050 degrees F.
>* Nitro methane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above
>the exhaust stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from
>atmospheric water vapour by the searing exhaust gases.
>* Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After ∏
>way, the engine is dieseling from compression plus the glow of exhaust
>valves at 1400 degrees F.
>* The engine can only be shut down by cutting off its fuel flow.
>* If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds
>up in those cylinders and then explodes with a force that can blow cylinder
>heads off the block in pieces or blow the block in half.
>* Dragsters twist the crank (torsionally) so far (20 degrees in the
>big end of the crank) that sometimes cam lobes are ground offset from front
>to rear to re-phase the valve timing somewhere closer to synchronisation
>with the pistons.
>* To exceed 300mph in 4.5 seconds dragsters must accelerate at an
>average of over 4G's. But in reaching 200 mph well before ∏ track, launch
>acceleration is closer to 8G's.
>* If all the equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, and for
>once NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run costs $1000.00 per second.
>* Dragsters reach over 300 miles per hour before you have read this
>sentence.
>* Top Fuel Engines ONLY turns 540 revolutions from light to light!
>* The redline is actually quite high at 9500rpm.
>* To give you an idea of this acceleration, the current TF dragster
>elapsed time record is 4.477 seconds for the quarter mile.
>* This means that you could be coming across the starting line in your
>average Lingenfelter powered "twin-turbo" Corvette at 200 mph (on a
>
>FLYING START) and the dragster would BEAT you to the finish line FROM A
>DEAD
>STOP in a Quarter mile distance!

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