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VW Beetle Fitted with a Jet Engine
6031769 writes "Ron Patrick has decided to go that little bit further by souping up his VW beetle with a jet engine, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. Serious planning went into the project. Patrick said, 'We did (computerized) structural analysis and we did stability analysis. And by God, you know what happens? It works!' Contrast with the Rocket Boy to see how it should not be done." Yes, the Darwin award winner was found to be bogus, but unlike the myth, Ron still lives!
Hey i have prior art! I should have patented this...
Signed,
Batman
Is there a bumper sticker that says: How do you like my driving? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT.
Ah.. finally, uselessness done right!
In Soviet Russia, beetle get smashed on windsheild. In America, Beetle smash YOU!
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
Or does combining a volkswagon bug and a tail pipe so large that it make goatse jealous seem very.. nevermind.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Patrick says that once in a while he puts on a crash helmet (mainly as a sound muffler), takes the car out on nearby Highway 237 in the wee hours of the morning and fires it up for a brief and hopefully cop-free run.
I frequently travel home from work on Hwy. 237 in Sunnyvale in the wee hours of the morning. I think I'd better watch out for this guy. I doubt my unmodfied Hyundai Accent could keep up, or even get out of the way for that matter.
And the brethren went away edified.
German for nutcase
http://www.ecm-co.com.nyud.net:8080/jetbeetle/
/. it.
http://www.ecm-co.com.nyud.net:8090/jetbeetle/
Coralizing the link doesn't seem to work for me, but YMMV.
FYI - It's hosted on his business website, so try not to
A mirror wouldn't hurt.
-http://www.ecm-co.com/jetbeetle/
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yeah, I'd hate to see that speeding ticket. It'd cost twice as much as the rocket car.
At least he didn't decide to suprise the owner with this upgrade, like this guy did...
"Darwin Express"
Table-ized A.I.
It's one thing to be tricking out a Honda Civic (ricer) or IROC (white trash), but adding a jet engine to a new Beetle in San Francisco is the tuner equivalent of Richard Simmons dancing in an Elton John music video.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
This is nothing NEW!! Jet engines all the time in TopGear..
s /carbage/pages/0412/
http://www.topgear.com/content/timetoburn/section
This guy must be pretty confident the cost of gas will eventually come back down.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
but can it fly? and can you imagine the MPG on that thing? it would probably make jumbo jet sized SUV's jealous!
Back in the 1960s, a company called Turbonique made (along with a rocket-powered turbocharger for "normal" engines), rocket engines for automobiles.
One of these gadgets pushed a VW Beetle (the old, cool kind, not those new toys) to a 9.36 ET at 168 mph in the quarter mile.
Later, someone built a rocket-powered go-kart which managed about 240 MPH...
If it's properly demilitarized, he shouldn't have any problem.
For things like missiles & rockets, the process involves removing any fuel/propellant and then doing something to the outside that permanently fucks it's flight characteristics. Usually a big notch in the nose, fins &/or compromising the rocket nozzles/jet engine.
Any guidance electronics that come with your rocket or missile are another story. You might need a permit to own/buy/import them, assuming you can have them at all.
You can buy all kinds of fun stuff, but the caveat is that it'll never work again. Unless you're diligent, in which case you can build yourself a fully functional attack helicopter or various other things by digging around in supposedly demilitarized scrap. The Army improperly throws away a lot of stuff.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Spinners, HID-headlights and a massive wing spoiler to go with that fat chrome tip.
Time to pimp das Auto! Amerikan engineering in da Haus, ja.
covering the most awesome truth-is-stranger-than-fiction stuff where every geek looks and says in a Keanu Reeves voice: "Whoa..."
What a great article!
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
for everybody pointing and laughing at his "chick" car with built-in flower vase. Now it's a jet-propelled chick car.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Oops
Me "Punch buggy blue!"
gf "Oww! Where? I don't see it..."
me "Too slow!"
by souping up his VW beetle with a jet engine,
Shouldn't it be, "adding a VW-beetle to his jet engine"?
Table-ized A.I.
An ex-Lockheed test pilot, his goal was to set an absolute altitude record with it - zoom climb it to flame-out, and control the ballistic portion of the flight with reaction thrusters.
After setting a low altitude speed record with it, but before the altitude attempt, Greenamyer had to punch out when one landing gear failed to extend. (You'd never survivve a gear up landing in an F-104.)
I'd hoped to find a lot more info on it on google, but will have to settle for this: Greenamyer
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
'till Ron Patrick hits a speed bump
a partial guide to life:
You can pretty much fuck around with your youth however you want. Dress crazy, sleep around, be poor, be rich, whatever. There comes a point -- let's say 30 -- when you need to get serious and start thinking about the future. I'm not talking about a job or investing or anything, I mean, do that stuff, but we're not covering that here. We're talking about identity and personality... who you are. There comes a time when reinventions of self are just tedious to your friends and family, so you need to pick a target for middle/old age, and then work, slowly, on gracefully transitioning from whoever you were at 29 into that guy.
I think this is my guy.
(idea cribbed somewhat from Vice magazine)
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Indeed, I know a guy that has a prototype exhaust bell off of some old ICBM rocket which is now inverted and half buried in the ground. Obviously, it's now serving as a very stylish planter for geraniums. It's all titanium, and to decommission it, they took a torch and put a few holes in the bell it self, and demolished the tubo pumps. Luckily, he knew enough about welding titanium to at least fix it cosmetically!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
"Instead of cut and try, cut and try, cut and try, like the hot rod guys do, you have to do a whole bunch of computer analysis before you build it," he said. "We did (computerized) structural analysis and we did stability analysis. And by God, you know what happens? It works! Duh."
:)
I have to agree with him regarding hot-rodders. A lot of people seem to think the way to solve a problem is to frob at it until you get something that works. All the Motorola phone hacking kids, Xbox homebrewers, and PSP kiddies seem to think that the spackle approach (throw things at the wall until something sticks) is the best way to solve problems. You know, rather than solving them by understanding them
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
There's a guy that sells motorcycles powered by helicopter turbines. Jay Leno has one.
The infamous Rocket Car story always specifies a late 1960s Chevy Impala as the pilot's first choice...
"But despite all these oversights, the story did specify that the car was a 1967 Chevy Impala. I think the reason this detail is always supplied is because it's critical to make the listener think the test pilot at least looked cool when he flew into the cliff. You'll never hear someone tell a story about a guy in a rocket-powered K-car or a Volkswagen Beetle. It has to be a car that deserves to have a rocket attached to it."
The Rocket Car Legend
Rover built a number (about 50 or so IIRC) of gas turbine cars in about the 60's or 70's. They were intended as a proof of concept prototype and were placed with customers for a trial. Not intended as a high performance vehicle. They worked but would have been too expensive to run and were a bit thirsty...for cheaper fuel than petrol, but it still didn't compute.
Fully street legal...
The Mythbusters made the mistake of asking permission. Just skip that step, and you'll find you can do a whole lot of things.
Reading the article, it seems he wants to pop an ex-Polish SAM down a scale missile silo, so he can sit there at night watching the lid open and the rocket rise in some kind of son et lumiere armageddonette.
I figure CHP pulling his volkswagon over will pale in comparison to the visitors he'll get about 10 minutes after the first satellite pass over his little display.
If I remember (and I may be wrong in detail), when the silo outside Green Valley was decommissioned and turned into a tourist attraction, the decommissioned missile was hauled out, laid on its side and had a big chunk cut out to demonstrate to passing satellites that it was clearly non-flyable. Then it was popped back down the hole, the lid half-opened and huge concrete buffers placed across the rails to prevent the lid from opening fully.
Whatever happened to that guy in New Zealand who was building a cruise missile from commonly available, completely non-military parts?? As I recall, he was talking about building the guidance system using parts bought on eBay for only a few hundred dollars. Last I heard, he was prohibited from launching the thing.
http://cdn.sfgate.com/gate/av/movies/2006/04/30/j
Why wouldn't he have put one of those in a Jetta? It seems much more appropriate to me.
So I am afraid this jet car is actually a bit pathetic. It's no more powerful than the (street legal, normally drivable) VW Bugatti, which costs about the same, and it is less powerful than a suitable modded tractor engine.
What I took away from that company was an in-dept knowledge of how to produce a hardened engine management system, and a lifelong passion for Diesels. As our Technical Director used to say, and history has proved him right, with the exception of power to weight ratio there is absolutely no measure on which a Diesel cannot be made to out-perform every other type of combustion engine.
Pining for the fjords
As the Top Gear people did with this Mini with 4 rockets in the boot: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHsw66dz4A
Beating up people in little rooms, if you do it for a good reason you do it for a bad one.
They were JATO (Jet-Assisted Take-Off) rockets, not ICBMs (InterContinental Ballistic Missile).
A JATO rocket is used to give additional thrust to an airplane so it reaches its takeoff speed faster and can thus rise from shorter runway. An ICBM is used to lift an atomic bomb into space and drop it to another continent from there.
Just a little difference in size and engine power there ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
See the pictures here.
___FutureShoks___
I mean, come on. He doesn't have the engine actually hooked up to any gears to turn the wheels. He just has it mounted on the back of the car, and he's relying on the engine thrust to push the car along.
... yet -
Trouble is that that kind of engine isn't designed to do that. It's a T-58 engine, a turboshaft engine off of a helicopter. While the engine on a jet is designed to shoot lots of hot air out the back, producing thrust to drive the jet forward, turboshafts are designed to, well, turn a shaft, to turn a rotor blade. In other words, they're torquey, not thrusty, and helicopters don't go fast because of the engine exhaust, they go fast because of the rotor.
I was looking to buy a (ex-Soviet) MiG 15 or MiG 17 jet engine.
He'd have been far better off doing that. The engine off a MiG-17 develops 6,000 ft-lbs of thrust.
I mean, look what kind of performance he gets with his 1500-horsepower jet engine:
He said that a jet-boosted run will "pin the speedometer and that's at 140." He thinks that when it hits 160 mph -- he hasn't seen that
140? My 300-horsepower Mustang GT is perfectly capable of hitting 140, and would probably do 160 if a governor doesn't kick in. 1500-horsepower is the power of the gas turbine in an M-1 tank; if he had this thing hooked into the drive wheels, he'd go like a bat out of hell. But as it is, all he's doing is making a lot of noise.
Which I mean is fun and all, but fundamentally, he doesn't have a jet-powered car. He's got a car with a jet engine in the trunk.
It's kinda slow, though.
* * * * * *
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--Bob
woohoo! Herbie goes to SPACE!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life