1963 Chrysler Turbine
Anybody old enough here to remember these cars?

This is back when Chrysler made some real cars.

My neighbor had one of them and used to drive it down the street and I remember how much I wanted one, an engineering masterpiece.

The turbine started, spooled and ran so smooth you could stand a quarter on end on the hood and it would not fall over.

It would run on anything that would burn including liquor and perfume.

I am sure the oil companies hated it.



Jim

 

Pretty interesting!

 

Imagine sitting behind it in traffic.............. 1375* running temps >500* exhaust temps.

It was a great concept, just a little ahead of its time.

 

And they crushed a lot of them......well, all but two.


Just think, that washing machine you bought back in the 1970's might just be a part of automotive history.

 

Jay Leno's Garage has one. They spent 30 minutes (about 15 with commercials) showing it and driving it. Wish they would have spent more time showing the drive train. Neat stuff.

 

Chrysler figured they were only a couple years from having a viable set-up when congress decided NASA could do a better job.

 

I remember reading in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics many years ago that if you burn gasoline at a very high temp (1700F rings a bell but I could be WAY off) then you get very good efficiency out of the gasoline and you get very few of the bad emissions. The only way to get to those high temps is to use a turbine. Unfortunately, the transmission to lower the rpm of a turbine to reasonable rpms for a drivetrain would be pretty complex and would have a lot of internal friction resistance removing a lot of the benefits of the high efficiency turbine. The point of the article was that a really efficient car could best be made with a small turbine running an alternator and then have the alternator charge batteries and power motor drive drivetrain - much like a diesel electric locomotive.

When I first heard about hybrid cars (the Prius) I assumed that this was the design being used. I guess the technology isn't quite there yet.

There is a slight memory WAY back there in the old part of my brain that tells me that the car above was the catalyst for the whole article.

 

My stomach hurts....




Interesting article

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/200...-turbine-cars/

 

You guys might enjoy this.... I did !

 

Wow....some rare stuff in there...

Makes me wonder what I'm going to do with my 8 cars...All in the 30's,40's and 50's, not enough room or time to restore them...

 

I guess they had a 79 New Yorker ready to tool up & bukd it . .government said no, to risky during the bail out. They had turbine k cars ready to go to about that time.

 

Started watching that, reminded me of a show I saw the other night, crashbusters or some such a thing. They set a solid round-headlighted D100 on a beam with an explosive charge under it. Split the frame in half when they set it off.

 

That corvair looked like it was in pretty good shape.
We no longer have any traditional junk yards around here. A few years back they sold all the junkers to Japan for scrap.

 

Sure makes me wish I had kept a few of mine. Loved my Studebaker Hawk - - wow that thing would fly. Sold it with 320K on it to my buddy - -he sold it at 400K and still running strong. Oldest I have now is my 66 TBird. Bought it new. Memories, memories - - oh now I could compose a song. Oh wait a minute, I think someone beat me to it. Durn.

 

That was one of the problems with the car, the exhaust exited from two wide ducts under the rear of the car at super hot temps, also if it drove through sand of loose dirt it would sandblast anything behind it.

Tailgaters learned not to follow so close.

It appears the turbine car idea wasn't dropped as thought.



Then around the same time Andy Granatelli was working on his secret Turbine Indy car that he finally raced in 1967 when Parnelli Jones led the Indy 500 for 196 laps, 3 laps from the finish line his car was disabled by a $6.00 transmission bearing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Indianapolis_500


The other Indy drivers complained of burned blistered paint and melted windshields from his hot jet exhaust.

Probably one of the last Indy-500 races I have ever watched.

Jim