AeroSprite! Aero & mechanically modified Austin Healey Sprite: consistent 65 MPG US

[xpedro01]

HI FRANK LEE. My wife resigned her teaching and got a job teaching at Fort Riley for K.State We moved to Manhattan and the need for a commuting car disappeared. I did not want it to fall into other owners hands for safety reasons, so I had a buddy that owned a midget remove the body and keep the chassis for his trouble. After a quarter million miles it deserved a rest.

[wdb]

Ah Bugeyes. I once drove a friend's Bugeye home with a piece of twine coming out from under the hood and over the windshield. The twine acted as a hand operated throttle cable; the foot-operated cable had broken.

[Thenorm]

this is my favourite bug eye.
its powered by a 3 rotor mazda engine.
it races at autocross by the Kiesel family.

[renault_megane_dci]

Actually we discussed "Atkinsoning a bike engine" in the bike section.
One of the guys tried it (advancing one tooth on the inlet) but had carb settings issues so we concluded it must be done on par with injection (and obviously DOHC is better suited to the mod)

[basjoos]

Do you have any photos showing the front and rear views of your car? I was wondering how you dealt with the radiator air inlet (adjustable radiator doors, if any), the air flow through the radiator, and where you exhausted the radiator air.

[xpedro01]

Basjoos--I am honored. I have a photo of the front. I am a newbie and have not figured how to get to the address of the pictures yet. I will send you my email address on a PM and if you email me I know that will work.

[MetroMPG]

xpedro - if you're not having any luck with the photo, feel free to email it to me and I'll add it here.

[elhigh]

I'm tickled to have an old-school modder on the site. The description of his motor mods -- changing the valve timing to make an ersatz Atkinson and still managing 55mph on what little power was left - is just awesome stuff.

I think, Xpedro, you would have made a decent racer. What with however long it must have taken to build speed in your little Sprite on such modest power, you must have learned some skills at not giving up the speed once you'd acquired it.

[xpedro01]

Elhigh-I appreciate the kind words. Is that a small (maybe not a cub) IH tractor I see on your avatar? l was a farmer till 1966. I worked with things like a John Deere model D, which was a 2 cylinder with 6.87" pistons and a 7 inch stroke. Compression ratio was 3.97 to 1. It was rated by "Nebraska Tests" as a 15-27. That would be 27 HP on the belt pulley and 15 HP on the drawbar with steel lugs.When rubber tires came along in the mid thirties they got an actual 35 drawbar max HP. I think their 'rating' was 70% of max. RPM was 900. It had water injection available and 2 fuel tanks if you used "fuel oil". The 2 gallon one was for gasoline to start and warm it up, then switch to oil (zero octane or less). The upper tank of the radiator held about 5 gallons of water for the water injection.

[elhigh]

It's an A. I have a 1945 parked in the front yard; I won it in a raffle. Not even a Super A, just an A, so no hydraulics are installed. It has some fueling issues and I plan on building a 3-pt hitch for it as no hitch gear was installed when it came to me. I have no time nor will to go looking for an original single-point Fast Hitch as it was equipped from the factory, and of course finding implements that would work with that would be like finding hen's teeth. A Cat 1 3PT will allow me to mount up some smaller implements and get some work out of it, though using a machine of this size for some chores I could do, like mowing my 9,000 sq. ft. yard, would be ridiculous. Three passes and the job would be done.

As far as power output goes, it's modest. VERY modest power ratings, easily eclipsed by a brand-new "garden tractor" from the big box stores. But those big box horsepower ratings aren't sufficient to, for instance, drag an 800-lb stump out of my front yard, which the A has done. And in 70 years I doubt if any of those big box garden "tractors" will still be around, whereas the Farmall might actually still be working.