Even though the Stalker is still for sale, I am still playing with it.

I have always thought it was a bit on the loud side.  Even though my neighbors have never shown up with pitchforks and court orders, it still bothered me.  I started with the specified short pipe with one Speedway auger each side, which was deafeningly loud while driving it.  I then lengthened the pipes and added another auger.  This was in the right direction but still too loud.  While trolling through car magazines I noticed an ad for Car Chemistry exhaust inserts claiming to allow an “open header look with muffler noise levels”.  Intrigued, I started searching for information.  There was quite a bit of good feedback in various hot rod forums, so I took the plunge.

Car Chemistry 3 Disk Insert

The exhaust insert is formed from a perforated center tube with three perforated disks that match the ID of the exhaust collector.  There are two end caps provided with each insert.  The advice on the website conflicts with the instructions provide with the product regarding the use of the solid end cap.  I welded the cap with the hole on the upstream end of the insert (the end with the longer tube extension) for the first tests.  I ended up welding both end caps on and leaving the solid cap completely closed.  I only used spot welds, so it would not be hard to remove for experimentation.

Yesterday I installed them.  I gathered some data to see how much, if any, difference there really was.  I didn’t have a helper so I elected just to do some quick SPL measurements for trends.  With the car in the garage with completely open pipes at idle I walked my dB meter back to where I measured less than 100dB and marked that spot.  I then tried different configurations of exhaust and measured at the same spot.  I would prefer to have someone else take measurements while I drive by at different speeds, but I don’t have friends friends nearby that loyal!  Not too mention driving by with open headers probably would bring out the pitchforks and court orders…

Here are the measurements:

Open Headers: 97dB

CC Inserts with upstream plug (0.87″ diameter): 87dB

CC Inserts with upstream and downstream plug (closed):  83 dB

Complete long pipes with CC inserts and speedway augers: 73dB

24dB decrease is HUGE. It is quiet enough that I don’t think I will suffer irreparable hearing damage if I drive to the gas station without ear plugs and the tone is much nicer.  The previous exhaust sounded flatulent.  The CC Inserts have cut down the high frequency and made it more of a roar than a howl.  My butt dyno thinks the engine is running stronger, but that could be placebo…overall I am very happy with them.

You can reach me at 520-300-1182 if you are interested in the SuperStalker

I have had my fun with the SuperStalker and I am itching for another project.  If you are interested in purchasing please leave a comment and I will get back to you.  No overseas offers will be entertained.

I am selling my Brunton Super Stalker. I have never raced the car and have only put about 2,000 miles on it since it became road worthy. I just haven’t been able to use it as much as I hoped. I had a great time building it, but I am itching for a new project.

• Titled in AZ as a 1962 Lotus Seven
• 1998 Buick L67 with around 80K miles
  • 240HP 280ft-lbs of torque
  • 1500lbs car!
• Full complement of Autometer gauges
• One piece Lexan wind screen (better pictures coming soon) installed
• Two piece safety glass windscreen for inspection requirements
• Camaro T5 transmission with custom remote shifter
• Detroit TrueTrac differential with 3.42 gears.
• Four wheel disk brakes
• Cosmetically the car has a few problems. I did the paint myself but over catalyzed the scuttle and it is chipping where the bonnet comes down.

Exterior Pictures are here.

Very high resolution pictures are available in my section of the StalkerV6 Gallery

About two months ago the Super Stalker start behaving badly.  The engine was misfiring constantly under heavy load.  The ECU was showing a “3X reference circuit” diagnostic trouble code.  A quick review of L67 information showed this was normally attributed to a failed crankshaft position sensor (CPS).   As this engine has about 80K miles on it I didn’t think a failed CPS was that far fetched so I replaced it.  This is not a really difficult job, but does take some time, especially when I need to squeeze mechanical work around family commitments.  After I replaced the sensor, the engine ran perfectly and I went on a few long drives, total of about two hours running time, then the problem came back with a vengeance. I couldn’t even get out of the garage.

The ECU wasn’t logging any codes so I assumed this  was a new problem somewhere else in the ignition system.  I went through the ignition system with a fine toothed comb, but could find no problems.  After SEVERAL hours of trouble shooting spread across six calendar weeks the ECU finally threw the 3X reference circuit DTC again.   I couldn’t really imagine that a brand new sensor had gone bad already and the wiring harness checked out fine to the Ignition  Control Module (ICM) checked out.  I realized the reason the DTC had not been thrown earlier is that it takes 30 seconds at RPM for the ECU to latch the code, and I hadn’t run the engine that long while I was trouble shooting.

Dennis sent me a schematic of the ECU harnessing.  This showed the 3X reference circuit being carried on a line from the ICM to the ECU.  I had not previously checked around the ECU since this really seemed like an ignition problem.  On examining the ECU I noticed that the connectors to the ECU were not firmly seated.  I reseated the connectors and the problem went away.  At that point I remembered that I had gone into the scuttle while I was replacing the CPS to take care of some other minor improvements.  I had removed the ECU when I did that.  So replacing the CPS probably did not actually fix the problem, reseating the connectors on the ECU fixed it and I was fooled by coincidence.

The reason the ECU connectors were coming out is that I had never put in the M6×45 retaining screws that would hold the connectors to the ECU.  They are in there now, and I have had several trouble free hours, and the engine is running far better than before.  I think that some behaviors I had been ignoring, like poor return to idle, had actually been caused by the loosening connectors.  Details count…

The glove box has worked well for a few months, but it was ugly.  There are large gaps between the box and the dash and the paint is damaged where I cut the door out of the dash.  To finish the job I need to add a flange behind the door and repaint the dash.

Making a flange behind the door is actually quite simple.  Mike Arnold shows a really cool technique for making door with very tight clearances (small gaps) in his AR-5 videos.  The technique is to cut out the door, which was already done, then to wrap the edges of the door with duct tape, making sure to tape in as far as the flanges are supposed to go.  Reinforcing resins will not generally stick to duct tape, so once the edges of the door are tapes, mount the door in place where you want it.  Then mix some filler (talc and resin) and fill in the gaps then lay up a few layers of glass behind it (over the duct tape).  Once the resin has set you can pull the door off and you have a perfect flange behind the door.

Glove box, shut.

Glove box open, showing flange built up behind door. Amazingly enough there are actually gloves in the glove box! Along with goggles, and the paperwork that keep the constabulary at bay.

The side panels on the stalker are 0.065 inch thick aluminum held with a few fasteners at the front and rear ends of the panel.  There are flanges bent in at the top and bottom, so the panel is fairly stiff along its length.  But from top to bottom it can flex, which allows it to bang into the vertical legs of the frame.  My Stalker demonstrated by having an incredibly annoying buzz from the right side panel when the engine was near 3500RPM.

Frame before foam tape. The buzz came from side panel hitting the vertical bar at about the middle of the car.

I pulled the side panels and applied this tape along all of the square frame components, and beneath the diamond plate flooring.

This was very simple, inexpensive and only added about 1 pound to the car.

Frame with tape applied. The round diagonal tubes clear the panel by over 0.25 inches and are not a concern.

My Stalker windshield is held to the scuttle by 10 bolts. To remove the windshield I have to remove the scuttle to access the accompanying nuts.  Removing and lifting the scuttle is non-trivial. I would like to be able to easily remove the windshield so that I can start trying to fit my new windscreen design.

Ten bolts with nyloc nuts hold the windshield to the scuttle. You have to pull the entire scuttle to remove the windshield.

The scuttle is fiberglass which makes riveted nut plates impractical.  Tee nuts (also called blind nuts) can’t be used either, without additional material.   I replaced the nyloc nuts with tee nuts, but had the prongs pointed away from the fiberglass.  Then I mixed up some fiberglass jelly and sculpted a mound of jelly to keep the nut from twisting.  This jelly is polyester resin with chopped fiberglass embedded.  It is much harder than stand body filler and is strong enough to keep the tee nuts from twisting when the bolts are tightened.

Fiberglass jelly built up over tee nuts will allow the bolts to be removed and replaced without pulling the scuttle.

The old tires on the very used Bandsaw I bought literally fell off once I removed the duct tape holding them on.  I replaced them with new urethane bandsaw tires from Rockler.  These tires were a perfect fit, but did require special technique to fit them.  The instructions provided were dead on.

The tires need to be heated to allow them to stretch over the wheels. The instructions specify 140 degree water for fifteen minutes.

140 degree water, for 15 minutes softened the tires enough to stretch them. Carefully watching a meat thermometer and stirring the water kept the water at 140, and kept the tires off the bottom of the pan where they might have melted from the direct flame on the bottom of the pot

The new tires on the wheels.

Pretty simple project: add wind deflectors to the side of the windshield.  The current windshield allows a huge wind blast to shoot right at my face.  This isn’t a problem until it starts to get cold, then it actually gets hard to breath, especially in crosswinds from the drivers side.

I started with some corrugated cardboard and experimented with different shapes to get something that looked nice and promised a great degree of wind protection without compromising visibility.  Once I was satisfied with the shape, I cut wings out of some Lexan I had laying around from my original windshield.

Cardboard mockup of windwing

The cardboard pattern was used as a template to cut the lexan on a bandsaw.

The brackets are 1/16″ aluminum sheet bent and bolted behind the windshield stanchions.  The wings are held to the brackets using windshield adhesive.

3M Windshield adhesive holds the lexan to the aluminum brackets

Once installed the wings are very unobtrusive, but effective at very high speeds. They are very effective at reducing the effects of crosswinds in the cockpit.

The installed wings are nearly invisible, and very effective.

The recent spike in gasoline prices (the subsequent crash in prices is temporary) amplified the interest in alternative energy sources for transportation. Many of the proposed solutions involve “electric cars”, that is, cars that store and use electrical energy as their primary source of energy for conversion into mechanical drive. This contrasts with “hybrid” drives like the Prius, which primarily use energy stored in gasoline with electrical augmentation to improve efficiency.

There have been millions of words written about these cars and why they are the “future”, but there is one aspect that I have never seen concretely addressed: how to supply power for use in the western United States, where typical transportation distances are much greater than in the Eastern United States and Europe where population density is much higher.

In the western United States a trip of 100 miles each way is not infrequent.  It might not be a daily occurrence, but it happens often enough that a car with only a 100 mile range would be very inconvenient if it couldn’t be recharged rapidly.  Rapid recharging means single digit minutes, not hours.  What does this sort of recharging capability imply for the electrical generation system?

The EPA limits gasoline pumps to 10 gallons per minute, but most average between 5 and 10 gpm.  So let’s say we refuel at 5 gallons per minute. Gasoline has an energy content of approximately 131MJ/gal (mega joules per gallon, please forgive the mixing of unit systems). At 5 gallons per minute, the typical fuel pump is moving 655MJ/minute, or 10.9MW!

So if a thousand cars are trying to recharge at the same time, that is a 109GW load.  The largest nuclear generating station in the United States, currently the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, is rated at 3.2GW. (Why nuclear? Because all of the other significant power generation methods use fossil fuels which essentially just move the problem, not solve it. Solar is not yet ready for prime time.)  A thousand cars refueling at the same time in a major city would not be unusual.

Let’s look at it another way,  current US gasoline consumption is 390 million gallons per day.  Assume that the vast majority of that gasoline is used for transportation.  The energy content of gasoline, again is 131MJ/gal., which equates to 51,090,000 GJ/day,  or 591 GW of continuous power usage.  That is 184 Palo Verde sized nuclear power plants.

This naïve analysis doesn’t take into account any efficiency gains from using electric cars, so let’s do that.  Assume that the average car is on 20% efficient, so 80% of the energy content in the gasoline is wasted.  And for the sake of argument let’s say electric cars are 100% efficient.  That means we only need one fifth as much electrical power to replace the gasoline.  So we only have to build 36 new Palo Verde size plants.

So is there an alternative?  No.

Another popular alternative fuel proposed for transportation is hydrogen.  Many breathless articles have been written about hydrogen fuel celled cars like Honda’s FCX Clarity. They completely ignore the question “where does the hydrogen come from?”

Let’s ignore the considerable question of hydrogen distribution, getting the gas to the end user, and stick with actually obtaining the hydrogen in usable form.  Hydrogen is most easily obtained by electrolyzing water, splitting the H₂O into it’s component parts. That requires electricity, a good estimate of how much generating capacity would need to be dedicated to producing hydrogen gas can be found above. But that again ignores the inefficiencies in the electrolysis process itself.

If we want to move away from petroleum fuels (regardless of which country straddles the oil deposit) we need to start building generating capacity right now. By the time the generating capacity is in place, maybe we will have cracked the energy storage problem (hydrogen or electrochemical storage) problems that are at the forefront of most research now.

Well, after months of looking around I found an old bandsaw, and it happened to be about half a mile away. It is an old Taiwan made 14″ bandsaw that needs a through going through, new tires, new blade guides, new belts. It is only 3/4HP and singel speed, but there is a good foundation for adding a larger motor and a transmission to reduce the speed. It cost $200 cash, and will probably be another three hundred before I have it doing everything I want, but I am pretty happy with it…