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Contrast this excerpt from the infamous letter from Clyde Barrow to Henry Ford: http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/barrow.asp "...For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got every other car skinned, and even if my business hasen't[sic] been strickly[sic] legal it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8."
With this:
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/police-blotter/troopers-ask-for-help-finding-xbox-game-thieves-20151125 "...The thieves were seen fleeing the store in a gray Toyota Prius."
Something just feels wrong when thieves use a Prius as their getaway car!
[What is the strangest getaway vehicle you have ever heard of? -Ed.]
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Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday December 02 2015, @03:07AM
Thanks for the post! I had not considered a leaky oil seal on a turbocharger as the fuel source for a runaway diesel. Now that you point it out, its obvious.
Here I was, rejecting anything with a turbocharger, only because I heard they would shred themselves into a pulp when they went, and feed the broken turbine blades through the intake manifold to the engine, taking it out as well. I figured as far as I was concerned, the performance gain wasn't worth the reliability hit.
In addition, I was under the belief that the increased pressures of turbo-ing an engine would incite cavitation on those old 7.3L engines as well as overload the rest of the drive train, leading me to expensive engine and transmission failure.
I get the word these old engines, originally designed by International Harvester for farm equipment, often go over a million miles if not abused.
I had heard of the runaway diesel thing, and figured I would run a diesel as long as I could still have some sort of manual override on it should it do this. Either I replace its existing fuel pump with an electrically-powered gear pump, or put some sort of valve under the dash so I could do the God thing if I had to.
Being the whole thing is mechanical - once started, there is really very little I can do to control it should the injection pump get stuck and refuse to shut the fuel off. No spark plugs. This beast does not need any electricity to run, so I can't kill it by denying it voltage somewhere. All I can do is either deny it fuel or air.
Ok. I have no turbo. So its failed seals cannot inject oil into the intake manifold. I wonder how else the engine can suck up its own oil supply into its fuel intake if I kill off the diesel? PCV valve? Head gasket failure?
I bought this beast after very careful consideration of what is the best available vehicle out there for me, given my weightings on cost, performance, reliability, and "chick magnet" factors. ( Obviously, my "chick magnet" parameter carries a weight of zero, performance carries a weight of if it will move, its good enough, while low cost of ownership and high reliability/durability/maintainability carries the lions share of what I am looking for. ). I was also looking for a very safe vehicle to drive or to have my loved ones in. This one is heavy enough that just about everything except FreightLiners and Mack trucks will just bounce off of it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:53PM
All I can do is either deny it fuel or air.
Could stall it, something from that era is probably manual transmission.
I suspect runaways are kind of like terror attacks in that the odds of it happening to you individually are ridiculous low, less than getting hit by lightning, but the odds of seeing spectacular coverage online when it does happen are extremely high.
Its interesting culturally to think that all visually observable failures will be documented and viewed world wide. Just a decade ago most fail was never seen in public, so there was a trash can fire at work, so what, but going forward if its a visible failure its going up on youtube and/or FB for the world to see for all eternity. That'll likely have weird cultural effects, long term.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:47AM
Thanks for the reassurance.
I know this is a 20 year old machine and will need some TLC, but I have fallen sufficiently in love with it that I am going to take this one on as a "project car", which means I will probably devote the rest of my life into it.
Mechanically, its built to last. There is a lot of my microcontroller technology I would love to build into it. I love this old beast because her mechanicals are so elegantly simple, yet very robust ( Ford E350 frame). I believe if I only take care of her well, she will always take me where I want to go.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]