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Daffy Zone…..

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Shibadog said:
Me, me! I know! Cz behind the taillight😊. It was a challenge finding them on certain cars. Remember the old vow beetles where the tank was under the hood and you’d have to reinflate the spare tire because the air from the spare powered the windshield wipers? Or the two stroke SAAB’s where you added oil to the fuel tank before filling it up? Good memories,
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The little Chevy Corvairs were some of my favorite cars in the early 60's and they had a few really unique features. One was the cabin heater and the way it worked. Anyone know how? And some early models of VW used a similar system.
 
I was always intrigued with the Corvair, especially the little horizontal, air cooled 6 cyl engines and owned several over time. I experimented with using the little engines to run big pumps, adapted one to power a "Barber Green"? asphalt road compactor, built dune buggies, and several other applications with them. In fact my very first airboat I ever built was a little 10' x 42", stainless bottom boat with 18ga gal tin sides pop riveted side to bottom. That would have been probably about 1969-70 and I powered it with a 140hp Corvair engine. That little boat would take me anywhere I wanted to go in the water, but I had to work the devil out of it to get maximum power. I'd turn the little motor up to 4,000rpm or so in really bad stuff to get max hp, but at that speed the prop would cavitate. That boat was one of our first experiments with auto engines on airboats and we learned they were just not real good for air power. Auto engines required too high rpm to develop max hp, and an air prop needed to be run <2600 rpm for max efficiency. That included even all the big blocks of the day. I personally tried 455 Buick/Caddy big blocks with the same result. Today there are gear reduction drives to allow high rpm of the engine while keeping the props in their sweet spot. 383ci stroker crate GM engines today are very common in the airboat world, all the way up to 572's. We still all get a good laugh at how most of us started off trying to make those little Corvair engines work out. Today there are still a few folks using them but on smaller flat bottom Jon boats that stay in the water all the time and are simply not capable of running on dry land like the newer, bigger boats. But they're great for all the pan fishermen to run around in the real shallow water.
 
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