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Comment Smoke screen on my car. (Score 3, Funny) 535

In the summer of 1988 my two biggest hobbies were Radio-control airplanes and modifying my 1969 Firebird.

I was interested in putting a skywriting system on one of my RC airplanes. The kits were expensive so I looked into the methods used by the old-timers on real airplanes. A common DIY method back in the day was to pump a 50/50 mixture of diesel and transmission fluid right into the engines exhaust headers. My first thought was "Forget the airplane, this would work on my car!" I ran down to the hardware store and bought some brake lines(metal tubes threaded on the end), fuel hose, 1-gal Gas can, etc. Then I ran to the wrecking yard and pulled the first electric fuel pump I found. The whole project was easily under $20 at the time.

I drilled holes in all 8 exhaust headers of my Firebird as close as I could to the manifold and tapped them so I could thread in the brake-lines. I ran them all back to the electric fuel pump, which then lead to the gas can. I filled the gas can up faithfully following the 50:50 Diesel/Tranny-fluid mix and set out to test it on some abandoned logging roads.

On the drive there I was thinking about what I might need change to improve it. Would the fuel pump be enough? Will I need to slightly constrict the shorter hoses so the mixture reaches all the headers simultaneously? Will I need to adjust the mixture?
The first test worked so ridiculously well that I never bothered optimizing anything. Thick, white smoke filled up both lanes of the access-road nearly to the tops of the trees. I had to wait several minutes for the smoke to clear before I could drive back through it..

I used it responsibly for the most part (if that's even possible) but you just can't have something like that when you're in High school. I remember one friend borrowing my car at lunch and completely shutting down traffic for about 10 min. on the highway in front of our High-school. Another time I was at the movie theater parking lot and a crowd of "popular kids" from school begged to see it. I revved the engine and fired off a "small puff" while parked. Two police cars showed up when the saw the 300' "mushroom cloud" over the theater and I had to convince them that the rings were going bad but the car only smoked "sometimes." Yet another time a "friend" hit the switch when I wasn't looking at a stop light in downtown Portland. I looked back to see what all the honking is about and I see no cars, no buildings, just a while cloud. The rest of that story is a calamity that I don't care to elaborate on. I will say that nobody was hurt, though.

I dismantled it after that and never made another. The fun/stress ratio wasn't even close to being worth it.

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