History The elusive "POGUE CARBURETOR"

We've all heard of the "elusive 100 mpg carburetor". I've personally had an infatuation with high mileage stuff since I was a kid back in the early 70's gas crunch.

I bought all the books, plans and patent papers and only dreamed of ever seeing or laying my hands on one. I even tried to build one a couple of times with limited success.

Years later I found this picture of Don Garlits holding a Pogue Vapor Carb for a flat head Ford V-8.

So, when I was at Garlits' Museum a couple of years ago and I asked him for his autograph. He said, "Sure, where would you like me to sign it?" I pulled out my picture of him holding that Pogue Vapor Carb and said, "Right here would be fine."

He exclaimed, "Where did you get that?!" I told him I found it on line and he said, "That's my "Winnie!" He told me it was on display in the back building in the back corner and proceeded to autograph my picture.

So, I asked him if he ever found out if it really worked or not, and he smiled, cocked his head a moment and said, "I don't know..." I actually expected him to ask me if I wanted to help him try to make it run!

Regardless of whether you believe it's impossible or not and laying all the politics aside, lets hear your story of what you might have seen or heard about HIGH MILEAGE vapor carbs on early traditional cars of the 1920's - 1960's.

Here are a few pictures I took that day...

 

What makes me wonder is the comparative stoichiometry, calorific values, etc. of fuels which are gaseous at atmospheric pressure anyway, like LPG or CNG. We do see better combustion efficiency there, but nothing like these claims.

 

Interesting ! No story, but looking forward to hearing from others.

 

Pogue experimented with vaporizing the gas using exhaust heat. He claimed good results in the 30s but in a 1954 interview said it wouldn't work with the new gas. He must have meant leaded gas, the lead additives would stay behind and clog up the vaporizer and never get to the engine.

Smoky Yunick did something similar with his adiabatic engine in the 80s. He claimed to double the mileage while at the same time doubling horsepower. With unleaded gas you can use heat to vaporize the fuel where you can't with leaded gas.

Compare the Pogue and Yunick designs and you will see both were getting at the same thing but the Yunick was more ambitious.

 

I have also been interesting in high mileage vaporized fuel for a while. There is the Shell Oil Opel that won a record for 276 mpg. The car is currently on display at the LeMay Marymount facility in Parkland, WA. I will try to find some pictures of it. My friend and I were testing fuel vapor with an oil bath air cleaner that had gas in it instead of oil. We metered the gas with an external float bowl. It was on a 61 dodge truck. We were able to drive it around but never got it totally dialed in. That is pretty cool that you were able to see it in person. I have only seen the patent drawings.

 

A bit off topic, but I have a '95 Saturn SL2 that I swapped a '97 Jetta TDI drivetrain into several years ago. With some tuning, a few aerodynamic mods (filling in the grille, smooth wheel covers, headlights flush with the nose, etc), and some hypermiling driving techniques, I've been able to get up to 73 mpg on the highway on a few occasions, although returns of mid-60's is more common. My son drives it like he stole it, so he only gets around 60 out of it

 

I had a friend who was fascinated with the Pogue carb, he worked on all kinds of ideas like taking a VW engine and using 2 of the cylinders for making an air compressor so the fuel vapors would be more pressurized. He got up to some great gas mileage but the biggest problem was finding a material that would transfer enough heat to fully vaporize the gasoline.

 

Yes! Also the introduction of multi-compound fuels in that era, evaporate at different temperatures. The problem is the light ends evaporate at 160* or so and the heavy ends evaporate at about 450* or so, thus you get a distilling process that gums up the system and smells like an old carburetor with bad gas that has been sitting for a year or two. The exact same process only it takes time.

We really need a single compound fuel like "white gas" from way back then. Even Coleman lantern fuel, kerosene, diesel, thinners, etc. have multiple compounds in them these days.

However, blended gasolines will auto ignite (detonate) up near 800*-900* so it could be safely heated much higher than the exhaust would be able to heat it, say around 600* and it would turn into a single compound vapor again that would be stable.

The trick is that it needs to be done "on the fly" - think of a Coleman stove with a gas generator. They call it "thermo-cracking" much like the refineries do in the first place.

 

Yes, that OT engine is at Gatlits too. Very impressive stuff!
Here is a picture of the show card with a little explanation...

 

There was more to the story than just the carb. The model A that was originally fitted with the prototype also had the fuel line run several times through the water jacket in the block. My take on that was that the fuel would be vaporized or close to it before it even got close to the carb. From what I was told, and this was from someone who was there, was that the Ford went from Brandon Manitoba to Vancouver on 18 gallons of gas.....

 

I don't know. I've not heard that story yet. I'm not familiar with Canadian gallons. How many MPG would that be? This stuff is neat to hear, tell us more...

 

Not sure what roads would have been in place in the mid to late 30's, but today's distance through Calgary is about 1375 miles. Canadian gallon is approx 1.15 times large than a US gallon.

 

Our own "Squirrel" here on the H.A.M.B. has been involved with a car that got over 100 mpg as I recall.

 

mr57, here is a link to an article on that trip from Winnipeg to Vancouver...

http://fuel-efficient-vehicles.org/energy-news/?page_id=986

Very interesting!!!

 

Cool!!! Squirrel, get on here and tell us about it. Thanks

 

heh...just saw this. When I was in college, my senior project was with a few other students, we build a supermileage car for the SAE contest. We got about 500 mpg, the winners got around 1500. they're over 3000 mpg now, I believe.

The thing is, this is a car that you would not want to drive, and could not drive on city streets. 15 mph average speed, uncomfortable as can be, and designed to run on a test track.

There's no magic to fuel mileage. Energy in = work done plus heat out. Design a car so it has to do the least amount of work, ie make it light and aerodynamic and not able to go up hills or accelerate worth a darn, and minimize losses.

The vapor stuff seems to me to be a big waste of time, but the allure of a 100 mpg carb (in the early years) or a 200 mpg carb (in the 70s gas crunch) sure sold a lot of snake oil. Years ago I was thinking about it, and decided that if there was going to be any benefit from vaporization, then it would be because fuel was not being burned all the way in a "normal" engine. But if you look at the HC readings on an exhaust analyzer on a "normal" engine, you'll see that the fuel is almost all getting burned.

The funny thing is that we've known how to get pretty good mileage out of cars for a long, long time...but folks just don't want to drive an underpowered sardine can! (at least not in this country, they do it all the time in other places)

 

Thanks for your input Jim!

 

Jim, I looked on your My fabulous web page and found the high mileage car.
That's very cool! Wow!

 

My father was a mechanic in Winnipeg, working at Crawford Motors, at the time of the demonstration tests and told me that the car (Model A) did achieve the mileage that was forecast. They did work on the car before it left for Vancouver, seems the car needed another valve job, One of many. One of the issues that fails to get mentioned.

Canuck

 

Valves need a soft landing and lead helps. Now we have other additives to lubricate the top end.

 

The very real limit to how lean a mixture can be used is flame propagation. At some point above the 15 parts air to 1 part fuel the fuel molecules are too far apart to conduct a burn across the combustion chamber. Ford solved some of this problem by having a tiny separate chamber with a spark plug and a very rich mixture and a flame port into the regular chamber which is charged with a very lean mixture. The "exploding" gas from the tiny chamber shot through the port and across the main chamber lighting fuel/air mixture that was too lean to be touched off by a spark plug. It was called a "controlled vortex combustion chamber" or CVCC. When Ford didn't utilize this Honda took it up and when their customers didn't make any sense out of CVCC they stuck in a couple of i's and it become a Civic.

 

As a practical matter it seems to me that were the rumors true, the conspiracies, (leaving aside the actual physics and stoichiometric fuel/air ratio for the moment, we know there is only so much energy to be derived from a gallon of fuel) then other countries would have developed the same types of carburetors.

Particularly, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany during World War II, both countries were dependent (mostly) on imports for their war efforts and neither were slouches when it came to engineering. As it is, the work that can be extracted from a gallon of gasoline is amazing and one reason fossil fuels will be around for decades to come. Nothing else comes close.

Fill your tank with one (1) gallon @$2 - and load the trunk up with bricks. Drive as far as you can. 10 miles, 15, 25 miles? OK. Would you push 2000 pounds 25 miles through the snow for $2? Yeah, that's what I thought.

 

That's neat to know that someone close was involved in the vapor carb thing back then. Now we have hardened seats like for use on propane and or hydrogen fueled engines. Problem solved. Thanks.

 

My limited understanding is that we are still thinking of it as a liquid fuel. Then the stoichiometric fuel/air ratio will be a problem beyond about 16-1. When it goes through the thermo-cracking stage it turns into something else like a plasma and it changes chemistry.

Now we're at a different level of physics. Something called quantum energy or over-unity. Many believe that is what happened with the super high mileage fuel mixtures and it's corresponding claims of 200+ mpg.

In my limited experimenting, when this thing gets to a certain temperature the air fuel ratio gauge goes off the chart and the power picks up like I have a tailwind. ???

A guy told me one time that I was trying to break the laws of physics and I politely told him, "I don't think we know all the laws of physics yet." He looked at me sort of dumb-founded and his conversation ended with me.

Maybe Charles Pogue knew or saw something that we don't.

 

It could be that he knew that folks would believe things like "over-unity" and "quantum energy" and give him money in hopes of getting something for nothing.

Like many other scams, the secret to the Pogue carburetor is psychology.

 

There have been several articles written on the Pogue carb over the years, and several rumors on the demise of it. One was that the oil sheiks paid him off to not develop it and another was that they told him if he went into production, he would die. Who knows? I think if you have one it is a real collectable.

 

Anyone who believes any of these magic fantasy 100+ mpg vapor carburetors ever existed in a legitimate working form can buy one today and have their own 75+ mpg land yacht by the end of the week.

Its called a propane conversion, and a propane carburetor really does work on vapor, or "fumes" as the true believers like to call it.

A gallon of propane has 75% of the energy of a gallon of gasoline, so, if some backyard inventor could cobble up a 100 mpg carb for gasoline 80 years ago, then surely a well engineered and precision manufactured current one for propane should be a cinch to kick a early 80's Crown Vic or Impala up to 75 mpg. Yeah, right.

Or, it would be both simpler and cheaper to just admit self promoting crooks, hucksters, and con artists have been around for ages, and always will be, just waiting to take the money of the gullible or grab some moment of self concocted fame based on the latest pile of outlandish claims of their new top secret discovery.

Here's a great example of internet promoted stupidity related to high mileage claims. https://futurecreep.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/100-miles-per-gallon-the-great-oil-conspiracy/
As usual, the comments are the most entertaining part of the page, with each poster trying to one-up the previous ones.

Funny thing is, I clearly remember all the hype surrounding the Moody-mobile when it was happening in real time. You could hardly turn on the TV without hearing another talking head with all the technical expertise of a head of cabbage blubbering on about this stuff as if it was at least as significant as the first moon landing.

Not sure what any of this has to do with the HAMB, since there's nothing traditional about being gullible or ignorant.

 

Fish carb was another but maybe more oriented towards performance, I have a book about those types of carbs..I'll try to dig it out later..The Bourke engine I think came the closest..

 

I disagree....being gullible and ignorant is about as traditional as the human condition gets.

 

This last statement is nonsense, Honda first marketed and sold the Civic here in '73 and '74 with a conventional non-CVCC engine, it wasn't until '75 that the CVCC engine was used. So the name 'Civic' had absolutely nothing to do with the CVCC engine. My dad bought a new Civic in '74 and I was quite familiar with the mechanicals on it, it had a conventional overhead cam 2-valve 1237cc 4-banger. In '75 the mother of one of my friends bought a new 1.5 liter CVCC Civic.

-------------------------------------------------------

Back to the original subject, I think just getting the chance to meet 'Big' himself is awesome and interacting with him on his prized 'Winnie' must have been a real treat!