A lot of attention has recently been brought to the pictures of us testing the efficiency of various home chemicals as a fuel additive. Well I guess that I can explain it a bit better.

The Car
The unfortunate 626 in question was my first beater. It survived three winters of sliding, hitting other beaters and general abuse. Conveniently, non-turbo 3000GT wheels fit on the car which means its pretty easy to get the car set up with 225s in the front and the 165s on the rear. As silly as it sounds, this car was an oversteer machine. Of course, like all good things it eventually developed enough problems that it was not worth the work required to make it pass Massachusetts state inspection and that made it time to kill the car.

Beating it to death
This was the first car that we set out to destroy so we were not as experienced as we are today. We thought that it would be entertaining to do such things as leave the car idling on a flat surface and then get it moving by jamming it into first gear, and while it was amusing the car also got very angry very quickly and a lot of spilled oil later we had to tow the car home for its final moments.

Chemical death
First wee moved the car into a well ventilated area so we don’t suffocate. And then we grabbed a random line that was going to the intake manifold and extended it so we could feed in fluids.

The first chemical I had on hand was a generic toilet cleaner. We were expecting to get some nasty smoke out the tailpipe, so we were pretty shocked when the car reacted like so:

The next interesting chemical was starter fluid used for grilling. We let the car run with starter fluid for as long as we could stand the smoke which was roughly this long:

After letting the smoke dissipate (which took an extremely long time and must have displeased my neighbors pretty spectacularly) we walked around the car and noticed the exhaust had spewed out a thick black mess which was extremely difficult to clean up:

We then decided that smoking was only so interesting so we decided to stuff things inside the valve cover. We dumped a few nuts and bolts in, stuffed some chlorine in, poured all my used motor oil in, and mashed it in with the handle from one of my jacks:

The car ran for about 10 seconds and then the throttle body got blocked by a bolt and we couldn’t give the car the wide open throttle it required. After fixing it we got the car to run for a full 2 minutes before it literally puked. It made a fantastically disgusting sound, stopped running, and ejected a whole bunch of thick, chunky, brown yuck.

If you look carefully you can see one a nut the car decided it didn’t want to eat inside the puddle.

Since the destruction of this car we have killed several others which I will try to post up here.