Something Old, and Something New

I got a call Friday night, which I had been hoping to get. A friend called and said he had bought a new truck for his farm, and I was welcome to come over and take his (rusted to the point of being unsafe to drive) 1985 Chevy ¾ ton pickup for free. This was great news, as I wanted the engine (a four bolt main, freshly rebuilt small block 350) for a 1968 Jeep that I am restoring.

At this point, I am sure you are wondering what the hell this has to do with technology, as the newest tech I have mentioned was created 24 years ago. One of the things that I am looking forward to doing to this grossly inefficient motor, once it is freed from its rotted carcass, is convert it to a modern, customizable and fully programmable electronic fuel injection (EFI). While nearly everyone takes EFI for granted these days (if you drive a car made in the last 15 years, you have it in one form or another), there is a niche market for tech savvy tinkerers to build – from scratch – modern fuel systems for old engines that were only offered with carburetion. The EFI kits range from total DIY efforts, where you are literally soldering together the motherboards, to nearly plug and play offerings with base tunes for the type of engine that you are retrofitting. Nearly all of the available kits offer laptop based tuning and programming through a standard USB interface. All of them offer the ability to tune an old engine in good working order to the point where it rivals modern engines

So, why is this important? How is it relevant? First, it is actually “greener” to keep older vehicles in use and in good tune then it is to scrap them and buy something new, if you look at the energy required to scrap and build them. Even better, though, is to take the older, inefficient engine and give it modern components that make it *MUCH* cleaner to run. In the case of the truck engine that I am going to convert, the gas mileage should jump from 7mpg to around 17mpg, or more – which is not bad for a 40 year old truck with a 25 year old motor. It is more than simple gas mileage too, though that is the first thing that people think of when considering a swap from carbs to EFI. Tailpipe emissions are also reduced using a modern, computer tunable fuel system. Sensors placed in the exhaust continually test and adjust the induction for optimum fuel to air mixture. This creates far fewer unburned hydrocarbons (greenhouse gasses) being released into the atmosphere. Also, the ROI for the conversion can be seen usually within one or two years of the conversion due to the increased mileage and more efficient running characteristics.

The Kindle killer? Not yet.

Over the past week, two important announcements were made, both on Wednesday the 27th. The first was President Obama’s first state of the union address. And the second was the official announcement of Apple’s new product, the iPad. Unfortunately, I missed the President’s address due to class, but I did manage to steal off a few minutes of time at work to catch Steve Jobs do what he does best.

At least within the circles that I seem to run, Apple’s iPad seems to have made the bigger splash. In my other GB759 class that meets Wednesday, several of us sat around talking about the iPad (and no one even mentioned the President’s address). The consensus was that though it was kind of cool, it was not nearly as cool as prior Apple gadget releases such as the iPhone and the iPod. Furthermore, Apple was hamstringing the iPad right out of the gate by the features that it didn’t have. No USB? No Flash support? No camera?

We all agreed, while waiting for our professor to restart class after break, that the device was cool but did not move us in the way that the other big Apple releases had. We do not seem to have been alone. Apple stock, at $213 per share on Wednesday before Jobs’ Keynote address, dropped $21 to $192 at close on Friday.

While not all of it is good, there is still a LOT of buzz for the iPad. It will be interesting to see what Apple does to offset the lackluster press for its newest “must have” gadget. In my opinion, though, it is still a generation or two from being something really special.