Why does HD drag their feet

Epa, Gas Crap, Saw Just Last Night On Chopper Challange A Guy Made His Bike Run On Monster Energy Drink, His Sponser Of Course, But Actually Off The Water In The Drink, By A Simple Modification Of A Two Tank System, We Can All Run On What Ever Has Water In It, How Much Is The Conversion , I Don't Know, But One It Doesn't Look Butt Ugly And Can Be Made In Any Fashion You Want, So The Question Is Why Are We Stuck On Oil And Gas, Money And Politics. So Why Is It So Simple With A Little Money To Convert You Vehical To Run On Water, What Ever The Cost Is We Should Consider Because At The Rate Of Gas It Will Pay For Itself, Not To Mention The Water System Runs Emmissions Free, And That's Why We Still Have Gas And Oil, Look At All The Revenue That Comes From Emmission Test, Gas Tax And Inspections, So What Ever You Think Hd Is Still In The Gov. Pocket Just Like All The Major Car And Truck Manufactures Here And Abroad, It's All About The Benjermans/ 2012 If Not The End Of The World Acording To The Myans, Water 6.00 A Gallon.

Betcha a scooter that runs on waters sounds like it has rubberbands in it tooo. If it don't sound like a Harley who wants it.

I know a litttle bit about that - it is possible to use electricity to extract hydrogen from water to use as fuel & an engineer friend of mine's been doing it for a few years now. BUT - don't buy the "run your car on water" claims or those which say you can make enough hydrogen driving down the road to run the engine on 100% hydrogen. No you can't - unless you can convince God to change the laws of physics. It takes more electricity than the charging system on any vehicle (bike, car, semi, whatever) can possibly produce & the equipment needed to run the engine on 100% hydrogen is as big as the vehicle.

BUT - given the parameters you have to work with, you can make some hydrogen & use it to replace some gasoline. 1st vehicle it was tried on (which I've seen several times & is driven often) is an older Chevy Nova with an inline 6-cyl. engine. Lots of room to work with under the hood & a carb that's easy to modify, cutting back on gasoline & injecting as much hydrogen as you can realisticallv make to replace it. Easy to change the distributor advance curve too. Picked up 6 mpg. 2nd vehicle is a Dodge Ram with a fuel-injected V-6 (seen that one too). Not any room to work with under the hood, so the unit is mounted in the front of the pickup bed - takes up about as much space as a footlocker. Picked up 7 mpg. EFI makes it a lot trickier because you have to change the fuel & ignition curves yourself, depending on how much hydrogen you can actually produce.

Now the project is semi-trucks, for the owner of a small fleet. 20% fuel mileage increase on the 1st one - owner said do all 7. Haven't been over to the shop in several months, so I don't know how much farther along development is, but one thing I do know is that a small group of professors & engineers was quite impressed & said they thought they could get a $500,000 Gov't. grant to continue development. Nope - the Gov't. doesn't want it to work. Wonder why? 1st thing that comes to mind is there's no highway use tax on water. Look @ the gas pump & see how much state & federal tax there is on each gallon. Now what would happen to those tax revenues if a whole bunch of vehicles started getting 20%-50% better mileage?

Point of the matter is yes, you can extract hydrogen from water to use as fuel, but you couldn't do it on a bike that you actually rode everyday 'cause the charging system can't make enough electricity & you don't have enough space to put the equip. But you can do it on a car, pickup, van & especially a semi. But don't expect to see any such system on the market, except the "snake oil" already out there & there is no "one size fits all" setup.

might have missed

I am not sure I saw the entire thread but the "sound" is the throw of the pistons on a single pin. Potato-potato... that is why a Harley sounds like a Harley and a Vrod and others do not. If someone already typed it, sorry.

As far as poo-pooing the hydrogen fuel cells, Honda is putting some out. The total cost of the project will be in the neighborhood of 20 million dollars. It is a great public relations campaign for Honda, but practically useless.

If we take a closer look at hydrogen fuel, we find it is inadequate as a replacement for hydrocarbons. To make hydrogen it takes electricity. The laws of physics and chemistry tell us it takes as much energy to separate the hydrogen in water as you get when you burn the hydrogen. This would be 100% efficiency, which is also impossible.The electricity will be provided off the electrical power grid. Most of our electricity comes from burning coal, and is not too efficient, and has a large carbon footprint. Basically, we would be transferring the carbon footprint of automobiles to power stations, but would not reduce carbon emissions significantly. Of course, using renewable resources (an windmill on every roof, solar panels everywhere) could reduce the coal usage, but not by much.

Two ways to distribute hydrogen, liquid form, which is very very very very cold, and takes a lot of energy to cool it, lots of insulation to keep it cool, and is dangerous to handle. The other way to distribute it would be like they currently do with natural gas, which is highly compress it. This also takes energy to compress the stuff, and working with gases at

I am currently working in Thailand. They had a big controversy here when the transport ministry wanted all the new taxis to run on compressed natural gas, rather than propane. The problem was that the taxis would have to refuel twice a day, rather than once with propane, and it takes several hours to compress the natural gas into the pressure tanks, and the tanks took up the whole trunk, so carrying luggage was out of the question.

Some of the large trucks here run with it, but they have several large tanks to carry the stuff, and just can switch out the tanks and fill them 'off line'.

The other way to deliver the hydrogen is in non pure form, such as methane or propane. Some fuel cells can do this, but that gets us back to using hydrocarbons.

Once you have hydrogen, you can use it in internal combustion engines. You do not need a fuel cell, though that is more efficient. The problem with the fuel cell theory is the fuel, and the high cost of fuel cells. I think a lot of folks might not like having to wait two hours to fuel up the family transport either. Some studies indicate that it will be cheaper to run on hydrogen fuel cells due to the increase in efficiency, but there are still issues to work out.

The other drawback to the fuel cell theory is power. People like power in their vehicles. They like to be able to get up to speed quickly. An gasoline internal combustion engine has a much higher power to weight ratio than electric motors. I was working in the Baltimore Washington area a few years back, and it seemed every time I would try to get on the freeway, where you want to get up to highway speed before merging, I would get behind one of the Toyota Prius vehicles that had too little power. I thought those things should be banned from highways as a safety hazard. To match a typical 6 cylinder auto engine, you would need 120 to 150 hp electric motors. Electric motors have an advantage in torque (100% torque at any speed), but a motor that size, rated for continuous duty, would be large and heavy. Add to that the weight of the fuel cells, the compressed hydrogen tanks, etc. and vehicle start to weigh twice as much. Of course, the fuels cell vehicles they are talking about will not have 120-150 hp. They will be slow on acceleration, and we will have to start redesigning freeway on ramps to give a mile acceleration lane.

Of course, you can make a car small, light, with a small 4 cylinder engine with no power, and get 35+ MPG, but nobody wants those as they have no power.

Any gains would come from efficiency, as fuel cells are more efficient in the conversion than internal combustion engines, so perhaps research and development may someday make this practical. In the meantime, don't hold your breath.

There is a web site: FC2K, that has a lot of information on fuel cells and vehicles with them. I stand corrected, a few of the prototype vehicles will have 120 HP fuel cells. Most will not. They are predicting marketable vehicles by 2012. I think this may be a bit optimistic. The future is on the way.

I wonder if people will install amplifiers to play 'Harley potato potato" while riding fuel cell vehicles?

Actually, after reading the site I mentioned above, it seems Honda is behind on fuel cells. Toyota has had some going in Japan, and a company called Hydrogenics, or something like that, which is partnered with GM has a fleet in the New York area now. They had a fleet used by Fedex in Tokyo as early as 2003. The Honda thing is that they set up a production line for theirs, so they can claim to have the first production model, while the others are still considered prototypes and modified vehicles. I always thought the secret of the Japanese car companies was more due to marketing than vehicles.

Doing field service work, I get to test drive a lot of cars and trucks as rentals. Based on these experiences, I really do not see why everyone says the Japanese cars are better. I have had some that were real dogs, and some that were good. On my current project I started with a Honda CRV, and got rid of that quickly. Since then I have had Chevy, Isuzu, Toyota, and Mitsubishi rentals, and several of some of them. The Toyota trucks here (Thailand) had the most variability, I have had 4, 2 were quite good, and two were crap. The Isuzu I had was ok, the Chevy was good, and of the three Mitsubishi trucks I drove, 1 was ok, and two were crap. Keep in mind though that The Honda and the good Mitsu were fairly new, the rest had some age and use on them.

I think we would have to wait a while before fuel cell technology is small enough and cheap enough to be practical for cycles, but if a lot of the other vehicles on the road start to use hydrogen, that would mean more gas, and cheaper gas, for the cycles. Keep riding!

You never know with Honda .A couple years ago we worked with a supplier to Honda on a development project that would fuel a natural gas powered car in your home garage. It was a pumping set up that hooked up to your natural gas line to your house and it would compress the gas into a tank on your car .It took about 4 hrs to fill a car. It didn't take off real well yet. I wouldn't want my neighbors playing around with natural gas in their vehicle. We have seen a number of homes blown up in the last 2 yrs from natural gas leaks.

I frankly don't give a hoot what my bike runs on, as long as I can keep her running. But a whole lot of the same folks singing the anti-oil-based fuel song are also big into restricting our energy usage of any kind. Don't think so? There are Dems in Congress now saying that energy usage - not just gas - should be allotted by the government to the individuals. Don't remember that in the Constitution, do you?

Keep your powder dry.........

Natural gas is a great fuel, but I certainly don't want my neighbors filling their own cars @ home. You can bet the Gov't. doesn't either - not only from a safety standpoint, but because there's no highway use tax on NG. And the engine needs to be tuned for it & nothing else to run right. I used to live in a small city where some of the city cars would run on natural gas, propane or gasoline - but the compromises you have to make so the engine will run on all 3 means it doesn't run well on any. The people who drove the cars didn't like them @ all & there was no overall cost savings, so the city quit buying them. But if there was advance planning, gas stations had natural gas too & qualified operators to fill vehicles, then it would certainly make sense to manufacture NG vehicles. One of our problems is we never plan ahead.

I've seen a video of one that works well - in the particular application - wouldn't work on the public highways. It's somewhat like a golf cart, but with with a flatbed & can pull a little trailer - used to move things around in huge warehouses & from one to another. Small piston engine that doesn't burn anything - powered by an air tank that's pressurized to 3000 psi. Of course that takes a whopper-doozy of an air-compressor, which takes a LOT of electricity to run, but in that application there's a compressor on-site anyway. The little truck will run several hours on a tank of air & since it doesn't leave the warehouse complex, it works very well - especially inside buildings where you definitely don't want exhaust fumes.

On a larger scale we have to think about the "big picture" & that pesky old law of conservation of energy - energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just changed in form. Say you could build 10,000 air cars with a big enough engine & air tank to be viable on city streets. The local gas station air-compressors certainly can't recharge such vehicles so you'd need a lot of big high-pressure ones, which would take a huge amount of electricity to run. What fuel does the area power plant use? Will it handle the increased demand & will the power grid handle it? The energy to provide the compressed air has to come from somewhere - there ain't no "free lunch". But that doesn't mean such vehicles shouldn't be developed & used where they are practical & they are for warehouses, factories & so on. Might be practical for things like delivering the local mail too.

And one thing I recently saw that's pretty neat is a solar film: PowerFilm™ Flexible Thin Film Solar Modules I read that Toyota is planning on making the roof of their hybrid cars a solar panel & that would be a way to do it. Actually you could use that film on just about any vehicle. Wouldn't provide enough power to run the vehicle, but would help recharge batteries so the gasoline or diesel engine wouldn't have to do all of it. Park the vehicle outside instead of plugging it into your house.

One of the most effective ways to make people do something is to hit 'em in the wallet & I do believe rising fuel prices will spur lots of technological developments. Unfortunately lots of "snake oil" salesmen too

In the 70's during Nixon's administration we had the first big gas crisis. That was the wake up call our government was too afraid to listen to. We needed a plan right then. It should have been promoted like the race to the moon during Kennedy's time. Time to get off the Arabian tit and start working toward new and better energy sources.

We got Oil right here ! What's wrong with it.

I don't think anything is wrong with it, there just isn't enough.