Re: Thermo 101, Part II (Boost vs Compression Ratio)

[rdh@sli.com (Robert D. Houk)]

   > The magazine "Turbo and Hi-Tech Performance", November 1994 issue, went
   > into some details on "more power". (Actually, "More Power!" might well
   > be the magazine's sub-title, if it had one.)

   Thanks for the info., but isn't that the magazine with the well-endowed 
   women leaning over the cars? Is it a division of "Truckin'"?  They must 
   have really burnt the midnight oil on this one...

Yeah, they have a tendency towards appealing to the, um, mammalian male
hormonal response systems that do seem to predominate in the world of
high-performance automobile owners/drivers (I've only known one true
gearheadette in my life, and she was into dragsters).

Overall, the mag tends towards raw power rather than total balanced ge-
stalt. Lots of articles on how to get more power out of your 5.0L Mus-
tangs, for example. (Some of them are quite amusing, as they cheerfully
describe the results of too much boost without corresponding strength-
ening of the underlying components: "to be continued next month when we
can find a new engine").

They have lots of technical info that makes for good reading, though. My
only complaint might be that they tend to stop halfway through rather
then delving way over everyone's head into the underlying "physics" of
what is really going on. (I'd rather have it and not use it than want it
and not have it...)

Similarly, their "projects" tend to be described more in terms of top-
level actions and results without really going into the nitty gritty of
all the nuts'n'bolts you would need to reproduce the project yourself.

Still, just knowing it can be down is half the battle; I find the mag
to be emminently worthwhile, just as I do Autoweek, Car and Driver, and
European Car (each has its strengthes and weaknesses; to some degree they
all compliment each other; certainly none of them are sufficient by them-
selves to eliminate the usefullness of the others).

					-RDH