Frequently Asked Questions
about Microfurthur

Absolutely. Not! This is just some hacking around. The point is that a guy in his basement using hundred-year-old technology and decades-old spare parts can get between 40 and 80 mpg on anything from diesel to used cooking oil, grill propane to old motorboat gas. This is America! We put men on the Moon 40 years ago! Shouldn’t we be way ahead of where we are? (Let alone flying cars. Don’t get me started!)

Further (then Furthur) is a bus of some renown from the 60s. Its colorful life is intertwined with the histories of Ken Kesey, The Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady, Tom Wolfe, and many others.

“Microcar” is a category of small vehicles, usually having engines of 250cc or smaller. This vehicle is (was?) an example of a Post-War Italian microcar.

“Microfurthur” is a nod to both.

The three-wheeler is a 1965 utility vehicle from Italy called a Lambro. I and some high-school science students did the electric conversion of the rusty relic in ’04 and ’05.

The homemade trailer has a single-cylinder Italian diesel (Lombardini) from one of those big flashing yellow arrows you see by construction sites on highways.

The other two removable APUs (Auxilliary Power Units) are a home-converted propane machine that delivers DC straight to the batteries, and another plain old Colman residential-use generator.

1. It’s Diesel-Electric.
Like trains, tugboats, and submarines (to name a few) going back to about 1900, the hybrid combination of a diesel engine to run a generator to charge batteries is tried and true. (By the way, gasoline-electric hybrids are not new with the Honda Insight or Toyota Prius. Ferdinand Porsche (that Porsche) built the first one in 1899.)

2. It Has A Diesel Removable Auxiliary Power Unit Which Runs On Multiple Fuels.
This vehicle has a calculated (more data later) range of about 20 miles, enough to make my commute. (I will have to charge at both ends or make it work a little better if the range is any less!) The APU is on a trailer, and can be left behind. I can charge while pulling or while parked with the APU attached.

The diesel engine can run on petrodiesel or biodiesel and on SVO (straight vegetable oil) or on UVO (used vegetable oil… sometimes called WVO, or waste vegetable oil, but it’s not waste, is it? It’s fuel!)

3. It Has A Propane-Fired Removable APU.
This Auxilary Power Unit rides on the back deck of the vehicle. It employs a Honda 5-hp internal combustion engine (I.C.E.) that I converted, with some students back in about 2000, using a kit, to run on propane.  It delivers straight DC at ~53v to charge the battery pack directly, or, at times of peak demand, to support the current delivery by the battery pack.

4. It Has A Gasoline-Fired Removable APU.
This Auxilary Power Unit rides on the back deck of the vehicle, too. It is a 10-year-old, plain-as-anything off-the-shelf generator. Briggs and Stratton 8-hp gas I.C.E. running a generator head by direct drive. This delivers 110v AC for the same charing system you would use to plug the electic vehicle into a household wall socket.

5. Bonus! It can also be charged by plugging in.
I guess it’s really a hybrid five ways. Plug-in Hybrids are coming to a dealership near you! (Prius, a new Saturn, Ford announced one you might see in five years, etc.)

No! Even though it was a rusty and beat up old thing when I got it, I have been very careful not to do anything irreversible on it. Maybe the next caretaker of this hard-luck time-traveler will want to do a full restoration!

A little. Maybe next year?

At best, maybe. Even a quick and casual bit of looking leads you to see what a scam and environmental failure corn-based Ethanol is. And in the Americas alone we are already seeing the consequence of competition between people who want to drive, and dairy farmers, let alone people who just want to eat: The price of corn has doubled in the last year on biofuel production demand.

Cellulosic Ethanol, algal fuels, and other technologies hold much greater promise. Jumping into hyped fixes like Ethanol is just trading problems, and worse.

We’ve got a ways to go.

Visit www.maxmatic.com for more information.

Microfurthur makes occasional appearances at The Discovery Museums in Acton. Have you been there lately? Great place for you and your kids! www.discoverymuseums.org.