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    Categories: Lifestyle

Homemade Hydrogen Generator Increases Fuel Economy.

It Took Four Years Of Testing And Research To Find The Answers.

Seven years ago, with the price of gasoline getting beyond the point I wanted to pay, I decided to look at my options.  I’d been in the automotive business as an award winning professional race car driver in both drag racing and road racing, a highly successful race car and high-end sports car mechanic and I’d owned seven auto parts and service facilities in Oregon and Hawaii.  I knew what I wanted.  The Internet was coming of age, so I started looking.

I knew some but, not a lot, about hydrogen.  I knew it only took a small amount to enhance the properties of other fuels.  I knew it would work with gas, natural gas, propane or diesel.  And, I knew that people had been generating hydrogen on a small scale for personal use using various methods for quite a few years.

I searched the Internet and gave up after awhile.  I resumed my searching when gas prices spiked again.  The problem I found was, no one was offering anything that would do what I wanted at a price that wasn’t outrageously high and, I knew from my automotive experiences, all had some serious, inherent problems.

I’d read about the different solutions that most people were using and decided that potassium hydroxide, more commonly known as drain cleaner, acids and other caustic chemicals, were too dangerous.  If you get them on the paint of the car, it’s gone or severely bleached out.  Getting those type chemicals on the skin can cause burns and, in the eyes, they can blind you.  Not for me, so I started looking concerning that aspect of the project too.  I found an alternative that works as good, and is safe enough to be ingested.  

My first home made hydrogen generator was made using a stainless steel container.  The interior of the container began corroding almost immediately.  A friend, and longtime professional weldor, told me the best stainless was made in Italy. It took a while but, eventually, I found a container that would work.  The Italian stainless was superior to what I’d been using, but still not satisfactory.  With the electrolyte I was using, I didn’t need some super expensive, exotic container, so I decided to use Lexan® . 
In order to increase the fuel economy, most people either make the engine smaller, which generally means less horsepower, or make the car smaller and/or lighter.  I wasn’t in the car manufacturing or, from scratch, engine building, so I had to find a different process.  I figured by using race car engine techniques, I could increase the MPG through more efficient use of the same amount of fuel. 

Sixty to eighty percent of the fuel that goes in the engine is used for cooling the pistons, valves and other internal engine components.  If I went too lean on the mixture, I‘d burn a piston or other engine part and destroy the engine.  Plus, hydrogen burns very hot, which would increase the problem.  There was another way that cooled the parts efficiently and made the engine run cooler and, as an extra plus, gave it more horsepower.  I tried it, it worked, so I incorporated it into my basic design.

Now, I had Lexan ® bottles, an electrolyte that wasn’t destructive to man, beast and automobile finishes and an additional bonus for cooling and increasing efficiency. 

The next step entailed getting what I had in bottles and jars, into the engine.  My experience has been that the simpler the system, the less likely it is to cause problems and the better it will be in the long run.  Many people believe that everything has to be complicated or it won’t work.  In almost every case, the exact opposite is true. 

I’ve written health articles for 25 years and that’s required reading ten’s of thousands of pages of research information and then boiling down what I found so my readers could understand the doctorese.  I’ve used much of what I’ve found in my personal quest for health and it always turns out that the simple stuff works best.  From cars to cosmos, there are a few rules that pertain to all things.  This project proved no different.

With that in mind, I eliminated any ideas about sophisticated computer controls, injection and things that go clunk, and breakdown, in the night.  The only drawback is, the system uses vacuum to deliver the hydrogen and other components, and it won’t work with supercharged or turbocharged engines.  The engine has to be naturally aspirated. 

Three years ago, after a lot of blind alleys, I came up with a highly successful unit.  Our personal cars had gotten from twenty-two to fifty percent increases in MPG.  People began asking if I’d teach them what I knew.  I did and they were happy with the results of their installations.  But, another problem arose.  I didn’t have time to teach and have a personal life.  I’d stopped teaching health for the same reason a few years before.  I was back to options.

My answer to the problem was to do one more workshop and have my son video it for me.  We made a DVD, that’s an exact copy of a workshop, plus new information.  Since I build websites for others, I built a website for the DVD.  Now, I can sell the DVD for a reasonable price, guarantee that it will work and my customer can use it on their personal car(s) and/or install the system for others and make a good living doing it.
Simple, it only took five years of testing and research. 

The environment benefits, my customers save on gas and the entire system can be built at home, with basic hand tools, for under fifty dollars plus the $12.95 DVD and shipping costs.  I’m happy.  Everything needed is available at most hardware stores, like Lowe’s or Home Depot, and some, but not all, is available at Wal Mart. 

You can see the unit and get more information by going to http://www.mileageman1.com

Once you work with the unit, you’ll see that stage 1 is the most important part and all it takes is filling it with water.           

Larry Miller: I was born in Los Angeles in 1940. My father was a fighter pilot instructor during WWll and we moved from coast to coast, maybe that’s where I got the nomad in my blood. After graduating from high school in 1958 I joined the Marines. That lifestyle wasn’t for me and upon my discharge I went on with my life, and have never looked back. I worked briefly for a Caterpillar dealer in Riverside, CA before moving back to N. California where I was a welder and truck driver for a chemical company. Truck driving wasn’t my calling anymore than being in the Marines, and I went back to work for another Caterpillar dealer steam cleaning dirty tractor parts and welding. They sent me to schools, lots and lots of schools. I spent as much time going to trade schools as I did at work. I went from cleaning parts to apprentice field mechanic, to mechanic to the parts department to satellite store manager in less than two years. They wanted me to move to Sacramento and be a salesman: I moved to Oregon to learn to commune with nature. I went to work for another heavy equipment dealer and was later contacted by the World’s largest Lorraine Crane dealer and offered the position of purchasing agent and general parts manager. In 1967 I was offered a line of automotive parts and supplies and went into business for myself. My business revolved around eleven race cars that we maintained for others, driving race cars professionally and maintaining high end sports cars. I was a championship and regional champion driver. My business was the largest import parts and service, non dealer, in the state until I sold it in 1979. We went sailing in 79, first to Mexico and then Hawaii. I was an award winning Trans-Pacific sailor and sailor of the year, Hawaii, Island of Kauai. An opportunity presented itself in Hawaii during 1981 and I was back in business, importing Japanese auto body and hard parts. I also felt the pull to write and began freelancing for magazines and newspapers in 1982. My main focus in my articles is, and always has been, health, wellness and fitness. Most of us have heard the saying, “Time is all we have.” I disagree. Our health is all we have, because without our health, we have no time. I was a US Olympic team hopeful in racewalking and held all the records for the state of Hawaii. As a sponsored athlete in my forties, I finished first in nine marathons in a row in my division, qualified for the Ironman® and was the state USCF cycling champion five times in Hawaii and Oregon. Celinda and I were married in 1988 after a three year engagement. We sold our businesses and organic farm and sailed back to Oregon. After our sailboat boat was sold, we moved to Joseph, Oregon, two miles from the trailhead into the Eagle Cap Wilderness. We were caregivers for my mother the last ten years she was alive. We moved to New Mexico in 1995 because it was too cold for my mom in Oregon during the winters. Celinda designed, and I engineered and built our strawbale house. I began writing the weekly health column for a local newspaper in 1996, and still do. In 2000, I took the summer off to do a four month, 4000 mile, hike, bike and kayak odyssey. I’d been writing health, fitness and sports articles since 1982 and the journey produced a full-length, nonfiction, first person adventure book, Yol Bolsun, May There Be A Road, which can be bought from Amazon.com and others over the Internet. The summer of 2001 was spent hiking. kayaking, fishing and exploring the southwest. In 2002 Celinda and I spent the summer in Canada learning the hospitality business at a resort in preparation for doing promotion for the resort in the US. Most of 2003 was spent reestablishing the trees and landscape that had died during the stay in Canada. We had a house sitter and the house sitter had an ex-husband, and that’s a long story. In July of 2004 I did a solo kayak trip on the Snake River, taking pictures, writing articles and pencil sketching the journey. I hope to do another kayak adventure on the Snake River during the summer of 2008, on the section I missed in 2000 and 2004. In 2005, I returned to Canada to the resort where we’d spent 2002. I was supposed to be there for the month of June. I’d contacted people I’d met in 2002 and they came back to Canada to fish, hike and spend time at the resort, Echo Valley Ranch and Spa, while I was there. My one month became five and then it was off to Spain to do the El Camino de Santiago as a travel companion with one of the guests who’d returned to Canada in June. During the summer of 2006 a friend from Ireland, who I’d met in Spain the year before, came to visit in NM and we fished, hiked and explored the White Mountains of AZ. He’d never slept out in the wild in a tent before, and it was quite an experience, for both of us. My newspaper articles were put on the Internet beginning in 2002. I was asked to give public speaking engagements, photo and video presentations, on various subjects for the library in Deming, NM and continue to do so. In 2006 I videoed and produced a DVD for the Smithsonian Institute’s travel exhibit “Between Fences.” NMFILMS had a conference by invitation only, which I attended. While attending the conference, I realized that film making wasn’t what I wanted to do but I still wanted to use my sixteen years of experience and enjoyment of videoing and photography. During the winter of 2005, I discovered that no one on record had ever run from the Arizona border to the Texas border, a distance of 165 miles. During the spring and summer of 2006 I trained for the run and the run was completed in October, 2006. In late 2005, I began building and maintaining websites incorporating all the things I enjoyed about video, photography, travel and the out of doors. 2007 has been a summer of upgrading the home and property which resulted in a downgrading of my enthusiasm for being located in one place. If we don’t like what’s happening in our life, we need to change what we’re doing. Celinda and I are ready to pull up roots and move on. I guess I’ve come full circle. I’m ready to revert back to my childhood, and a nomadic lifestyle.
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