- In my never ending search to find more
and unique ways to bump up power on the old cat dish,
I came across a company that makes turbos for your axle.
Claiming to deliver 1300 horsepower directly to your wheels,
bypassing the losses you get from a traditional turbo setup.
(crying)
But as you might expect,
Turbo Axle is a wild fricking idea,
an engineers, fever dream brought to life.
And today we're gonna dive into the brain
of one horsepower hungry engineer
and see how Turbo Axles came to be, how they work
and more importantly,
why Job needs to put one on the Miata.
Job we're giving you more work, baby.
Woo hoo. Let's go!
(bright upbeat music)
- Thank you to The Zebra for sponsoring today's video.
Namaste.
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(mellow music)
- Back in 1962, an engineer named Gene Middlebrook
started a company called Turbonique to sell his inventions.
Applying what he learned designing ballistic missiles
as a defense contractor,
he built and sold power adding equipment for cars.
One of those invention was a Turbo Axle,
but that wasn't a turbo charger for your axle.
There's a difference, let me explain.
Ordinarily, we use the word turbo
to describe that under hoods Benny boy
that uses exhaust gases to power a turbine,
a fan that's rotated by the exhaust flow.
That turbine is attached to an impeller, it's another fan,
that pushes more air into your engine.
That extra air means it can burn more fuel
and more horsepower.
But the word turbo is also used
with lots of other mechanical devices.
To an engineer like Middlebrook's,
turbo means anything that makes use of a turbine.
Stuff like a turboprop airplane engine,
which uses a turbine to spin a propeller
or the GM Turbo-Hydromatic transmission
which uses a turbine to build hydraulic pressure.
Of course, marketers,
they don't always see eye to eye with us, engineers.
And sometime turbo gets used when there's no turbine.
That's how we ended up with Porsche's Taycan Turbo,
which is an EV.
It couldn't use a turbo, even if it had one.
Porsche's marketing people say turbo just means
the fastest top of the line version of their cars.
Because apparently,
words mean whatever Porsche says they do.
If only there were some sort of book
that could help us tell what words mean.
Now that we know that marketers are liars
and getting back to some engineering,
what is the appeal to designing
and fabricating a Turbo Axle?
Well, it's to solve an inherent problem
that all turbochargers have,
that parasitic load. - [Man 2] Oh, you suck.
- Looking at a turbo on the Miata, for example,
that engine has to do work to push gases
through the exhaust.
If you put something in the path of those gases,
like a turbine, the engine has to work harder.
Now, here's a good example.
Have you ever been on a mission
to run into the grocery store
to pick up a bag of Hawaiian Sweet Maui Kettle Chips.
And as you're walking down the aisle,
an old lady comes out of nowhere
and steps right in front of you?
It takes more work to push old Ethel out of the way.
Perfect analogy.
Similarly, a mechanical supercharger
connected to the engines crank,
consume some of the engine's power.
Alternator, the air conditioning compressor
and power steering pump are all doing this
when you drive your car too.
But this means at low RPMs,
a turbo or a supercharger is drawing more power
than it's adding.
That's parasitic load.
And at low RPMs, the engine would perform better without it.
It's only when the charge air reaches a high enough density,
is there more than enough additional power
to make up for that loss. (car engine roaring)
Middlebrook saw this problem and he said,
"There's gotta be another way."
What he came up with was a supercharger
that had its own power source,
but he didn't nail that on its first try.
He developed a battery powered electric supercharger.
We did an episode on B2B about electric superchargers
and their big problem is that
the batteries to make significant horsepower
are simply too heavy for them to be viable in most cases.
Middlebrook's electric supercharger
had the same problem as electric turbos.
It just didn't add enough power to be worth it,
but he wasn't ready to give up.
And because of his background in missiles,
he tried a different power source.
Rocket fuel.
Whoa!
(rock music playing)
(cheering)
And this led to the inventions
that may Turbonique infamous.
All of which were powered by something called thermolene.
Thermolene was just a brand name for isopropyl nitrate,
a rocket fuel that Turbonique would send you in the mail.
If you think that's dangerous. Yeah, you'd be right.
I can't even send... well, now you can't.
And you can't send poop it at mail now.
But this was 1960s, a time before safety ever existed.
Seat belts weren't even mandatory in cars until 1968.
And you could buy a child's story that contained radioactive
and reachable uranium 238,
in case you wanted the kids to grow up to be the next X-Men.
A part of what makes isopropyl nitrate dangerous
is that it's a mono propellant.
That means it contains everything you need
for combustion, unlike gasoline.
Gasoline is composed of hydrocarbons,
molecules containing hydrogen and carbon.
And to make combustion happen
that requires oxygen.
Oxygen is over here, they're like,
"Yeah, you need me. You need me, (beeping)"
Gasoline in an airtight container simply can't burn.
Thermolene has oxygen built into it,
meaning all you need to set off a combustion is a catalyst
like a spark, pressure, or high temperature.
But it also means you can't suffocate
an isopropyl nitrate fire by cutting off its oxygen supply,
it's already built in, it won't happen.
Isopropyl nitrate isn't really used anymore,
partially because it releases more toxic gases
than other rocker fuels and it's highly dangerous.
But thermolene also has another problem.
It doesn't contain quite enough oxygen
for complete combustion of its hydrocarbons
inside an engine.
The unburned hydrocarbons get very hot
from the combustion happening around them
and can ignite when they exit through the exhaust
and come into contact with air.
The flame this produces is nearly invisible
and it burns around 1100°C.
Can't even see a hot, hot flame.
So Middlebrook saw the drag strip
as a place to use his invention,
a liquid driven supercharger
and it mounted on the engine
in between the carburetor and intake manifold.
Like a turbo, it used an impeller to increase the pressure
and density of the charged air.
How that impeller was driven
is what made the device super special.
Attached to the other end of the impeller shaft
with a turbine and combustion chamber,
the combustion and exhaust gases
from burning isopropyl nitrate inside
that would spin the turbine and the impeller
up to a hundred thousand RPM.
To make that possible,
the combustion chamber had two injector ports.
One was used for the fuel thermolene
and the second was use for liquid oxygen.
That extra oxygen helped the isopropyl nitrate ignite
for more complete, more powerful combustion.
But it also meant that you had to have
three high pressure canisters mounted somewhere in your car.
One for liquid oxygen, one for thermolene
and one for nitrogen, which was used as a propellant
to rapidly move that thermolene from its canister
into the combustion chamber.
All that sounds a bit complicated and it was,
but it's hard to argue with the results.
In one of the few documented tests,
a liquid driven supercharger
boosted a Chevy 409 cubic inch engine
from its stock 405 horsepower to 835 horsepower.
One of the biggest challenges at that point
was having a carburetor that could flow enough fuel
to use all that extra air.
The device also took up a lot of space under the hood
and that increased charge pressure
put a lot of strain on the engine.
So Middlebrook's next idea
was to just take the engine entirely out of the equation.
And for that he designed a rocket fueled rocket.
This is the Turbonique Thrust Engine,
and it wasn't exactly subtle.
It was a rocket that you strap to the back of a vehicle,
you hit the ignition switch and you held on.
It was basically something from an ACME Catalog.
But in one test where thrust engine
was attached to a go-kart,
it ran the quarter mile and five seconds
at 240 miles an hour,
a record for rocket powered go-karts
that remains to this day.
Of course it is, who the (beeping) else would do that?
So the rocket fueled, liquid-driven supercharger,
took up space under the hood,
it drank fuel and it wore out your motor.
The rocket fueled thrust engine
had all the sophistication in safety
of something out of a Wile E Coyote cartoon.
But the Turbonique Turbo Drag Axle
was the rocket fueled sweet spot between them.
The Goldilocks turbo axle, like the thrust engine
left the cars regular motor completely alone.
You could drive to the drag strip in a quiet, comfortable,
otherwise totally normal road car.
In fact, according to the Turbo Axle's instructions,
when the Drag Axle was activated,
the transmission had to be in neutral,
maintaining no connection between the engine and the wheels.
It's pretty sick.
See the Turbo Axle employed the same sort of fuel system
with liquid oxygen, isopropyl nitrate
and nitrogen as the liquid driven supercharger had.
And it had the same sort of combustion chamber
and turbine set up with one notable exception,
it was a lot bigger. (whistling)
Because the device was attached directly to the real axle,
it didn't have to fit in an engine bay.
So everything was scaled up.
And because of that, that turbine generated 1300 horsepower.
Instead of using all that power to spin an impeller
and push more air into the engine,
the output shaft of the Drag Axle's turbine
was connected directly to the rear differential.
Rocket fuel combustion power (car engine roaring)
was sent straight to the wheels.
If you left the car in drive,
that means some of the power
would also be sent back up to the engine,
probably spinning it faster than it was ever designed to go.
And that's why the car had to be left in neutral.
But there were a couple problems with this setup.
First was a fuel, which was tremendously dangerous
and costs around 25 bucks a gallon in today's money.
That paled in comparison
to the cost of the Turbo Axle itself, $4,695 bucks
in 1960s dollars
or $42 grand today.
Another downside
is that none of the Turbonique devices had a throttle.
The Turbo Axle's fuel flow rate was controlled by a valve
that was pretty much a garden spigot underneath the car.
(spraying sound)
The Turbo Axle was activated or deactivated
by a simple on off switch.
And if your finger fell off the ignition button
during a run, you can't just re-ignite
because thermolene would pool inside the combastion chamber
and explode if a spark was re-introduced.
(piano playing) Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!
But if you had money and a total lack of self-preservation,
there were a few ways that made it so easy to go fast.
A Volkswagen Beetle called The Black Widow,
used the Turbo Axle
to complete a 9.36 second quarter mile run
at 168 miles per hour.
It had more to give,
but unfortunately we'll never know how much more.
On a second attempt,
just 200 feet from the finish
and traveling at 183 miles per hour,
the Beetle decided it was an actual rocket
and went airborne. (laughs)
The driver was somehow completely unharmed
and alongside the wreck car appeared
in Turbonique advertisements.
So the Turbo Axle was expensive, ridiculous,
completely unsafe.
And we didn't even have time to talk about the lawsuits
between Middlebrook, his customers,
and even the US government
over the poor quality manufacturing of his devices.
In spite of all that,
I think Turbo Axles deserve a second chance.
There's not a single documented instance,
not even an anecdote that I could find
about someone being killed or seriously injured.
And if you think about it,
a turbine driving the axle of a car
isn't inherently any more dangerous
than what an internal combustion engine does.
With a better fuel source, proper throttle control,
modern manufacturing techniques,
and a team of engineers instead of just one guy,
Turbo Axles could likely be made safe and reasonably priced.
And that's why me and Job
are going into a Turbo Axle business.
So if you wanna be on the first set of Turbo Axles,
send us your deposit, just 5, 5, 5, 5, $555,
48 payments of that and we'll send you on a vigil. (laughs)
(trumpet playing) (birds chirping)
(birds chirping) (car engine roaring)
- A flag isn't just a decoration.
A flag represents an idea, a community of people
and the qualities for which they stand.
- And if you believe in Donut's message
that everyone can like cars,
then what better way to show it
than with a bad-ass Donut flag.
Hanging in your garage, hanging in your bedroom,
or watch it wave proudly on your at-home flagpole.
- [Man 3] I'd say they're available for only $19.98,
which is so much cheaper than $20.
- So get your Donut flag right now@donutmedia.com
and let the world know that you believe
that cars are for everybody.
(upbeat music)
- Let me know in the comments, what do you think?
You want us to design, engineer, fricking build a Turbo Axle
and throw it on the old Miata?
Let me Job know, we need a new project.
And I think that could be the one.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode to B2B.
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