- 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. Lately, I've been spending
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- [Man 1] plane, watch out, plane! - /bumper. (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. If you could like this video
that really helps us out. Subscribe if you're
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