Engines & Fuel
Originally becoming popular in the 1960s, sandrails used lightweight air-cooled engines like the Volkswagen engine from the VW Beetle and Porsche (~200 pounds) or the Chevrolet Corvair (~350 pounds). Because of the availability of affordable parts, the Volkswagen engine continues to be the mainstay of many sandrails today. More recently, some enthusiast have turned to lighter weight water-cooled engines such as the Subaru engine or Ford ecotech engines.
The need for more power comes from necessity and desire when driving in steep sand dunes. This has driven sandrail engine builders to add performance features to engines such as the stock 28 horse power Volkswagen engine. This includes: larger pistons, Turbo chargers, dual racing carburetors, fuel injection, and high performance cylinder heads to name a few. Some performance engines can run on premium unleaded gasoline. However, many high performance engines must use racing fuel or fuel additives. A high performance sandrail Volkswagen engine could produce well into the 170-200+ horse power range and as high as 700 horse power with Methanol fuel.
Most sandrails use a manual transmission, although automatic transmissions are used as well.
Read more about this topic: Sandrail
Famous quotes containing the words engines and/or fuel:
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)