Jet-powered VW

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... &type=cars

Ron Patrick is approaching the age of 50, a time when many men begin thinking about minutiae like pensions and second homes and third cars. But Patrick is far more interested in telling you why it is that he has stuck a big jet engine in the back of a prosaic silver Volkswagen.

He's standing out in a parking lot, waving his arms with wild enthusiasm, pointing at the car as if he were a 15-year-old who's just had his first ride in a Corvette, his eyes spinning in delight. This car consumes him, he loves the completely outrageous idea behind it, and for a moment, his infectious mood makes you think, gee, anybody could do this and it sounds like a great way to spend a few years, not to mention $250,000.

Patrick is a 48-year-old Stanford-trained (Ph.D.) engineer who owns ECM (Engine Control and Monitoring), a Sunnyvale firm that makes electronic instruments used by auto manufacturers to calibrate their engines for performance, fuel economy and emissions. He knows cars. He knows how they work. He's an animated man who has a seasoned sense of humor, a wry view of the world, mixed with a dash of the absurd and an absolute passion for things like, well, jet-powered cars.

Patrick has had a lot of cars and he said that about five or six years ago he was getting pretty bored with the state of the hot-rodding car hobby in America.

"I'd been building cars for a long time," he said. "Drag cars, American muscle cars. The last one was a big hemi engine in a 1965 Dodge Coronet. I wanted something of the extreme of the extreme of the extreme. I was looking to buy a (ex-Soviet) MiG 15 or MiG 17 jet engine. I finally decided on the T58."

The Navy surplus General Electric T58-8F is that menacing, giant cigar-like item sticking out of the VW's hatchback. When he fires it up, standing next to it is a bit like standing next to one of the engines of a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320 while the thing is about to back off from the gate. This, however, is a Volkswagen bug with a 1,450-horsepower jet engine sticking out the back, idling away at 13,000 RPM.

It's a perfectly street-legal VW, too, with current California registration and smog-approved gas-burning front engine made by Volkswagen. It's just this humongous big thing projecting 23 inches rearward from the hatchback that makes it different from any other bug. The "thing" is what Patrick describes as "essentially a baby Lear jet engine, a couple steps down from the engine on an F4 Phantom."

"The presidential chopper has two of these engines," Patrick said the other day at his office in Sunnyvale. "It's the one that lands at the White House and you see the president come out and the little dog running around."

So let's dispense, right here, on the why of this project -- why did he spend a quarter of a million dollars to build a car whose major attribute (the jet engine) cannot be legally used on a public highway?

"The purpose of this car is to have fun and be stupid," he says with a laugh. "This is entertainment. It's a toy, a toy for silly boys."

And where do you go if you want to build a jet-powered car? You go to the iconic group that has been doing this for decades, the Arfons family in Akron, Ohio, creators of the Green Monster and other closed-course, record-setting jet-powered cars. Patrick flew out to confer with the Arfonses.

"He had this crazy idea -- he wanted to put a jet engine in a Volkswagen," said Tim Arfons, who runs the Akron Turbine Group and is a man who has seen his share of outré ideas. "The one I suggested (the T58) was one we used in jet-powered ATVs (all-terrain vehicles)."

Arfons is the son of Art Arfons, legendary in fast-car circles as the man who set world speed records (576 mph in 1965 was his last one) at the Bonneville Salt Flats with his jet-powered car the Green Monster. (Back in the 1960s, Arfons and Rio Vista resident Craig Breedlove went head-to-head on the salt flats, trading off the world's record between them.) Tim Arfons has a barn full of surplus parts, but says his engine supply is "down to about 100, maybe 125."

Patrick bought what was originally a $600,000 engine and Arfons boxed it up and shipped it to Sunnyvale so Patrick could start his project.

In 2000, Patrick bought a new VW bug. He had visited various car dealers with a full-sized cardboard mock-up of the jet engine, opening and closing the rear doors of car after car (lots of station wagons and hatchbacks) to see which one would accommodate the jet engine best. The VW won.

As Patrick pointed out, however, when you're building this kind of car you don't just open up the back of the VW, ram the engine in and hope for the best.

"Instead of cut and try, cut and try, cut and try, like the hot rod guys do, you have to do a whole bunch of computer analysis before you build it," he said. "We did (computerized) structural analysis and we did stability analysis. And by God, you know what happens? It works! Duh."

The project took four years to complete and in its finished state it is clean enough to perhaps give even Volkswagen a bit of jet envy. Various braided steel conduits flow smoothly over the engine and down into the car's bowels. The engine is anchored to the car's inner walls and frame by a number of sturdy struts. Behind the passenger seat is a bright red tank for the Halon fire extinguishing system, used in some aircraft.

Patrick started up the jet in his company parking lot the other day. It sounded like a jet engine on an airplane. It was idling at 13,000 rpm and if you put your hand a couple of feet in back of the heat shield it felt like being toasted by a hair dryer. Several days later, after repairing the jet's heat shield, Patrick fired up the engine and had flames roaring out the back. Don't try this at home. Any of it.

But a parking lot is not the place for this toy.

Patrick says that once in a while he puts on a crash helmet (mainly as a sound muffler), takes the car out on nearby Highway 237 in the wee hours of the morning and fires it up for a brief and hopefully cop-free run.

Asked if he was afraid of hurting himself or others with his jet car, Patrick said, "No. Since the age of 18, I've been doing engine testing and working with combustion devices. I've done it for years and years and I've never hurt myself or anyone else. You can be worried about something like that even when driving a normal car on the road. I try to use experience, judgment and maturity in this car. When it's blowing off on the road, I have friends a mile behind the car and a mile ahead of the car and we're on walkie-talkies."

The Chronicle asked the state Department of Motor Vehicles if they could think of any reason why this car shouldn't be on the road and, as fast as you can say afterburner, DMV said, "Call the Highway Patrol."

At the CHP, spokesman Tom Marshall said questions about the Patrick car were the kind of thing you don't just answer off the top of your head. He said he had to call the CHP Academy, where, he later reported, "they were wondering what I was smoking."

The experts at the academy said a patrolling CHP officer might have a question or two about the protruding engine and that it could run afoul of emissions and noise laws if it were operated on a public street.

On a public street? Heaven forbid!

So what's it like out there, Ron?

"You drive the car up to about 90 miles an hour and you spool up the jet, then hit it W.O.T. (wide-open throttle)," he said, fondly recalling one of his rides. "It's one of the finest feelings you can have in your life. In the rear view mirror, all you see is light and hear the thunder of the jet. It's like you're going down the largest hill you've ever been on."

He said that a jet-boosted run will "pin the speedometer and that's at 140." He thinks that when it hits 160 mph -- he hasn't seen that ... yet -- the car will start lifting off the ground, but "the fun is not necessarily how fast you want to go. The fun is the sound of the thing. Just starting it up, it's like a (Boeing) 747 landing in your front yard."

Speaking of which, his own front yard may very well be the site of his next project, after he's through fiddling with his current one -- a Honda motor scooter powered by twin Cruise missile jet motors.

The front yard experiment goes like this: A year or two ago, Patrick, through his connections in the surplus military equipment world, found himself at a "secret, but now defunct air force base in Poland," one that had been used by Warsaw Pact forces during the Cold War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Soviet-era armaments began showing up on various black and not-so-black markets.

The men running the Polish air force base were trying to sell Patrick an SA-2 missile. This is the ubiquitous surface-to-air missile used by the Soviet Union and nearly all its military allies. It was an SA-2 that shot down Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane in 1960.

Not only were the guys at the air base trying to sell Patrick an SA-2, "they were saying, 'you want a MiG 21 (fighter jet)? I'll sell you two tanks and a MiG.' " .

"So they wanted $2,000 for the missile," Patrick said, "and I had a bottle of ouzo and after a while I got them down to a grand." He still hasn't got the 35-foot-long missile, but he does know what he'll do with it once it clears U.S. customs. (Good luck.)

"I want to build a missile silo on my front lawn," he said. "It'll have those electric-opening silo doors and I'll have a set of lights for it. Then, at night, I open the silo doors and raise the missile up, with those lights on it."

He gave a great big smile.

"It's technical art."