I’ve used a tablespoon in a lab setting, and I have no problem with a volumetric cylinder that’s calibrated in tablespoons, but sadly I was born too late to have ever worn a lab shop coat styled as a smoking jacket.
Times were better.
I would love to have an engine with a sight glass in the combustion chamber.
That was a Jam Handy Production, BTW. And if it took 3 tbsp of gas to go 1/4 mile, and aren’t there ~256 tbsp in a gallon, then what was the fuel efficiency of the vehicle they showed? My 1950 Chevy Powerglide Deluxe got maybe 14mpg on the highway, much less in the city, and I’m guessing the vehicle in the clip gets worse than that.
That said, it’s still impressive that three tablespoons of gas got that 1930’s vehicle so far.
Apparently 21.33 mpg. Not bad. Maybe getting your air from giant balloons improves fuel efficiency.
Probably have to run the engine for A/C, but you might be on to something.
These are the same people explaining the health benefits of diethyl lead.
The weird thing is that that 3 tablespoons of gasoline, mass about 33 grams, produced over 100 grams of CO2, with the help of the oxygen in that bag of air. Just doing their part to slowly convert our atmosphere into a less hospitable place.
Ah the days when clean air was free.
Those are shop coats, not lab coats. I think you can still find them…here’s a hilariously expensive one modeled by a hipster dude, but there are others out there.
Reminding me of my ambitions to learn more about cars. I really wish I had the garage space and tools and time. Unfortunately it’s only possible to have so many hobbies.
The incongruity of hipster dude and the smoking jacket styled shop coat is pretty hilarious, but the price not so much ;).
When I worked as a shop mechanic, back in the dim reaches of time, we had light blue shirts and dark blue pants delivered weekly by a laundry truck, and the cost came out of salary. They were cheap, thin polyester and entirely pervious to oil, winter winds, and even axle grease. One of the reasons I am not a professional mechanic today is that I got tired of the ingrained petroleum in every pore, like a constellation of black dots on my legs and arms, and decided to go back to school.
When I was in the rocket business, slightly later in life, we had equally cheesy white polyester lab coats that were nominally fire resistant, but the old guys had these awesome thick greenish denim lab coats from the 1950s (that were definitely fire resistant and definitely not fire proof, as testified by the burn marks). Apparently at the Wasatch division it was the other way around, the white coats were the old thick canvas and the new cheesy ones were green.
Today I have a nice full-length leather blacksmith apron but my lab coat is a generic cheesy white poly one that cost $5 at the Goodwill.
Was anyone else expecting to see the diver get attacked by the creature from the black lagoon?
I love the Mythbustersey demo at the end.
“Good old air!”
Although this film is supposed to promote Chevrolet products, the whole thing is really an advertisement for air. Air!! Buy some today!
This. During my time on the flightline, whenever the jet was towed to Fuel Cell (which is where any fuel-related issues were analyzed and fixed), they’d give us coveralls of the flimsiest white cotton…for doing work around and inside the fuel tanks of a KC-135. Which had only been drained of fuel, and were not wiped clean. All of which meant the coveralls didn’t do anything but funnel the residual fuel straight to my work uniform and hence, to my skin.
The only good thing about going to Fuel Cell was the potential of doing an engine run on the hammerhead as an ops check for the repaired system/s. And those engine runs burned a touch more than three tablespoons of fuel. Much louder, too…
Lost me on the bolded part, and my Google-fu is apparently weak today. 
I was mostly in the space part of aerospace. The only plane work I ever did was on some JATO unit testing, I think subcontracted from Ford.
I bet that was not much fun in the wintertime…
Sorry, that thought ran through my head right as I posted the reply. The “hammerhead” on an airport ramp/apron has been a different spot at each of the bases I worked, so that’s not a good descriptor. Essentially, the aircraft would be towed from its normal parking spot to a safe spot, where it was chocked and brakes locked so the engines could be run without sending a shitload of hot, speedy exhaust straight into other parked jets or obstacles (and if the thing exploded while running, it wouldn’t take out half the fleet). Maintenance runs sometimes meant running all four engines at 103%, and doing such a run in a bigass KC-135, getting to do all the tower calls for towing the jet, and then pushing those throttles up…hooooooooly fucken shit, for this gasoline junky it was…almost as good as doing a fully laden takeoff.
On Andrews, we’d tow the aircraft down to the circled spot, face the jet towards the far end of the runway, and light 'em up!
