Quote:
"During this time, I went through a 55-gallon drum full of grimy used spark plugs. I inspected them all very carefully and found that the older the model of spark plug was, the more the centre electrode of the plug was worn all around the side. It took the shape of a small ball. It was a half a ball—a dome shape, to be exact.
"That's when I thought, 'If that's what the spark plug wants to be, then why not start off with that shape and see what it does?' So, I took a brand new plug and filed it down into the shape of a dome and fired it and noticed it worked a little bit better."
This particular passage deals with conventional spark plug technology, the only change being to round off the edges of the center electrode of a new plug. It worked "a little bit better". This is _extremely_ hard to believe! So hard to believe, in fact, that it makes one wonder about the rest of what he says, and makes the reluctance of manufacturers to pick up the idea somewhat easier to understand, assuming he tells them the same story.
As I understand it a (conventional) spark plug is, essentially, a capacitor with an air (well, air/fuel) gap between the plates (the "electrodes"). When the ignition system "fires" the spark plug, it charges it up until the dielectric (air/fuel mix in the gap) ionizes and the spark plug arcs over. With anything approximating ordinary electrodes this happens in what amounts to a single lightning bolt, and it happens at the point where the charge density on the electrode surface is highest.
That's where the sharp edges on a new plug come into play. The charge density on the surface of a charged conductor is inversely related to the radius of curvature of the surface. Hence, charge concentrates at those sharp edges on a new plug, and in fact concentrates so much that the plug will fire at a much lower voltage than would be required in the absence of the sharp edges. That, in fact, is the biggest part of what happens to "old" plugs -- since they tend to fire at the sharpest corners, those corners eventually get rounded off, charge distributes itself evenly over the (now smooth) surface, and the firing voltage must be consequently a great deal higher. With a modern high voltage system that may not matter much but in the old days of a single set of breaker points, a capacitor, and a coil, plugs with rounded off corners had a very hard time firing.
So, the notion that he just filed off the sharp edges on a conventional plug and _improved_ its performance is very hard to swallow. It makes the subsequent claims that much harder to believe.
Terry Blanton wrote:
44-50% improvement in mileage from a plasma spark plug:
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/Firestorm.html
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