Better gas mileage.

[Steve]

So I was thinking last night, you know how some modern trucks and cars will shut half of their cylinders when they don't need the power. I don't think this would be a tough thing to implement yourself on diesel engine. Possible uses for a switch that would let you disable a few cylinders would be using even less fuel and quieter operation at idle (if you are using your bus engine as a generator or water heater), or traveling on long flat interstates.

[Griff]

You'd still be shooting fuel to the cylinders though, wouldn't you, or could you also disable the injectors? (I don't know diesels, but am trying to learn should I go that route in the future.)

[Steve]

No, and that is why it would work easily on a diesel. On a diesel engine you do not control the spark via spark plugs you control the fuel via injectors. These could be easily turned on and off at will. The only problem is that it would still be compressing the air in the unused cylinders, if there were an easy way to change the cam timing on the exhaust valves of those cylinders (which I think is how they do it on the new cars) then you would only loose power due the friction of the cylinder moving. The amount of power lost to compressing the air might not be high enough that it wouldn't be worthwhile trying anyways at least at idle, which is where diesels are more efficient than gas because they are not using as high amount of air/fuel.

[skoolie_grease]

there's a 'wing' that you can put on your bus that sometimes triples the mileage. no joke. read the reports of users putting these things on their cards, vans, etc.

no one has reported about mileage increase on a bus, but it will certainly help.

here are some links:

http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Ram ... Wing/data/
http://quantumgravitics.tripod.com/
http://quantumgravitics.tripod.com/id3.html

if you get one up, let us know!