[ExI] mr. medes car fire

[spike at rainier66.com]

…> On Behalf Of Tom Nowell via extropy-chat

Subject: Re: [ExI] mr. medes car fire

 

>…Spike, you don't need to have many mirrors to reflect enough light to warp a modern car. I bring you an example of London architecture's finest, the Walkie Talkie! (It is compulsory for landmark buildings to have a nickname, the more stupid the better. I don't make the rules).…

 

>…You'd think an architect from Uruguay would know enough to avoid concave mirrors focusing heat, but then maybe he thought London wasn't sunny enough for this to be a problem.  Tom

 

 

Thanks Tom.  When I lived in the desert in southern California, we saw plenty of cases where sunlight reflected off of a side mirror onto a door as the sun rose or set.  That would double the solar intensity at that spot.  If some silly goof didn’t know to park facing north, or didn’t have bags to put over the mirrors, this would happen to the doors in just one season:

 

 



 

The desert was hard on a car’s appearance: the sun would blister the paint, the wind storms would sand blast the paint right off of them.  We saw plenty of cars which were young and perfectly sound mechanically but had much or most of the paint scoured right off of it.  There was little one could do but drive it that way.

 

I thought of an idea which might let us set a car on fire without even the cheaty oxygen tanks: get some of that car window film which reflects IR, put the stuff on the outside of the windows with the reflective side facing in.  That should help trap heat in there.  

 

I want to think of something that has a really low auto-ignition temperature, but not some goofball chemical that only mad scientists and…em… mad…or rather… curious…experimenty… engineers would ever fool with, but rather put something in that car which a normal person would have, such as… wax paper?  What is something that might auto-ignite at or below about 250C?  Good chance with enough mirrors and the reflective film turned around backwards, we could make it to 250 C.

 

Tom I have seen car dashboards ruined by desert heat.  The worst ones were the Japanese cars made in the 70s.  There were some things about plastic Japanese car makers just didn’t get when they started importing cars to the USA.

 

spike

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