Timmy Gets A Breathalizer!

My Best Friend of the Day, Kenneth Barnes, suggested that I buy a lottery ticket today after I gave him eighty bucks. His reasoning behind his suggestion is closely tied to my giving him the money to pass my car’s smog exam.

Against all odds and many of my fears, Timmy passed.

According to Ken, he sees about four or five of these Metros each year and three or four of them fail. I think it has something to do with their notoriously problematic number three cylinder, the one in the middle, and a lot to do with their age. I don’t know when the last one was built, but I doubt it was last year.

Timmy, as the generated report indicated, has a definite problem with hydrocarbons. The state average is 31ppm, which seems to be a pretty low number. The maximum allowable by law is a whopping 153 at 15mph or about 2000 RPM. Timmy passed this test by a comfortable 4ppm, coming in at 149.

I have no idea what a concentration of 4ppm looks like, but if it’s anything like the amount of pharmaceuticals they’ve recently discovered in our water, that’s a teaspoon or so in about three or four Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Ken said my passing was pretty much a crap shoot, but he didn’t use those words. He said an engine temperature difference of as little as five or ten degrees could have put Timmy and me over the limit, but I failed to ask if cooler or hotter would be better.

With the speed increased to 25MPH and the engine running at 2226RPM, Timmy only generated 104ppm of hydrocarbons, a better result since the maximum allowable at those numbers is 128. Still, the average is twenty, so I’m only contributing something like five times that number.
To my credit, though, I hardly ever drive. In the eighteen months or so I’ve owned Timmy, I think I’ve put only about thirteen hundred miles on him.

The other piece of bad news is that Timmy is a resounding failure as a suicide device. While the average CO emission is 0.10%, Timmy can only offer up a measly 0.07%, nowhere near the 0.91% maximum. I’m not sure he can idle long enough on his tiny six gallon gas tank to fill any decently sized garage with enough carbon monoxide to kill anyone.

No, I didn’t buy the lottery number. You can add that to my list of regrets.