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The Mercedes SL 500 5.00 Litre V8 32v with 308 BHP a car that would prove if LPG
was up to the mark, and if Gas Power UK Ltd were men not mice of the Autogas
arena :)
With best fuel consumption of 22 MPG at 50 MPH,
this beast of a car can empty a tank of petrol in no time at full tilt
and it's no surprise
that it was being converted to LPG.
The poor pencil got chewed on this one, whose system should we use?
What would the performance be like after the conversion?
Would it be as quick of the mark and where would we put the tank?
Being a soft top convertible, the boot space is limited and when we lifted the spare wheel we
found a fluid reservoir which needed to be moved to accommodate the LPG tank.
So we sent
Rex off to make the necessary brackets and just like the
Chrysler C300 we decided to
use the new 4 hole infilled torroidal tank, which had less of a profile than the
older 4 hole tank. This is because the tank is fitted with an integral air box
and because height was critical we had no option. It
benefited the customer as they enable a much quicker
fuel fill.
Here is a twist. Where do you put a filler when there is an exhaust
exiting on each side,
remembering that a vent pipe cannot vent onto or near an exhaust
pipe for safety reasons? Easy! Place it in the middle,
under the bumper, and set back so it is not the first point of impact.
Now onto the front of the vehicle.
As this was going to be a modern gas guzzler we decided to use the Prins system,
not because Romano could not cope, more because we wanted to know
any
limitations of the Prins system (which we thankfully
discovered there were none).
The injectors come in blocks which did prove to be a small but easy challenge to
overcome, and as there was next to no space under the bonnet, the reducer was
mounted on the off side of the engine, with all the other sensors finding space
in any nook or cranny we could find.
Small fingers certainly helped with this conversion.
The switch we mounted in the interior trim as shown below
(sorry for the blurred photo)
So we achieved another goal we had converted a
top-of-the-range German petrol guzzler into an
eco friendly Gas machine that still guzzles, but now its LPG.
And reference to
the performance - it still moves like an iced ferrite on speed up and down the
proverbial drain pipe.
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