1,000 followers, part 4 of 4: the kill switches in Stan Meyer's water buggy (Memo WFC 423 DA)

Part 4 of the 1,000-follower drop: safety, from Stan Meyer's Memo WFC 423 DA. "Under Murphy's law, whatever go wrong will go wrong," he told Deer Creek in 1985. Figure 4-28, Emergency Shut-Down Circuit, has six triggers, each through its own optocoupler: panic button, ajar switch, pull ring, engine heat, R.P.M. limit and water heat, with LED indicators and a push reset on the panel, and a normally closed push-stop, bump switch and pull ring below. Any one of them cuts the signal to the computer control circuits. In New Zealand in 1989 he described the bump switch: "on impact it would activate the jar switch, which would shut down the electronic circuits, which would de-energize the system." Figure 4-21, Emergency Reset Circuit, trips at a 300 °F safety limit, lights an indicator and waits for a push reset. Figure 3-6, Safety Interlock Circuit, latches it through a 12 V relay with a pull-ring disconnect and a momentary power-on switch, so once it trips it stays off until someone restarts it on purpose. Cars have had a crash cut-off for the fuel pump for decades: the inertia switch. Every page of the memo is free at stanslegacy.com. Thank you for 1,000.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer · Deer Creek, Ohio · 1985
• Stan Meyer lecture · New Zealand, 1989
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 4-28: Emergency Shut-Down Circuit
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 4-21: Emergency Reset Circuit
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 3-6: Safety Interlock Circuit
• Stan Meyer · Memo WFC 423 DA, Water Fuel Injection System · Figure 4-22: Water Probe Crk't
• Stan Meyer, Memo WFC 423 DA: Figures 3-6, 4-21, 4-22, 4-28 — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, lecture, Deer Creek, Ohio, 1985, at 46:43
• Stan Meyer lecture, New Zealand, 1989, at 13:09