Modern motor car practice

MODERN MOTOR CAR PRACTICE

BY W. H. BERRY

LONDON, HENRY FROWDE AND HODDER & STOUGHTON, 1921
    

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PREFACE

One approaches the writing of a preface of this nature with very mixed feelings. Since this work was first mooted, two years ago, many changes have taken place, and I am afraid that it has not been possible strictly to follow the lines originally laid down for the treatment of the book. During the War, of course, vast forward steps were made in scientific and technical matters. Actually, however, the motor industry and motor designs were in 1918 substantially as in 1914, because such matters as progress and economy were subordinate during the War period to steady and continued output and mechanical trustworthiness. At the same time we were justified in believing that the first year of peace would see almost revolutionary changes in design.

The air was full of rumours and counter-rumours. There were not wanting authorities who maintained, with a recent but crowded experience of air-cooled aeroplane engines to support their contentions, that the enormous progress made in aircraft engines during the that three years of war would be reproduced in motor construction, and so, they argued, the water-cooled ear engine, for various reasons, was a doomed unit. Others there were who contended that the air-cooled aero-engine had not even the slightest relationship, nor could it have, to the unit needed for car practice. There were enthusiastic designers with schemes for displacing the more orthodox air and water-cooled units with rotary and other types. We were threatened with an enormous invasion of super-efficient ears originating on the Continent and in the United States. The English motorist had been led to regard the 1914 type of motor ear as obsolete, and it is hardly too much to say that he looked forward to ears in 1919 which, among other things, would be half as light as the older vehicles, would cost something like half as much to buy, and wherein fuel, oil, tyre and upkeep costs generally would be negligible factors.

Motor car manufacturers who announced that they proposed building simply improved versions of their 1914 chassis were subjected to ridicule, and termed inefficient, narrow-minded, and behind the times. Designers and works engineers, generally, with four years of Government work to upset them - work in which money was of no account and production was everything – contemplated installing hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of ultra- modern machinery: they planned new chassis and talked of car productions reaching five, ten, and fifty thousand annually.

The first shock to the public came when motor car prices practically doubled; but the manufacturers themselves had a very severe shock when it was found that raw materials were almost unobtainable, that modern machinery was not to be had for any consideration, and that labor, both skilled and unskilled, was very much out of hand. Furthermore, a valuable lesson was taught, even to the old-established factories, when they found that although a new design of car could be laid out on the drawing board in the course of a month or so, it was necessary to build the first chassis entirely by hand - a process involving months of untiring and continuous effort, and that when this chassis had been produced, road tests demonstrated weaknesses here and there which involved a return to the workshop for alterations and adjustment. It was, obviously, no use setting out the plant for quantity production of any car until all the details had been finally settled and arranged; and while all this experimental work in building and testing was going on, the hard fact remained that overhead expenses, on a scale never previously anticipated, sent up the cost of car production by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile an impatient public was clamouring for the finished products.

Makers could hardly be blamed, then, for abandoning much slow and costly experimental work and devoting themselves entirely to producing only those cars which previous experience indicated would be satisfactory in the hands of users. The position now, in 1921, is that many of the ideas and designs of early 1919 have vanished, and we have products that are substantially 1914 designs, but vastly improved in detail.

The writer of technical books, of course, has suffered in similar conditions. It was hoped when this book was first begun that the contributions of the various authorities and experts would set a new line of thought in many directions. But, as a matter of fact, two years of experience have proved that many new ideas arc not sound in practice, and so a return has had to be made to the older reason. Nobody is more fully aware of the defects and weaknesses of this present volume than the present writer.


CONTENTS

    The Internal Combustion Engine
    Types of Engines
    The Systems and Principles of Carburation
    Representative Carburetters
    Engine Cooling ....
    Engine Fuel Feed Systems
    Fuels
    Producer Gas
    The Steam Car
    Gearboxes
    The Theory and Practice of Gear Changing
    Clutches
    Transmission and Live Axles
    Frames
    Front Axles
    Tyres
    Springing and Suspension
    Ignition and Electric Equipment
    American Automotive Electrical Apparatus
    Screens and Hoods
    Welding Repairs
    The X-Ray Examination of Materials
    Tyre Repairing by Vulcanization
    Body-work
    The Law concerning Motors and
    Motoring
    Roads


INTRODUCTORY

So many claims to the first invention of the motor car have been made on behalf of both individuals and countries, that it is well to go back through the early history of mechanical traction in the endeavour to discover to whom actually belongs the credit for the genesis of the modern automobile. In the pursuit of this task it should be made clear that many of the early inventors, who succeeded to some extent in partially solving the problems surrounding the evolution of the mechanically-propelled road vehicle, fail to establish a claim by reason of the fact that they sought their solution in a motive power other than by the combustion of a volatile gas within a working cylinder. To these we can give all credit in the proper place, but the task in hand at the moment is to award due credit for the first invention of a road vehicle propelled by an internal combustion engine. When we have established this, we have placed ourselves in a position to follow the development of the car as we know it to-day, through all the various stages of its existence.

It is perfectly true that steam and electricity arc still used in the propulsion of certain types of road vehicles, mostly of the heavy class. As a matter of fact, electricity is the motive power in quite a number of light vehicles of the town carriage type, but with a single exception their production is limited to the United States. Electricity as a motive power has not succeeded in the retention of popular favour in Europe, in so far as the lighter vehicles are concerned. Even in the heavy class, there are but few examples.


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