WRITTEN BY COLIN PIERCE, FROM WERRIBEE & DISTRICT COLLECTABLE VEHICLE CLUB INC
Hi fellow members and enthusiasts in general. Hopefully for us Melbournians our ‘Uncle Dan’s’ press release this Sunday might have some good news regarding some relaxing of COVID restrictions that will allow us to go places more than 5 kilometres from our home and begin to catch up with fellow members.
In the meantime see if you can remember any of these items below sent to me to share with you all from days gone-by, it’s virtually all American stuff but you would be able to relate to some as used in early FX~EH Holden’s and 50’s English vehicles.
Let's go under the car. Recognise this?
It’s an Exhaust Cut Out. These were commonly installed on cars from the 1920s into the 1950s. Pulling a knob located under the dash connected to that Bowden cable disconnected the muffler from the exhaust downpipe and gave you “straight pipes”. This reduced exhaust backpressure and increase horsepower (and add a lot of noise) for climbing grades or faster acceleration. If you just wanted to make noise, and thought the horn was inadequate, in the 1920s and ’ 30s you could fit one of these to the exhaust cut out.
These are Exhaust Whistles.
More extreme were Explosion Whistles that looked like this:
They could be fitted via special spark plugs or screwed directly to a port drilled and threaded into the car’s cylinder head. They were operated by a lanyard pull-cord located in the passenger compartment.
These were once common.
Before automatic distributor advance systems (and long before microprocessor-controlled ignition systems) cars had Manual Throttle and Ignition Advance Controls mounted on the centre of steering wheels. Some of the better cars had a control like this:
This was the Battery/Magneto Switch. It allowed you to switch from battery and coil to magneto ignition.
And while we are looking at steering wheels, do you know what that button in the middle of the steering wheel does?
No, it is not a horn button. It’s a Kick Down Switch for the Automatic Electric Overdrive. And if you are quite young and wondering what the hell an Automatic Overdrive is, it is a secondary transmission attached to the output shaft of a manual gearbox that uses a governor and an electric solenoid to engage, or disengage, i.e. kick down, an additional cruising gear.
And finally here are some more Buicks.
Note that there is a second small stalk on the right of the steering column, below the transmission shift lever. From 1940 until the early 1950s Buicks placed the Turn Signal Stalk on the right side of the steering column rather than the left as in other cars.
Let ’ s go under the hood of an old car and see what we can find. What, for example, is that thing pictured below? And why would a Mario Brother braze a plumbing part onto a spark plug? Well, THAT is a Primer Spark Plug. Those were once made by every major spark plug company and you could buy one for any car.
Why would you want a faucet attached to your spark plug? Early gasoline formulations had a problem with volatility, especially at low temperatures. That made starting difficult on a cold day. The Primer Spark Plug permitted you to prime your car engine prior to starting it. You would open those faucets on each of the spark plugs and, using a small funnel, pour gasoline or, better, more volatile liquid ether, into each cylinder.
You could easily buy the ether in small screw top tins at any pharmacy. After closing the valves on the spark plugs you could start the car using that primer fluid. But why not simply pour gasoline into the carburettor?
Because of this:
Almost all automobile carburettors in the 1920s were Updraft Carburettors’.
They sucked air, and vaporized gasoline, up.You couldn't pour anything into their air horns. So you bought a set of Primer Plugs.
Note that fuel volatility, or rather the lack of it, was such a problem in the teens, ‘ 20s, and ’ 30s that the better carburettors, such as the Rayfield Model G, were water jacketed and heated by the engine.
GREEN SPARK PLUGS?
You thought all spark plugs had white porcelain insulators, right? They do now. But at one time the Splitdorf Company made a premium spark plug that was very recognizable because of its hexagonalinsulator and its green colour. The colour was not a marketing or aesthetic choice. Splitdorf Spark Plug insulators were made out of ruby mica rather than porcelain. The mica was more durable than porcelain being less susceptible to cracks and breaking.
GLASS SPARK PLUGS?
Glass Spark Plugs were once used for tuning cars.The glass insulator allowed the mechanic to see into the cylinder while the engine was running and view the colour of the combustion. If the burning air/fuel mixture was a yellow-orange colour you knew the mixture was too rich and you turned in the low or high speed needle valves on the carburettor. When the colour seen through the Glass Spark Plug was pale blue the mechanic knew that the air/fuel ratio was around the desired 14.6:1. I’ve seen similar glass spark plugs as late as the 1970s.
REBUILDABLE SPARK PLUGS?
When the centre electrode of a spark plug has been burned up or filed down or if the porcelain insulator has cracked youthrow it away, right? Not in the teens and twenties. Spark plugs were once rebuildable. Here is a page from a 1921 auto supply house catalogue. Look at the bottom right corner of that page.
Those are separate spark plug centre electrodes and insulators. Now look carefully at the spark plug shown at the top left of the page. See the hex nut just below the porcelain insulator and above the metal hex body of the plug? Those spark plugs were rebuildable.You could unfasten the hex nut, remove and replace the insulator and centre electrode, insert a new gasket to seal the insulator within the metal body of the plug, and replace and tighten the hex nut giving you a rebuilt spark plug.
That strange looking glass thing above? Here’s another one:
What are they? They are Traffic Light Prisms. They were used from the 1920s into the 1950s to view traffic lights that were often mounted on wires high in the centre of intersections and were obscured by the roof or visor of the car.
They were common on low slung cars like the Hudson Hornet, particularly when the car was equipped with an external windshield visor, ...which is something else most people have never seen.
DRIVE ON SNOW AND ICE?
In the 1950s the Sears Roebuck Catalogue sold an accessory that would allow motorists obtain traction on snow and ice by pushing a button mounted below the dashboard. These Automatic Automobile Wheel Sanders would deposit sand in front of each rear tire. The sand was contained in hoppers located in the car’s trunk and fed through tubes in the wheel wells.
In the late 1960s General Motors offered a similar optional accessory called Liquid Tire Chain that used a liquid traction enhancer.
Anyone who has owned or worked on a car made in the 1970s or earlier recognizes this, below.
It is a mechanical fuel pump that was actuated by a lobe on the engine ’ s camshaft and used a diaphragm to suck fuel from the tank and deliver it to the carburettor. But look closely at the lower section of the pump.
What is that metal lever? What you are looking at is a fuel pump with a Priming Lever. These were quite common on British and European cars through the 1960s and into the 1970s. When a car is parked the fuel in the carburettor float bowls can percolate into the manifold or evaporate or, in some situations, flow back to the pump. The Primer Lever allowed you to prime the carburettors’ without using the starter and possibly wearing down the battery.
But do you recognise this?
This was at one time the most common type of fuel pump, used on 95% of all cars.
It is a Stewart Warner Vacuum Fuel System. It’s divided into two chambers. The upper chamber is connected to a port on the engine’s intake manifold from which it draws a vacuum. This vacuum is used to suck fuel from the tank into the upper chamber. When that chamber fills a float valve shuts off the vacuum and allows the fuel to flow from the upper chamber into a lower chamber from which it flows by gravity into the carburettor.
Okay. How about this?
This is an Oil Bath Air Cleaner. It does NOT use a replaceable filter element.
Rather it works like this:
Air is drawn into the filter at high velocity at the top by the intake manifold vacuum. At the bottom of the filter there is a pool of oil. When the air reaches the bottom of the filter the air must change direction 180 degrees and go through an oil-soaked mesh filter. But the heavier dirt particles in the air, driven by inertia, become trapped in the pool of oil. To clean it you must disassemble the unit, drain the oil, remove the accumulated sludge in the bottom of the unit, clean the mesh filter in kerosene or gasoline, dry it, oil the cleaned filter, pour clean oil into the reservoir, and reassemble and reinstall the air cleaner. Before disposable paper air cleaner elements, the Oil Bath Air Cleaner was the best air cleaner available.
Do you know what this is?
It's an External Oil Filter. It uses a paper cartridge like this:
Oil filters were not standard equipment on cars until sometime in the 1970s. On many cars they were an optional extra or after-market accessories. And they were externally mounted. To change them you had to open the housing, remove the paper filter, drain and fill the housing … a messy job … and replace the filter.
But did you know that some engine oil filters used Toilet Paper as Filter Elements ?
These were popular when the Ford Model T was new. But they were still being sold in the 1950s.
OK, how about these.
Commonly called Motor Monitors these were Engine Manifold Vacuum Gauges . They were attached to the dashboards or steering columns of cars in the 1940s and ’50s and were used as fuel economy gauges, although they were also useful for monitoring the need for a tune up, a valve grind, or an overhaul.
This is the interior of a 1950 Buick.
See that T-shaped handle under and at the far left side of the dash? Now look to the right side of the dash. See one just like it? Those are the Dual Hood Release Latches. But why are there two of them? Well on those cars the hood was hinged, not at the back near the windshield but at the sides next to the fenders. And it could open from either the left or the right side depending upon which of the two latches you pulled.
Note the pedals on the driver side floorboards of this car.
From the left; parking brake, dimmer switch, clutch pedal, brake pedal, gas accelerator pedal. But what is that round pedal to the right of the accelerator? That’s the Starter Pedal.It was more than just a foot actuated electrical switch. Yes it was a switch, but it also connected to a mechanical linkage that moved the starter pinion into mechanical engagement with the engine’s flywheel ring gear. That’s something that is always done today by the starter ’s integral Bendix drive. Starter Pedals were commonly found on cars in the 1920s and continued to be used on trucks in the 1940s.
This looks like a standard car radio, right?
Here is another view (above).
And another.
In the late 1950s some General Motors cars offered an optional Trans-Portable Radio, an AM band transistorized car radio that operated in the car where it was connected to the car’s 12 volt lead-acid battery and the car’s front and rear speakers or could be removed from the car for use powered by self-contained dry cell batteries on picnics or at the beach.
And do you know what this is?
It is Chrysler's Highway Hi-Fi.
An in-car record player offered as an option from 1956 through 1959. It played special 16 ⅔ rpm vinyl disks producedby Columbia Records and sold through Chrysler dealers.
Here is another thing common in cars in the 1940s.
See that white knob on top of the dashboard. That turns on the windshield wipers. It was most commonly found inthat location. FX/FJ’s had them, It is not a switch but rather a valve that turns on and off engine manifold vacuum to the Vacuum Powered Windshield Wiper motor which looked like this:
The problem with Vacuum Motors is that engine vacuum is greatest at idle and lowest when the engine is under a load or when you quickly push down the accelerator pedal. So vacuum-powered windshield wipers tended to slow down or stop working when you were climbing a hill or when you pulled out to pass a truck on a rainy night.
To resolve that problem the better cars were equipped with something like this.
This is a Combination Mechanical Fuel Pump and Vacuum Booster Pump. This insured that you still had sufficient vacuum to operate the windshield wipers even when accelerating or under load.
OK, as long as we are under the hood here is another part, common on good cars in the 1940s and early 1950s, that you may not recognise.
This is a Hydro-Lectric Pump. It supplied hydraulic pressure to operate the hydraulic cylinders that raised and lowered power windows or convertible tops.
That glass container filled with blue liquid next to it?
That’s the windshield washer reservoir and pump. If you failed to remember to replace the water in that with anti-freeze washer solution in November you could find a lot of broken glass under the hood of your car.
On this Buick look at the round knob located on the windshield header just above the rear-view mirror.
Do you know what that does? Well turning it lowers the radio antenna, seen in the centre of the windshield header, to allow the car to clear the low door of a garage.
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