Cars were changing during my years of growing up, and people's expectations of their vehicles were changing, too. While a few things about cars stay pretty much the same through the years, car design details have gone through thousands of changes. Automobiles and smaller trucks today still mostly burn gasoline, as they did 100 years ago, and the gasoline internal combustion engine still retains basic components much as it had back then -- a crankshaft, pistons, piston pins, piston rods, a camshaft, a circulating water cooling system and spark plugs as part of an electric ignition system. But changes in parts have been numerous. When I started listing the changes taking place between 1950 and 1962, when I was moving from 10 years old to 22, the list was long.
Early automobile engines were usually hand-start machines. You turned them by hand with a crank to start the engine, usually by inserting the crank into notches in the engine crankshaft pulley. Hand-cranking, while better than parking on a hill and rolling off to start, was a very big chore and aggravation. My Grandpa Clement, my mother's dad, probably should have been born before cars. Actually he was, in the mid-1880s, but during Model-T Ford days, he had to learn to contend with cars. He was never comfortable with cars, never learned to drive well, and was always bothered, wherever the family went, by an urgent need to "get that car home!" Mom always said her Daddy couldn't relax and enjoy an event for worrying about "getting that car started and home!" She had numerous stories about Grandpa killing the motor on hills, "scotching" the wheels, cranking the motor again, and everybody pushing to get the car going.
I think car-makers started offering electric-start engines around 1910-1915. This meant that cars had to have batteries, and generators to charge them, along with voltage regulators and other gizmos. Of course batteries and generators brought about vastly improved car lighting systems. From 1915 to the mid-1950s I think most vehicles used 6-volt electrical systems. That worked OK when car engines were of low-compression designs and reasonably small size. But in the 1950s, people began wanting stronger engines, quicker acceleration, and road speeds averaging 60-70 miles per hour. Bigger engines with high compression demanded more cranking power to turn over and start, so car makers began installing 12-volt electric systems with more zip and umph! When I became a Chevrolet mechanic in 1959, virtually all new cars and trucks were being equipped with 12-volt electrical systems.
When I first started with Burger Motor Co. in Bentonville, we did a lot of generator repair work. We were soon to see two related changes: one, the changover from direct-current generators to alternators, and a shift from repairing faulty parts to a practice of replacing whole units. Repairing the old generators could be as simple as replacing worn brushes and bushings, or as complicated as replacing field coils, trueing the rotating armature, or replacing a shorted armature. The new alternators, with their newfangled diodes, had few repairable parts, and usually we replaced the whole unit when it went kaput.
One of the changes in people's expectations of their vehicles had to do with the type of power they looked for from car engines. While racing cars have been popular since the early 1900s, regular early-day car owners prized cars which pulled hills well. I can remember when the boys didn't talk so much about a car's speed or acceleration, but asked if your car could pull the Easley hill south of town in high gear? The lugging power was the thing. Lugging power favored engines with a long piston strokes and strong torque at low engine RPMs. My Grandpa Clement would lug his Model-T for all it was worth, and then some. With only four cylinders and 20 horsepower, the old Model T couldn't stay with Grandpa, even with its long stroke. He was always lugging it to death, then having to go to all that trouble to crank it up again.
Probably no change has been more momentous than the automatic transmission. I remember early names like the Chevrolet Powerglide, the Oldsmobile Hydramatic and Buick's Dynaflo. I always said that I would never have one of those automatics. They all used an oil-filled torque converter behind the engine, and a gearbox behind that. We often referred to the torque converters as "slush boxes." They were bad -- mostly slush and slip. Back then a "standard" transmission meant a 3-speed manual gearbox. Today of course, the automatics are standard, and a manual shift transmission is a special order.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 02/18/2015