How it Works

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How Your Car Works


ABS  

ABS

In these safety conscious days and car manufacturers touting their passive and active safety systems credentials, it remains that the greatest accident preventative ever developed are your car's brakes. How many times in the past few months have your brakes - slammed on in an emergency - saved your car from severe damage and you from injury or death? More>>
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Aerodynamics  

Aerodynamics

As early as the 1920s, the advantages of proper streamlining were very obvious. Throughout automotive history some companies managed to prove their point conclusively. Proof of how important aerodynamics are, and always have been, was seen in the Citroen DS, which was able to do 100 mph from only 73 bhp and would cruise all day at very high speeds while using only small quantities of fuel. More>>
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Air-Conditioning  

Air-Conditioning

These days we take air-conditioning for granted - unless of course it breaks down. But not that many decades ago, the vast majority of motorists had to travel through sluggish traffic sitting on sticky vinyl bench seats as they tried to get home. Take a Sunday drive through summer and the open window was the only real solution to flow-through ventilation - and that introduced wind, dust, and pollen from the open countryside. More>>
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Air-Cooled Engine  

Air-Cooled Engine

All car engines produce a great deal of heat during the combustion process. This heat has to be removed from the engine to prevent permanent damage. So engines cannot function without some form of cooling system. Water-cooling is the most common method, though for many years several European manufacturers have produced successful air-cooled engines. More>>
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Alloy Wheel  

Alloy Wheel

The alloy wheel was first seen by the world at the Grand Prix of the Automobile Club de France at Lyons, in 1924, which drew one of the largest crowds in history. The brilliant Bugatti Type 35 They bristled with improvements over prior Bugatti practice, including a much more reliable bottom end of the power plant, much better brakes, an aerodynamic body with quite low wind drag - but most important of all were the famous wheels. More>>
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Anti-Roll Bar / Anti-Sway Bar  

Anti-Roll Bar / Anti-Sway Bar

The function of the anti-roll bar is to stiffen the suspension so that it resists this sort of action and makes the car less prone to extreme body roll. An anti-roll bar is basically a steel torsion bar with each end bent at an angle. It is mounted transversely and interconnects the lower suspension arms. As the outer suspension arms move upwards and the inner arms move downwards, the anti-roll bar is placed under torsion. The thickness of the bar determines the amount of resistance to roll. More>>
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Automatic Transmission  

Automatic Transmission

The Auto Transmission can be traced back to one of the most unlikely people you would expect - none other than Nicholas ('Cruel Sea') Monsarrat - who developed an automatic gearshift in 1921 at the age of eleven. It was an infinitely variable ratio system with a governor, collar and ratchet. He showed it to his house master who analysed it carefully. He discovered that it would change up but not down. Monsarrat was discouraged from finding the solution in school time and turned to less mechanical pursuits. But where he failed, others succeeded. More>>
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Car Battery  

Battery

The battery is the car's electrical heart. It stores the power that starts the engine and supplies all the car's electrical needs when the generating system cannot cope. It is also one of those components that requires little maintenance. Checking the electrolyte level is usually all that is necessary. Modern developments are relieving the car owner of even that responsibility. More>>
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Body Shell  

Body Shell

From the first car, Cugnot's steam-driven Fardier of 1870, which used a frame of massive timbers with a wooden seat, it seemed to take an eternity for the basic design to develop. The frames of Benz's Patent carriage (1886) and Daimler's Stahlradwagen were designed simply to hold all the bits together. The very low power outputs of the early engines, in any case, rendered the addition of heavy bodywork impracticable; performance would have been reduced to almost negligible proportions. More>>
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Borg Warner Overdrive  

Borg Warner Overdrive

The Borg-Warner overdrive unit was in production up to the early 1960's, usually fitted to cars with engines of about three litres capacity. Production ceased when Borg-Warner concentrated on developing automatic transmissions. The gear train layout of the Borg-Warner design was similar to the Laycock overdrive - the annulus and the planet carrier act as the output and input members respectively and between them was fitted a roller clutch. More>>
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Brakes  

Brakes

Chances are, if your old Classic Car is fitted with drum brakes to the back wheels, or even all four, you have done maintenance yourself. And if you haven't, then you should, because it is a relatively easy procedure to undertake. You will need a few items to get you started, the biggest expense being a wheel puller. Before you start reefing off wheels, take our warning that unless you're prepared to do the job properly, adhering rigidly to maker's specifications and being ready to call in a qualified mechanic if you get into trouble, you'd better leave the brakes alone. More>>
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Cooling Fan  

Cooling Fan

The fan is one of the many components in the motor car which functions unnoticed and unthought-of of until something goes wrong. It has a simple but crucial job to do in a water-cooled engine. It boosts the draught of cooling air through the radiator, so keeping the engine at its correct working temperature. The time when the fan is needed most is when the engine is being run at low speed or when the car is stationary in traffic. In these conditions there is little air flow over the engine. It is at these times that trouble is often first noticed as a result of the radiator boiling over. More>>
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Cooling Fan  

Crankcase and Flywheel

When a piston engine is used to propel a vehicle, one of the first engineering problems encountered is how to gain the rotary power necessary to drive the wheels from an engine which produces linear power as its pistons rise and fall. The problem is solved by means of a crankshaft. This shaft, connected to both the piston assemblies and the transmission, converts the vertical movement of the pistons to rotary drive so that it can be transmitted to the road wheels. More>>
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Cylinder Head  

Cylinder Head

Engine-block design incorporating a separate cylinder-head has not always been the norm. Early engine designs were one-piece in construction. This was largely because engine technology was poor and components such as the valve-gear were primitive by today's standards. So it was easier for the block and head to be cast and machined as a single unit. But during the 1920s and 1930s engine design became much more complex. All production cars have the engine-block and head as two separate pieces, allowing for the head to be much more complex in design. More>>
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Electrical System  

Electrical System

Many car owners are nervous of their car's electrical system. The wiring, fuses and circuits can certainly cause confusion. But if the subject is approached logically, bearing in mind a few basic principles, a car's electrics become less of the daunting mystery that many people imagine them to be. Electricity is the flow of electrons along a cable or wire. Electrons are part of the atomic structure of materials and are far too small to be seen. The fact that electricity cannot be seen in action is one of the main reasons why many people find it hard to understand. More>>
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Elements In Your Car  

Elements In Your Car

Have you ever wondered how many different metals it takes to make your car? Of course the older the car is, the more likely it is that these elements are fewer in number, but nevertheless diverse and highly complex as I hope to demonstrate. Iron of course is the main metal in all cars old or new except for specially made vehicles constructed principally for lightness when aluminium might be the predominant metal. More>>
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Engine  

Engine

The internal combustion engine is a direct descendant of the reciprocating steam engine. Otto and other pioneers adapted many ideas from the steam engines of their time. This created internal combustion problems right from the start, because the old reciprocating steam engine was essentially a low-speed device, while the internal combustion engine needs speed to get its power. But you shouldn’t sell these early pioneers short, though, because many ideas we consider up-to-date were first developed in the very early days of combustion engines. More>>
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Exhaust  

Exhaust

We all know the exhaust system is the means of carrying exhaust gases, the products of combustion, to the rear of your car. Their initial job, before pollution and sound were added into the equation, was to discharge the gasses into the atmosphere rather than the car – particularly given one of the constituent gases created by the internal combustion engine is carbon monoxide - poisonous even in small quantities. More>>
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Ferguson Formula 4WD  

Ferguson Formula 4WD

A 4WD system often overlooked these days was the Ferguson design, which was fitted to the Jensen FF and first put into production in 1964. The system represented a great advance in 4WD design because it incorporated sensors which controlled clutches that adjusted the available torque between the front and rear of the car in the event of wheel-spin developing at any of the wheels. Unless all four wheels lost their grip simultaneously such as when hitting black ice, wheel-spin was completely eliminated - a major advance in road safety. More>>
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Final Drive  

Final Drive Unit

The final drive unit has three functions to perform: it gears down the speed of the propeller shaft to a suitable road wheel speed, it divides the transmitted torque from the engine between the two driving wheels and, except in the case of a transverse engine, it turns the drive through a right angle, transferring it from the propeller shaft to the driving wheels. A final drive is also needed in a front-wheel drive (FWD) car but with a transverse engine there is no need to turn the drive through a right angle. It must still split the drive into equal parts, however, for each driven wheel. More>>
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Four Wheel Drive  

Four Wheel Drive

The need to produce a light and reliable vehicle capable of making progress across country in all conditions was highlighted by the outbreak of World War 2 and it was the pioneering four-wheel drive Bantam Jeep which set the pattern for later developments by other manufacturers. Although originally designed for utility vehicles, the advantages of 4WD were such that its appeal widened and many 4WD vehicles were bought by the general public, a trend which the manufacturers were not slow to exploit. More>>
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Front Wheel Drive  

Front Wheel Drive

The idea of pulling a car, rather than pushing it, is actually older than the car itself, the inspiration coming from horse-drawn-vehicle; the Cugnot steamer of 1770 was probably the earliest front wheel drive machine. By the 1920s front-wheel drive enjoyed considerable popularity in sports cars such as the Tracta and Alvis, and even in racing cars - especially in the USA, where the de Dion axle was brilliantly adapted by Miller to serve the driven front wheels of his Indianapolis racers. More>>
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Fuel Gauge  

Fuel Gauge

The fuel gauge usually consists of two main components, the transmitter in the boot and the dial face mounted on the car fascia. The transmitter acts as a rheostat or "variable resistance" and consists basically of a float and a lever which change position according to the amount of fuel in the car's petrol tank. There are two basic types of fuel gauge on older cars, a bi-metallic resistance gauge and a magnetic or moving-iron gauge. More>>
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Fuel Injection  

Fuel Injection

The idea of injecting fuel into the inlet manifold, inlet ports, or even into the cylinders themselves is exactly what the carby does - but few would argue that injection does it better. Today we know fuel injection to be a better technology, easier to maintain and providing more power. Injection found initial success in racing, which was to prove that the only reason for the superior power of most injected engines was that the venturi, or restricted throat, of most carburettors (necessary to promote the pressure drop that sucks fuel from the jet) imposed a limit on the air-breathing ability of the engine, and it is the rate of air intake that determines the power output. More>>
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Gear Lever  

Gear Lever

Three on the tree. Four on the Floor. The gear change mechanism is a component that is too often taken for granted but it is one of the more important features of the car. It must be quick and smooth in action, efficient and totally reliable. Modern driving conditions demand that the driver makes frequent gear changes and a mechanism that is temperamental or inaccurate can be both frustrating and dangerous as well as physically tiring. More>>
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Handling  

Handling

In automotive speak, handling is usually defined as that aspect of vehicle control which begins where roadholding leaves off. In its widest sense, the word embraces every aspect of car control, including directional stability at high speed on a straight road and steering instability at any speed. Virtually all modern cars (we will exclude those made in China and India, as we have not had the pleasure of trying these) are designed well enough for them to be able to undertake most manoeuvres at reasonable speed and acceleration, without the driver even thinking about how the car is "handling". More>>
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Hemi-Head Engine  

Hemi-Head Engine

Ask any Valiant aficionado and he will gladly explain that hemispherical chambers have the best anti-knock characteristics and best volumetric efficiency, can rev to high rpm (due to light valve gear), but are expensive to build, and the valve gear is hard to maintain. Wedge chambers show extremely smooth combustion, have good turbulence and good volumetric efficiency. They're relatively inexpensive to manufacture, lightweight, compact, easy to maintain, and allow cooling system capacity to be reduced. More>>
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Hydragas Suspension  

Hydragas Suspension

The Hydragas system of vehicle suspension is similar in structure and operation to the Hydrolastic system in that it is fluid-operated and has a displacer unit on each wheel. The front and rear units are linked for each side of the car. The fluid used is water-based. Each unit consists of an integral spring, using inert gas as the springing medium, and a damper unit. More>>
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Hydrolastic Suspension  

Hydrolastic Suspension

Hydrolastic suspension is a "fluid" system that was used on a number of Morris 1100 derivatives, Morris 1800s, Leyland Minis between 1964 and 1971 and Wolseley 18/85s. The system used fluid displacer units fitted to each wheel. The front and rear units were connected so that the front and rear nearside form one connected pair and the front and rear offside form another connected pair. More>>
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Hydropneumatic Suspension  

Hydropneumatic Suspension

The major manufacturer that developed and put into production the hydropneumatic suspension system was Citroen. Maintenance of this system requires removing both the engine and the gearbox followed by removal of the front axle. More>>
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Laycock Overdrive  

Laycock Overdrive

In the Laycock overdrive unit, the annulus was mounted on the output shaft of the unit and drove the propeller shaft and the planet carrier was splined on to the output shaft of the main gearbox. The sun gear was mounted on a sleeve which slid over the gearbox output shaft and splined to the sun gear was a cone clutch. The cone clutch was used to engage or disengage the overdrive.. More>>
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Oil Filter  

Oil Filter

In most older engines, the oil drawn into the oil pump from the sump has to pass through a comparatively coarse gauze strainer; this prevents the large particles and sludge that sink to the bottom of the sump from entering the pump. There are, however, many finer particles and undesirable pollutants that find their way into lubricating oil: most of these are varnishes, gums, resins and acids, formed partly by oil decomposition and partly by condensed crankcase vapours; next come carbon, a by-product of combustion. More>>
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Oil Gauge  

Oil Guage

One thing that always seems to be missing from your instrument cluster is the oil pressure gauge - we can think of only a handful of current cars that have one fitted, such as the Mazda MX-5. And thats a shame, because the oil-pressure gauge can prove to be very valuable. More>>
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Oil Lubrication  

Oil Lubrication

Commercially available motor oils are so good that it is almost unheard of that an engine's failure should be attributed to some deficiency in its lubricant. The oil may deteriorate in use, the engine's performance may deteriorate correspondingly, but unless there be a catastrophic failure the average car owner remains unaware that their chosen oil may not be doing all it should. More>>
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Oil Pump  

Oil Pump

Many highly stressed, rapidly moving components in a modem internal-combustion engine need constant' lubrication if seizure or excessive wear are to be avoided. The function of an oil pump is to supply oil, under pressure, to those parts. of the engine which require this positive lubrication. The most common form of oil pump used to be the gear type. It consisted of two meshing gears, which rotate inside a close-fitted housing. As the gears rotated they carried oil around, against the housing. The meshing of the gear teeth forced the oil out into the pump. More>>
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Overdrive  

Overdrive

These days it is hard to find a car fitted with an overdrive, but for many years they were a welcome option, and any classic car enthusiast has likely had the pleasure of engaging the “added cog”. The function of the “perfect top gear” is to allow the engine speed, at which maximum power is developed, to correspond to the road speed at which the tractive effort at the driving wheels is the same as the sum of wind and mechanical resistance to motion. Only then can it be claimed that the car is correctly geared to reach the highest speed of which it is capable. More>>
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Panel Beating  

Panel Beating

These days, vehicle repairing on a commercial basis requires only a small but declining number of traditional panel beaters. The reasons for this decline are economic: panel beating is labour intensive and in the vehicle-repair industry it is far cheaper to strip off a damaged wing and replace it with a new one than to employ a panel beater on time-consuming rectification. Indeed, so complex are some built up welded sections used' in car manufacture today, that traditional methods of repair by stretching and shrinking the metal are often impossible. More>>
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Piston  

Piston

Because the linear movement of the piston must be converted to a rotational movement of the crank, mechanical loss is experienced as a consequence. Overall, this leads to a decrease in the overall efficiency of the combustion process. The motion of the crank shaft is not smooth, since energy supplied by the piston is not continuous and it is impulsive in nature. To address this, manufacturers fit heavy flywheels which supply constant inertia to the crank. More>>
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Pollution  

Pollution

Emission controls really started to bite in the 1970s, and as with all highly emotive subjects there were two camps - one which believed that the car emitted harmful gases to a rate of a crisis of world-wide proportions, the other one which believed that traffic fumes were not a serious threat to health. Rightly or wrongly, the same occurred here in Australia in 1975 when the first emission controls took effect, and motorists would look under the bonnet to discover plenty of extra plumbing, with its resultant loss in horse power. More>>
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Prototype  

Prototype

For many decades the automobile paparazzi have earned a good living seeking out prototypes and sending their grainy and sometimes fuzzy pictures to the motoring magazines press. The prototype is an important part in the automotive cycle, as it comes at a point where the marketing people in the company have test marketed a mythical product. They do this with surveys, or more likely these days, select focus groups, who perhaps did not even know they were contributing towards the design of a new car. More>>
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Radiator  

Radiator

We all know what the radiator does. But dissipating heat is not the easiest of jobs, particularly here in Australia, and ensuring the temperature is kept a little above boiling point has proved problematic for many foreign makes that have travelled our roads. The science or art of getting the temperature of an engine correct is set partly by the size of the radiator and partly by the pressure valve in the filler cap. Together, these two components have to control the engine temperature over a wide range of working conditions, in conjunction with the thermostat. More>>
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Spark Plug  

Spark Plug

The humble spark plug is made up from many materials – even precious metals such as gold and silver, platinum and iridium, although admittedly in very small quantities. The familiar white insulator material has been known by a variety of names, years ago Lodge christened theirs Corundite, KLG called theirs Sintox, but whatever it was called, it was merely sintered aluminium oxide. More>>
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Speedo  

Speedo

The oldest speedometer, introduced about 1900, was of the centrifugal governor (automatic regulator) type - a scaled-down edition of the governors seen on old steam engines. Later came the chronometric speedometer, based on a constant time period measured against the speed of rotation of a road wheel (i.e., distance travelled), thus obtaining the speed. More>>
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Springs  

Springs

Five types of spring are commonly used in motor vehicle suspension systems: leaf, torsion bar, coil, rubber and gas-filled devices are well known. The extent to which a spring deflects under load is known as the 'spring rate'. Each of the above types of spring can be manufactured either with a linear spring rate (so that within its designed operating limits its deflection is directly proportional to the load) or with a non-linear spring rate (so that its deflection becomes less against a steadily increasing load). More>>
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Starter Motor  

Starter Motor

The self-starting, or cranking motor, was introduced in the 1920s when motoring began to grow in popularity and manufacturers were competing to make their cars more attractive to the would-be purchaser. Previously, turning the starting-handle or pushing the car, with the gears engaged were the only methods of starting the engine. Most motorists were happy to adopt the new device, although the starting-handle was retained as a ready stand-by for another thirty years or more. More>>
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Steam Engine  

Steam Engine

Turn the clock back a century or so and the automotive industry was still sorting out which would become the favoured mode of engine design. It was a time when coal was cheap, and steam cars vied with petrol and electric for dominance. In a time when steam engines had already enjoyed a full century of development and the internal combustion was new and almost untried, the steam car was strongly competitive: the best remembered of the early steam cars-the Stanley, the Locomobile and the White - and all were smoother and faster than most petrol cars. More>>
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Streamlining  

Streamlining

Streamlining was ready for its breakthrough by 1939 but the war interrupted that. German motor magazines then ranked the slippery art second only to automobiles themselves among their land's contribution to motoring. "Afterwards it caught on slowly, mostly with the Italians. They even built the BMW Mille Miglia cars down there. More>>
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Steering  

Steering

Steering has evolved markedly over the last 150 years. Originally the front wheels were mounted at the extremities of a rigid beam axle, and right up to the late 1930s the independence of the two systems - steering and suspension - remained fairly easily ensured. When the front wheels were independently sprung, it followed that the distance between them could vary with different degrees and divisions of front suspension deflection, as for example in uni-lateral bump or in roll; and steering gear then took on a complexity that was for a while the ruination of many cars. More>>
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Suppressors  

Suppressors

As cars became more complex, so too did the many electrical circuits built into it, the most important being the ignition system. Any make or break of one of these circuits (as in a switch or an electric motor or the distributor) is likely to generate interference on radio frequencies, which shows itself as an annoying whine or crackle. These days the technology has improved to the point that interference is a thing of the past, however for the classic car enthusiast it can remain a problem - particularly when keeping a car "stock" with original AM band radios. More>>
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Suspension  

Suspension

We all understand that the primary purpose of the suspension system is to minimise the transmission of road shocks to the car's occupants - but the very earliest automobiles were un-sprung, or had a rudimentary suspension system at best. Pioneer designer Frederick Lanchester took elaborate pains to perfect a spring system that ensured his car moved gently up and down on its suspension at the same rate as a persons body moves up and down when they walks - a natural function that was emulated in the hope of avoiding any disturbance of the body's mechanism. More>>
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Synchromesh  

Synchromesh

A basic gearbox consists of a number of gearwheels, which transmit power from one shaft to another, and by selection of the correct size of gearwheel, the required shaft speed can be obtained. In changing gear, the gearwheels are moved so that combinations of different-sized gearwheels come into mesh. At one time, cars were fitted with the now-obsolete crash gearbox. In this, the gearwheels simply slid along splines into mesh. More>>
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Tachometer  

Tachometer

We all know the Tacho, or rev counter, is an instrument for measuring the speed of an engines rotation. Unlike the speedometer, the tachometer is not a legal requirement and, while nearly every car built these days has one, there was a time when its use was restricted to sports, high-performance and expensive cars. Being that it is one of the most important gauges in your instrument cluster, motoring enthusiasts would commonly fit after-market versions to their cars - and although the fitment of one would make your classic arguably less than stock, provided the tacho is from the same era it is well worth keeping. More>>
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Tappets  

Tappets

Most of us call it the tappet, but it is also known as the cam follower or valve lifter. Whatever you call it, it is a small member interposed between each camshaft lobe and the valve lifting mechanism, or the valve itself, depending on engine design. 'Valve lifting' means raising the valve off its seat. Only on side valve engines is the valve actually lifted upwards; overhead valves are actually depressed in order to 'lift' or open them. As a camshaft rotates, each lobe produces both a vertical and a side thrust. More>>
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Temperature Gauge  

Temperature Gauge

There are 3 temperatures of interest to the motorist; that of the water in the cooling system, that of the engine lubricating oil and that of the outside air. As auto manufacturers enhanced the dashboards from the rudimentary speedo and fuel gauge, they used two types of gauge: the mechanical and the electrical. In the mechanical gauge, the sensing element was a metal bulb, containing a fluid that had a high coefficient of expansion and a low freezing point, connected by a capillary tube directly to a diaphragm or Bourdon tube. More>>
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The Tyre  

Tire

The pneumatic tyre has come a long way since surgeon John Boyd Dunlop hit upon the idea of fastening inflated rubber tubes to bicycle wheels. This was a truly an epoch-marking invention, because it transformed the bicycle from a boneshaker - ridden only by fanatics - into a respectable means of conveyance, and it opened the way to faster modes of transport as we know it today. More>>
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Torsion Bar Suspension  

Torsion Bar Suspension

The torsion bar is basically a length of metal rod anchored at one end to the car body and at the other end to the suspension lower link. As the wheel passes over a bump the bar twists. It returns to its original position when the bump is passed and restores the car to its normal drive height. The resistance of the bar to twisting has the same effect as the spring used in more conventional suspension systems. More>>
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The ZF Automatic Transmission  

Transmission

The very first motor driven vehicles, such as Edward Butler's 1885 tricycle, had virtually no transmission system, the driving wheel spindle constituting a crankshaft to which the pistons were linked by long connecting rods in an emulation of steam locomotive practice. Thankfully car designers soon learned that the inability of the internal combustion engine to furnish controllable torque from zero rpm made some sort of complex transmission system essential. More>>
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Turbocharger  

Turbocharger / Supercharger

The use of a supercharger creates an artificially dense high-pressure atmosphere from which the engine can ingest a greater rate of air in each operating cycle. But a supercharger, when under load, is thermally inefficient, so its fuel consumption will be higher than that of the unblown engine. The unblown engine may also need a larger number of relatively closely spaced ratios. The same capacity turbocharged engine will be mechanically more efficient than the supercharged engine because its turbine does not place a significant overhead on the engine's power output. More>>
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Valves  

Valves

The valves regulate the flow of gases into and out of the combustion chamber. Their main operation is to open and close the ports (gas inlets and outlets) when required. To do this, they must make a completely gas-tight seal in the ports when these are closed, while offering no opposition to the flow of gases when the ports are open. They must also operate with the least friction possible, and this means they should have the simplest possible mechanism to operate them. More>>
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Variomatic Transmission  

Variomatic Transmission

Nearly all of the automatic transmissions discussed here at Unique Cars and Parts refer to gearboxes with two, three or four ratios. These generally tended to have fewer ratios than their manual equivalents because of the torque converter's ability to multiply the engine's torque, so enabling the engine to pull sufficiently strongly over a wide speed range. Things have changed these days, with automatics having as many, or more, gears than the equivalent manual transmission. More>>
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Water Cooling System  

Water Cooling System

Most owners of water-cooled cars take the cooling system for granted. Peering into the top of the radiator to check the water level is about the limit of their interest. The cooling system, though, is a complex assembly of many parts, each making a vital contribution to efficient engine performance. More>>
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Wheel Alignment  

Wheel Alignment

Car manufacturers generally advise the DIY mechanic to have the car's steering track or front wheel alignment checked by a garage. This is mainly because a car's wheel alignment must be set up extremely accurately and the apparatus a garage uses is expensive and difficult for the home mechanic to obtain. However, DIY tracking gauges are available from motor accessory stores or online and they provide an accurate reading at a fraction of the cost of the professional gauges. More>>
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