What have you done to your wagon lately? (Let's keep the thread going!)

Now I realized the Mercury's odometer's broken. It's par for the course with these cars with plastic gears in the instrument cluster.

 

I just Googled crank dog...one of the definitions I can't post. But this one I will...

 

There are also plastic gears at the transmission end but they are in oil so stay firm and don't dry out to crack.

 

No, no, no, back to crank dog. I know what a harmonic balancer is. Replaced a lot, even had a special kit at one time. I'm not afraid to say I googled crank dog as well. Got the same results as Fannie although I probably spent more time "researching " some of the more un mentionable definitions. So what in the world is it?! Please don't say it's a dog made out an old crank shaft like all the google pictures suggest.

 

A 'dog' is a type of mechanical clutch, so to speak, that allows power transfer, or to manually spin a shaft. On old cars without self-starters, you used a hand crank, which you engaged in the crank dog, then set the controls to start the engine. On a Schwimmwagen, it had what the German engineers called a 'dog clutch' for the propeller on the back, which was hinged. When driving down the road, the propeller assembly was latched in the up position; but when driven into water, the prop was lowered and engaged into the dog clutch, so the crankshaft could spin the prop.

 

I knew that. Well the old car crank part. Even my 1933 Chevy came with a hand crank and possible up to 1948 Fords. I know the earlier Ford V-8's had the crank dog thing to insert a crank. They were made so the hand crank could only crank one way and hopefully be able to slip out when the engine began spinning to start, which kept people from breaking body parts.

 

As Bob Hope would say..................... Well !!!!!!!!!!

 

In other news I recently found my Suburban (Kind of a wagon) is rustier than I thought. I need to order the replacement front quarter panel and glue it in; panels can be glued in these days now that glue's come a long way and it looks like it's better solution than welding.

On wagon news, when I took it to Butler last Wednesday a man said "My mother had one of these" and then a few others commented.

 

That's what Grandpa Len told me--even with the timing in full retard, the engine could whip around fast enough to break your hand or arm. Why you 'tossed' the crank handle over, not hold onto it.

 

Let's recall that's not the only reason we now have electric starters; in 1907 or thereabouts (give or take a year,) a friend of the heads of Cadillac died from trying to help a lady start her car. After that, even though it was the early 1900s, the president was so saddened he decided to make electric starters. I might have a handfull of the details off.

 

Ya know, that would be something that makes sense. Someone who worked for, or was related to, the President of Cadillac, ending up horribly injured and/or dying from getting tangled in one of those cranks, or the car was in gear, the holding brake wasn't on, etc. I'm gonna check it out.

 

So, Charles Kettering, along with Henry Leland of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. (DELCO), patented the first electric self-starter motor in the U.S. The Wiki page made no mention of anyone's injury or death prompting this work; it basically said that Kettering designed the first electric motor-driven cash register for NCR. But, that does not mean that injuries or deaths did not weigh on the engineer's minds.

 

I read an article about Henry Leland (and what an inspiration he was for his time) from some car magazine that I likely still have somewhere, that may be where I read about the beginning of electric starters. Here's another site that has the story, sometimes I have to wonder how true some of the stories are however:

"... until Charles Kettering invented the electric starter you could die starting a car. In early 1908, a woman stalled her Cadillac in Detroit, Michigan. She did not have enough strength to crank the engine to restart it. A passing motorist offered to help. His name was Byron Carter and he just happened to be a friend of Cadillac founder Henry Leland.

So Carter cranked the Cadillac's motor. It backfired .The crank hit him in the face breaking his jaw. Carter was admitted to hospital but infection and gangrene set in and in those days without antibiotics he died.

Carter's death led Leland to vow that Cadillac would rid its cars of the hand starter crank. And so he called on Charles Kettering, who owned Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company. You and I know it better by its acronym: DELCO..."

https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/1912-cadillac-had-first-starter-motor-27205

Incidentally I also just read electric starters aren't specifically from Cadillacs in the first place, that at least 1 was around in 1896; however, that may have only been for 1 car so Cadillac's still credited for bringing them to the mass market.

"One of the earliest recorded instances of an electric starter motor was in 1896, when British engineer H.J. Dowsing installed one on his Arnold. William Arnold & Sons was a manufacturer of agricultural equipment that acquired a license to produce Benz vehicles in England, and the Arnold in question was based on the Benz Velo. Dowsing equipped it with a dynomotor that he coupled to the flywheel, which was then used to start the engine and provide assistance on hills.

It would be almost two decades after H.J. Dowsing altered his Arnold before a production vehicle shipped with an electric starter. Although electricity was available from batteries, and a handful of automobiles from the turn of the century even ran on electricity, gasoline-powered vehicles at the time lacked electrical systems or any way of recharging the batteries."

http://www.crankshift.com/history-starter-motor/

 

My grandfather told me the story about how his dad broke his arm on the car's crank when it backfired one day and how he had to take care of him as a result. I'm really glad we have electric starters.