STAGNATION?
Page 15
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"The Inspector" Has His Own Point-of View as to the Urgency for Drastic Improvement in Modern Chassis Design.
HERE IS a peculiar fascination attaching to amateur prophecy. We, most of us, like to
indulge occasionally in speculation on Jules Verne lines, and to profess, 'incidentally, profound and dest•ructive dissatisfaction with things as they are. Sporadic outbursts of this kind are familiar features which do much to enliven the monotony Of commonplace progress in such an industry as ours. Every nowand again some of us contrive to work up a large amount of enthusiasm for such departures as gas producers, giant pneumatics, multi-wheeled ehassia, chassis with engine behind the back axle, front-wheel brakes, removable and interchangeable, bodywork, and so on. And yet this bright young _industry of ours goes on steadily developing on lines in no way sensational, nor betraying any striking departure from normal growth-and expansion. •
It. is good indeed that we should not be allowed to settle too much into one or more grooves. Periodic suggestions that there is need to get away 'from stereotyped methods appear to be useful spurs to fresh thought, and yet is it not remarkable how little , the commercial vehicle sports any radical departure in basic practice, and in spite of such uninspiring progress contrives to record a rate of achievement that is out of all proportion to that seemed in almost any other industry? A ready example is the car , burette's, There have been literally hundreds of patented " new ideas" for carburation improvements registeredduring the past ten or fifteen years, and yet the record of improvement in miles-pergallon achievement has, on the whole, been relatively negligible. Better fuel consumption results are ob, tamable to-day in term of vehicle-miles-per-gallon, • and in ton-miles-per-gallon, but how many of these cannot be Properly traced toan accumulation of meal! ehas il sis-de•ta improvements ? If one-tenth of the effort spent on vaporizer design had borne fruit during the. last 10 or 15 years, we surely should be running to-day on fuel, costs at least comparable with those we obtained when petrol was no more than a shilling a gallon. We still tolerate a ca,rburetting device which, by more or less complicated and carefully calculated combinations of choke tubes, pilot . had multiple jets, air regulators and what not, contrives to give us a -fairly satisfactory petrol • eapour of adequate. strength over a wide range of engine speeds and loads. We have achieved in 10 or 15 years a device that will give moderate satisfaction with a far more elastic engine, but we still let petrol squirt into indrawn air, warmed maybe, and take , the resultant mixture into the induction pipe of • a four-stroke-cycle: engine. We did the same thing back in the early.'nineties as we do now—only more ! How many times have we been invited to fit . So and So's economizer and add 10 miles to each gallon ? And why are we not all using it now ?
• It is good that we should be periodically reminded of the harsh and beastly mechanical compromise of the sliding gear-change. We have been periodically requested to detest it since the earliest Panhards and. Peugeots—and the Rolls-Royces, and the Crossleys, and the Daimlers, and the Leyland Eights of to-day still use it.. We see the same survival of "first thoughts," for instance, in the cotton mill of to-day.. Great sheds crammed with looms, each one .provided with a " pick-stick," I think it is called, asn apparently clumsy cam-operated lever flicking a
plain leather strap and jerking the shuttle backwards and forwards across the growing material—a relic almost of the sling and brick-end with which David is reputed to have incommoded Goliath. No doubt, periodically, someone in the textile machinery world calls attention to this ancient survival and predicts for the hundred and oneth time its early supersession by an electric-magnetic or hydro-pneumatic device. Meantime, all over Lancashire the straps go on flicking in their hundreds of thousands just as they flicked in our great-grandmothets' days. I believe, • eday, there is no other satisfactory device, but II r ill hazard a guess that there have been hundret of suggested alternatives.
Far be it from the present writer's intentions to suggest that we have reached finality, or to fail to urge the need for constant striving for betterment in matters that concern the commercial-vehicle industry. But it is his desire to suggest that no great cause for dissatisfaction exists to-day with types that have continued to make good in so remarkable a fashion for the past Jew years. The petrol-driven lorry or bus to-play is a highly satisfactory machine of its kind. It can, and will be improved, of course, but the writer does not admit that there is any vast urgency in the matter, nor will he concede that adequate attention to the possibility of advancement is not being paid by Britieh manufacturers, who, to-day, can offer industrial vehicles that are equal to the best in theworld such effort is constantly evident to those who are behind the scenes. Meantime, let us not talk of stagnation in this matter. We learned to run very early and have been capable of running very well ever since, although we walked but little at first.
Although the normal petrol vehicle still consists of a four-cylinder four-stroke-cycle engine, a. friction clutch, a gear-change box, and a live axle, steady progress is being made with such, alternative types as the petrol-electric chassis and the electromobilethe latter slow but sure. The steam wagon can still hold its own in certain occupations, andIthis essentially British type is not exempt from the efforts of designers to improve its boiler and engine efficiency, to reduce its weight and to incre e its radius. Active brains are presently engaged jm Diesel and super-Diesel experiments. The trol y-bus is an intermediate effort of current inter t. And we shadl certainly hear of hundreds of further ways of squirting petrol into induction_pipes before some revolutienary method of fuel feed farces us all to more drastic modification. One cannot help recalling the relative efficiency of an early Argyll, a very early one—in which the carb,uretting arrangements were little more than a jet in a length of ga,spipe—and, moreover, that its consumption results were remarkable. Nor can one conjure up any great anxiety for drastic and early alteration of ,design at a time when the modern lorry has brought the. great proud railways to sue for the right to its use as an alternative. Is not it sad to recall that the ton-mileage record set up by the Thomas Transmission. system many years ago has been unassailed until quite recently '? Neeertheless and thank goodness, there have been some drastic and far-reaching improvements in the arrangement of seats in chats-a-banes lately. So that we are not quite asleep. "Wake up, England "