Pooling Research Efforts Saves Time and Money
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AMONGST the most useful sections of the Institution of Automobile Engineers is its Automobile Research Department, and its work for the industry is greatly assisted by the long list of affiliated vehicle and accessory manufacturers, operators, oil companies and research organizations, comprising most of the leading concerns in the country.
The premises on the Great West Road, Brentford, are well equipped to deal with almost every class of research connected with the motor industry, such as material testing, the tracing of faults, such as brake squeak, cylinder wear, piston-ring blow-by and flutter, the overheating of tyres and brakes, the wear and cracking of bearings, failures due to fatigue, and many other problems the elucidation of which is steadily adding to the reliability and efficiency of roadtransport vehicles and the prestige of the British motor industry as a whole.
No difficulty is too small or too large to be put up by members for consideration, and the committee welcomes the co-ordination of all in order to pool experience for the general benefit. How different this is from the old days, when individual manufacturers jealously cherished their particular little secrets!
The Research Department is thus in a position to save its affiliated members expense far greater than is represented by the subscriptions, for it renders immediately available to them information which would otherwise require the services of individual research laboratories, involving not only money, but loss of time.
Each year the Automobile Research Committee invites representatives of the industry and others to an inspection of the Department, and we always regard this visit as one of the inost interesting we pay during the year.