The Importance of The Ground In Your Electrical Circuits...

Oh No...! Another Lecture on Ground!!

I know what you are thinking, yet another lecture on ground, and I have heard it all before, so I will just skip this one. Well before you wander off, here are some real life examples of what can happen without a properly grounded electrical system. If you have read thru most of the tech articles here you already know the importance of a good ground. Here are a few real life adventures that show you that a lack of a good ground affects things in a way that you would not expect. Read on...

You know by now that the ground path back to the battery is just as important as the current path from the battery to the accessory. The ground path back to the battery typically travels thru the frame which is likely painted, rusty, greasy, or any combination thereof. Any of the above named... which are not good conductors of electricity, will restrict the flow of current back to the battery.

Then there are the built-in obstacles like rubber engine mounts, rubber body mounts, and the engine accessories bolted to a painted or rusty engine block all of which can cause high resistance otherwise known as high electrical friction within the electrical circuits, as the current tries to find an electrical path back to the battery.

So why does this matter? Electricity is lazy and will find and follow the easiest path back to the battery. That path might include thru the cooling system which can damage parts inside of your transmission, especially automatics, so if you are having repeated transmission failures of small internal parts check for voltage present in your coolant which is a sign of a poor ground path back to the battery.

You clearly DO NOT Want These Glowing Cherry Red And Breaking!! That Could Be A Very Expensive And Wild Ride.

Not being selective, the return ground path back to the battery might include things like throttle return springs and the like, which is pretty scary when you think about it. Open up the hood some evening after dark and with the engine running look for glowing red/orange throttle return springs and arcing between plug wires and engine block, or any stray voltage. You should NOT see any open voltage anywhere.

If you have an overdrive... the ground is especially important. Ideally the overdrive transmission will be grounded as it is bolted to the engine block which you assume is also grounded to the frame. But remember there are also rubber motor mounts and rubber transmission mounts and the majority of your overdrive transmission is electrical. So if thinks are not working the first place to start is the ground. It's simple and won't cost you much.

I had a customer recently experience this very situation where his overdrive would only work interment. He tried everything to fix it, even swapping around his spare overdrive solenoid and relay along with his kick down switch and nothing seemed to make any difference. I told him to add a ground strap to his transmission and ground it to the frame making sure he had a clean metal to metal connection. Bingo his overdrive now works like it is brand new and shifts better than it ever has. His problem was a lack of ground.

Electrolysis destroyed these Aluminum Cylinder Heads...

Having the return ground path travel back thru the cooling system is also not a good plan especially if you have aluminum cylinder heads. The electrolysis created as the current travels thru the aluminum heads can destroy the aluminum heads within a short period of time. Now that I have your attention you want to know how to check your cooling system for electrolysis.

How To Check For Electrical Current Inside Of The Cooling System

First, remove the radiator cap carefully when the engine is warm (thermostat open) and engine idling. You want to set your voltmeter to the zero to ten scale. Insert the red lead of the voltmeter into the engine coolant making sure to NOT touch the metal of the radiator. Ground the black lead to a good ground location.

You want to check the liquid coolant only. If you have a reading greater than 0.10 you have electrical current flowing thru the cooling system. One of the worst cases I saw was a reading of 0.90
which means there was more than one source of battery ground not getting back to the battery.

Once you identify your reading you need to find the source of the stray ground. Typically it will be from an added on accessory like an engine cooling fan, or accessory spotlight, or fog lamps, and not a factory-installed accessory.

Your job is to turn on each of the accessories one at a time till you find the one that makes the reading drop. If your reading is high there is likely more than one accessory that is at fault. The fix is to make sure there is a clear and direct path back to the battery. A remote Battery Stud works ideal in this situation. You can ground more than one accessory directly back to the battery to insure everything works as it is supposed to.

A Remote Battery Stud can be used to power and ground all types of accessories back to the battery. As shown here you can attach more than one accessory to a Remote Battery Stud.

And The Starter...
This ground thing happens in starter circuits also which is why I tell you to use one gauge cables on both 6 and 12-volt applications and to always ground the starter at a starter mounting bolt and not to the frame or engine block as even the factory did. You can lose up to 40 percent of your cranking power from a poor ground in the starting circuit.

Always remember this...  All batteries are at least 650 cranking amps and your starter should only need 150 amps to crank over the engine so if the engine cranks slowly or not at all that tells you the 650 amps stored in the battery is not getting delivered to the starter...and what has that job...THE BATTERY CABLES...and where is the ground cable connected and how far away from the starter is that? You want to have a DIRECT path between the starter and the battery! If you do that your antique vehicle will start even on 6-volts like a modern 12-volt.

So in summary you need to look carefully at the ground path back to the battery of all your accessories. Once you establish a good ground path all of your accessories will work better. You can be proud you fixed your grounds with such little effort on your part. Once you get things all fixed share your knowledge with your friends who no doubt struggled like you did before you got educated.

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A Carburetor Does Not "Suck" The Fuel Out Of The Float Bowl...

The Carburetor Chronicles...
If you want to start an argument at the next car club meeting, just ask someone to explain how a carburetor works. Most likely you will get the explanation of how the mechanical fuel pump fills up the float bowl, and the gas is "sucked" out of the float bowl and into the intake manifold where it is mixed with the air at a ratio of somewhere around fifteen parts air to one part gasoline.

Well...most of that explanation is correct except the part about the carburetor "sucking" the fuel out of the float bowl. That part is incorrect, here is what really happens. By the way, this explanation is also true of 2bbl and 4bbl carburetors. I am using the 1bbl example to make things easier for you to understand.

Before I explain this... you need to understand something called Bernoulli's Principle. Bernoulli's Principle says that the total energy of a particle in motion (like a particle of gasoline) remains constant at all points along the path that it is traveling. Therefore if the gasoline is expected to travel at a higher velocity, (such as when traveling thru the intake) the pressure around the particle of gasoline must be reduced. Less resistance, more speed. Lost already? Read on.

Suppose you have a formation of soldiers marching down the street twenty abreast. They march until they come to a narrow alley that they can only march ten abreast. Because of the narrow alley, the soldiers will have to march twice as fast as they marched in the street in order to maintain the same rate of travel as they had before.

This same explanation is what happens in automotive fuel applications as well. Keep in mind that a carburetor is a little more complicated than this... but for our discussion, we are just looking at how the air and fuel mix together.

Air is drawn into the top of the carburetor and down into the bottom of the carburetor, into an area known as the Venturi. The Venturi contains a tube that is smaller in diameter than the air intake area so a low-pressure area is created, just like when the soldiers got to the narrow alley.

We know that atmospheric pressure is present inside of the carburetor (and is all around us) which means there is atmospheric pressure inside of the float bowl.  A low-pressure area is created inside of the Venturi of the carburetor because the Venturi tube is smaller in diameter than the carburetor air intake.

The outlet of the float bowl is located inside the Venturi so what's going to happen to the fuel inside the float bowl as a result of the low pressure created by the Venturi?

The fuel is going to be pushed out of the float bowl by the atmospheric pressure into the Venturi of the carburetor, where it will be mixed with the outside air to form the fuel mixture. It is that fuel mixture that then travels down inside of the intake into the cylinders. The intake manifold is a big opening and a high-pressure area so the difference in pressure is what helps draw the air/fuel mixture thru the carburetor and into the intake manifold.

So the fuel in the float bowl is being pushed out of the float bowl by atmospheric pressure. It is not being "sucked" out of the float bowl as many car owners believe. 

This Carburetor needs an insulator and a heat riser

And Another Thing...
If the incoming fuel has a high humidity rate (water vapor often from cheap gas) and the outside temperature is cold enough the cooling effect will cool the carburetor base temperature to below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which will cause the base of the carburetor to frost over. Most of us have experienced that first hand.

Now you know what that ceramic insulator spacer (and the heat riser) is for, that mounts under the base of the carburetor...to prevent the base of the carburetor from freezing up which will cause the air/fuel mixture to stall, resulting in poor engine performance.

The density of the air in the air/fuel mixture will also affect engine performance. If you remember back in your younger days...how much better your car seemed to run on the way home at midnight from your girlfriend's house... than it did when you drove to her house at five o'clock. Chances are the air was much denser at midnight (and cooler) so there were more molecules available to mix with the gasoline. Your car really did have more power... it wasn't just the thoughts of your cute girlfriend that made the trip home seem to go faster.

So now you know how a carburetor really works, why the base of your carburetor sometimes frosts over, and most important of all you understand Bernoulli's Principle, which you should have already known and understood if you paid any attention in physics class. But if you were like me a Hot Rod Magazine was a better textbook than any physics book.

All that doesn't matter now because you learned what you needed to know here, and you learned how you can apply what you learned to something auto-related. They never did that in physics class!!

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Giving The Governor... The Boot!!

  If you have an R-10 or R-11 overdrive transmission chances are you have never seen one of these. That is not surprising, as most of these are long gone. This is the boot that originally covered the top of the governor. It kept moisture, dirt, and road grime, out of the inside of the governor.

As a rule... governors are typically trouble-free and require the least amount of maintenance, of any part of the overdrive, which makes sense because the only job the governor does is activate the overdrive via the relay when the vehicle speed reaches between 28 and 33 mph.

The two things that typically go wrong with the governor are the points inside of the governor housing (which look and work much like ignition points) become coated with oil dirt or road grime and quit making the electrical connection or...the cotton wrapped wire that comes up out of the governor metal cover will lose some of its insulation as it becomes dried out and brittle, causing a "short" in the circuit. The solution for the broken or missing insulation is to replace the governor wire with modern vinyl wrapped wire or new cotton wrapped wire if you want the original look.

The best solution for keeping out the moisture, dirt, and road splash out of the governor in the first place is to have the protective boot installed. But that has been a problem up to now as the originals are long gone and no new replacements were available.

As a replacement, I have seen soup cans, pop cans, beer cans, trash bags, and shop rags, even part of a bicycle tire tube. Most of those ideas were better than nothing but did not do a really good job of keeping the uglies out.

We now have for sale brand new exact reproductions of the rubber boot that once covered your governor from the factory. Installing one will keep out the moisture, dirt and road grime that will eventually cause you governor to stop working. You can find these along with new solenoids, relays, kick down switches, control cables, solenoid oil seals, and the gear oil, and a shop manual in the "parts" section of the website under what else...."overdrive parts."

You should now sleep better knowing your governor is well protected from the elements.

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2019 Great Race...Jim and Louise Feeney

Jim and Louise Feeney and their 1936 Ford Police Car. This car is a driver! How did Jim and Louise get from their home in Endicott New York to the start of the 2019 Great Race in Riverside California? They drove this car! And how did they get home after the race was over in Tacoma Washington? Same way they got to Riverside for the start of this race, they will drive this car. And...that is how they got to and from all of the previous Great Races.

I first met Jim and Louise about twenty years ago as they were driving back to New York from a car race in Texas.  There generator quit charging someplace in Oklahoma. They called my store and wanted to know...."you are that guy who builds those alternators for the Great Race, do you have the parts on hand to convert our 36 Ford from generator to alternator?"

Yes indeed! "Well we are someplace down here in Oklahoma and our generator quit so we will buy another battery and our heading in your direction. See you later this afternoon. About 2:00pm they showed up tired and thirsty. I said I would work on their car and gave them directions, and my truck to go eat lunch and cool off.  By the time they got back I had the alternator on and wired and was just about to test things out. I told Jim to get into his car and hit the starter the amp needle immediately went to charge and stayed there. There was a big smile on Jim's face.

All of this was more fun because I live in a small town of 4,500 people. I installed the alternator on the street in front of the store which drew a crowd of the locals who wanted to know what an old Ford police car was doing in town... and more important what was I doing to it, and finally where were the people at that drove it here?

The local newspaper even wandered down the street to take a picture of the action and get the straight scoop. The rumors were flying by the time the next edition hit the street..."they are filming a movie here, Fifth Avenue bought the car for advertising, its being used to film a commercial locally",  it belongs to the Kansas Highway Patrol and they are giving a talk to the local grade school class.

The local paper set the record straight and even interviewed Jim and Louise. The rumor mill was much more exciting. Jim and Louise have been a customer every since and I see them often at old car rally events and we still have a laugh over the excitement they caused when they rolled into town that hot summer day.

Pretty Official looking...

Car 54 Where Are You...? yes they have heard them all...

Imagine seeing this in the Rear view mirror in 1936. Odds are... it would cost you some of your hard earned depression dollars to square things up!

Yes Jim is the navigator and Louise drives...any questions...?!

The end of nine days and 2600 miles, and they still like each other !

You know how all of this works, now you know how it works in a 1936 Ford!

Jim and Louise finished 3rd in their class and 6th place overall which is a good showing anybody would be proud of. The old Ford proved to be as reliable as ever and will no doubt be back for next year's race. Many people are afraid to drive an old car any distance for fear it might break down but you have to remember when these cars were new people often drove them cross country.

With the modern technology we have available today, modern engine oil being a good example (it does a much better job of lubricating than the oil available in the 1930's) cars can be made just as reliable as a modern vehicle as Jim and Louise have clearly proved!

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The 2019 Great Race... John Hudson

Winning the Great Race does not happen overnight, it literally takes years and years of practice so most everything you do becomes second nature, you don't have to think about what to do, you automatically do it. In the 2019 race John Hudson and his son Greg drove John's 1940 Chevy coupe in the Great Race. John is an excellent mechanic who ran an auto repair garage in Baldwinsville New York for forty years.  His son is now running that garage, so both are excellent mechanics.

John has been helping Howard Sharp for close to thirty years work on the cars he has entered in the Great Race. Howard started out in the Great Race with a 1929 Dodge Sport Roadster one of only 1200 made. Howard was my second Great Race customer in 1990 after he watched Bud Melby and his 1936 Cord go thru the entire race and not change out a battery the entire race.

Howard, like most entrants in those early days swapped batteries at noon each day, the charging systems on the antique vehicles simply couldn't keep up with the electrical load. In the early days... the rule was the cars entered had to be 1945 and older. Today they can be as new as 1965.

I grew up driving Chevrolet pickups and owned and fixed up close to 50 of those during my high school years (which is how I came to invent the 6-volt alternator) so  knew all of their weak spots. John is an old Chevrolet man at heart so we immediately hit it off.

About five years ago John decided he wanted to try his hand at the Great Race. He knew he could make his Chevrolet reliable enough for the task and with a few parts from Fifth Avenue he was in business. He employed his Grandson Scott to be the navigator who was very good at math and they did well. Scott newly married, and a new job didn't have the time to compete in the 2019 race so John's son Greg stepped up and served as navigator for the 2019 Race.

Car 60 finished 27th out of 125 cars which is a very good showing especially with a new navigator. The navigation is very mentally challenging and it takes about ten years to learn it well but John's son picked it up pretty quickly. I was happy to sponsor John and his son in part because I can relate to his Stovebolt Chevrolet roots. We also had a long working relationship with the cars Howard owns.

Made it all the way to the finish line!

Over the pass in Oregon saw the temperature drop to 28 degrees

Who wouldn't be proud to own this Chevrolet...?

John Hudson the driver and his son Greg the navigator...

By now you know what the clock, speedo, and lap board is for...

Check out this optional accessory steering wheel. It is the only one I have ever seen. It is a very rare factory accessory.

Yes those are Ace awards for a perfect score on a leg, which is the distance between two check points. Wide whites...it doesn't get any better than that!

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Howard and Douglas Sharp Win the 2019 Great Race !!

It happened again... and I am proud to say this one was the best to date. The Great Race Team of Howard and Douglas Sharp and their 1916 Hudson Pike Peak Hill Climb Car crossed the finish line in Tacoma Washington (after nine days and 2600 miles) fourteen seconds ahead of the next car!

Typically the race is much closer than that, such as last year when the top four finishers all had scores within the same second, which is why the Great Race is scored down to a hundredth of a second. So this win was unprecedented. It also means the Sharp team had to lead the scoring most every day, which they did... for seven out of the nine days. They did it in an open car which makes it even more of an accomplishment.

They suffered thru the weather extremes with the hottest day being in California at 103 degrees and the coolest being the trip over the pass in Oregon where it was 29 degrees and snowing.

It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words... so here are a few of the winning team doing what they do best, for this, the third time... enjoy.

You can determine the temperature by the way they are dressed...

That Fifth Avenue Tag Topper has been a lot of hard miles...

     Yes, that is a Chevrolet 6 cylinder carburetor. Simple, and reliable is good. One of the big advantages to this engine is that it came balanced from the factory and was designed for the Pikes Peak hill climb race in Colorado. So it has a long stroke and lots of low end torque which helps with climbing hills, which they do a lot of in the Great Race. The engine is also very smooth, which helps keep the rest of the car from being damaged from vibration.

That little round sticker on the dash that says "ACE is an award for a perfect score on a leg, a leg being a specified portion of the race, usually between two checkpoints. If you look at this car it is covered with them. They have actually ran out of space for ace awards and have been removing old ones to make room for the new ones. And there is some prize money associated with those as well.

If you read the story on the home page about how the Great Race works I talk about a lap board. This is one of those, every team sets them up different, this just happens to be the one from the winning car.

I also talked about how the team has to go out and practice and learn how to be consistent in the way they accelerate and decelerate each time, then they have to make a chart. Well everybody has to do that, even the winning team.

The Fifth Avenue Tag Toppers have been along for the ride since 1989. Sometimes they end up a little worse for the wear... but in this case they have done better than the 1916 New York License plate it is attached too.

Douglas Sharp is the Navigator and has proven to be a pretty darn good one!

Howard is the driver and his job is more difficult than you think. If he is off by just one mph going either up hill or down, that will result in their time being off over 60 seconds in an hour! These guys are off on average, less than five seconds in an eight hour day!

Focus , Focus, Focus !

The guy in the middle is Jeff Stumb director of the Great Race. Yes that is yet another award for a perfect day on the Great Race.

At the awards banquet the Sharp team received two of the famed eagle awards... one for winning their class and one for winning the race overall. In the future there is likely to be the Howard and Douglas Sharp Bird Sanctuary Foundation.

This shows how big the birds really are. The banquet was held at the LeMay automotive museum in downtown Tacoma Washington. Harold LeMay was a local businessman who started a refuse and towing company shortly after World War II. At the time of his passing in 2000 his collection included over 3,000 vehicles along with a huge automobilia collection located in Spanaway Washington, a suburb of Tacoma Washington. At its peak Harold's refuse service ran 400 trucks every day.

The charming lady to the right is Janet Sharp. Howard's wife. She is the calm one who keeps everyone focused and takes care of the details.

There was a large crowd at the banquet but when 125 cars are entered and you add in the support people and the Great Race staff... that comes to a total of about 490 people moving across the country and staying at a different motel in a different town every night for ten days.

This year with the race being on the West Coast and most of the racers living on the Eastern half of the United States, many of them elected to ship their cars out to California and then fly to the starting line. 

The Reliable Carrier company hauled 80 of the 125 cars entered, to the starting line in Riverside California. That took 17 trucks who all arrived on the same day in Riverside. That was quite a sight! 

Now..imagine the logistics of getting those 80 cars back home where they came from,  which amounts to locations all across the country.

I not only sponsor the Sharp Racing team which I first began sponsoring in 1989 I also sponsor a car in the expert class and one in the rookie class. Check out the other blog for the details on the 1940 Chevrolet coupe and the 1939 Ford Police car.

The Follow Up

One thing that seems to have disappeared in modern business is the personal relationships. The one on one relationships have been traded for a simple email or text and often times people do business with each other for years, but only communicate via a text or email and as a result know nothing about each other except telephone numbers and email addresses.

I may be showing my age but when I started business in 1980's customers (and even today) customers were/are identified by name not a number and eventually you would meet most of them at a car show or swap meet.  Even as my business has grown and customers call and order from places like England, Sweden, and Belgium I still take the time to get to know them, what cars they own and a little about them.

New customers are surprised even today,  when they get a real person on the phone, and that they are not assigned a customer number at Fifth Avenue, instead we use their name and will also take the time to answer questions along with taking their parts order. "You mean I don't have to call a tech line to get my questions answered before I order?..." It is still one stop shopping, the same guy, (me) who will take the order, answer any questions and you are done, simple as that. But that is the way it should be, the guy or gal on the phone should now how every part they sell works, and how to install it correctly, and be able to answer any questions you have!

Which brings me back to the original point of this discussion. I have sponsored Howard Sharp in the Great Race for 30 years. We grew together learning how the Great Race works, he learned the navigation and driving skills, and I learned the importance of how to make an antique car reliable enough to be driven 4500 miles (as the Great Race was in the early days) and not break down so Howard could do what he did best.

We both learned a lot in those early days... from each other and from our hands on experiences. Even in those early days after the race was over and we each had a week or two to gets things back to normal, I would get a hand written letter from Howard, thanking me for the my sponsorship, for the parts I donated, and for the knowledge I shared, and for making his car reliable so he could focus on what he needed to do. He said he liked never having to worry if his car would start when it was hot, or if he would have a dead battery before the end of the day.

To a guy just starting out in business and not having a wheel barrow full of money... that meant a lot to me. Money was tight in those early days and I always had to decide what I could do for advertising that would get me the most bang for my buck. Sponsoring Howard was always a no brainier.

Howard would hold show and tell at night in the parking lot of the hotel for all of the Great Race teams, showing what parts I put on his car and how they worked  Because he was always finishing in the top ten and his car seldom broke down and he never had a dead battery, they figured he must be doing things right. Those teams began calling me asking for "what Howard has on his car..." That put Fifth Avenue on the Great Race map, thanks to Howard.

So here we are in 2019 thirty years after it all began and Howard along with his son Douglas have won the Great Race for the third time taking home $50,000. And true to tradition here comes the Thank you note, hand written, just as they have been since the beginning! As a sponsor it means a lot to me to get a hand written note, even after all of these years. I shows they truly appreciate the sponsorship when they take the time to sit down and write a hand written note.

Howard and I work on many projects together throughout the year, but the Great Race has always been something special. Douglas, has acquired the same business manners and also follows up with hand written letters. It is the little things they do. that matter.

So if you think the old ways of doing business have disappeared I can tell you there is still one class act on the planet. and I know how lucky am to still get to experience that.

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