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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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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Series VS Parallel Battery Connections...Which Is Which?

Series vs. Parallel Battery Connections
You have all heard the rules about connecting more than one battery together to either get more reserve power or more more voltage. The confusion lies in knowing which is which and understanding the results. Lets start by understanding how the battery cable connections are different between to two.

Batteries in parallel. When you connect two batteries together in parallel the output voltage remains the same as the original voltage of the electrical system. The benefit is that the reserve capacity is almost doubled. This is common in RV's and trolling motors on small fishing boats where you need lots of reserve capacity to run small electrical loads like interior lights and accessories. Typically you will see two deep cycle batteries in these applications. Deep cycle batteries are made to be discharged / recharged slowly over and over and are designed to deliver a steady output over multiple hours.

Parallel battery connections can also be used in automotive applications. I use two Optima 6-volt automotive batteries along with my 6-volt alternator in applications like antique fire trucks and ambulances That combination  provides plenty of reserve battery power to run the flashing lights and siren during a parade while still providing plenty of reserve capacity for engine cranking.

Each Optima 6-Volt Battery is a thousand cranking amps! So connecting two in parallel along with one gauge battery cables results in 2000 cranking amps! That will start about anything!

To connect two batteries in parallel… connect the positive terminals of both batteries together then connect to the original positive connection of the charging system, which is usually the starter solenoid or starter button on the starter. The connections on the battery end of the starting system are the same as they were originally, there is just a little more help in between.

You want to do the same with the negative battery cable, all of the negative posts are connected together. And as you learned earlier if you connect the ground end of your battery cable to the starter mounting bolt or as close to the starter as you can get..(not to the painted frame or engine block) your vehicle will start much easier, because you have then created a direct path between the battery and the starter.

When you go to the auto parts store to have the battery cables made, be sure take the measurements of the distance between the battery posts. Tell them you are connecting your batteries in parallel and you need the cables to look like the cables they use on golf carts. One gauge cable works best for both the positive and negative cables because now you have twice the current to deliver. Both batteries should be the same size and have the same rating. Adding a second battery will double your reserve capacity or the length of time you have before all of your battery current is gone.

Batteries Connected in Series – when two batteries are connected in "series" it is done most often to increase voltage and efficiency, (just like when the car manufacturers went from 6-volt to 12-volt). To build a "series" battery circuit, connect the positive of the first battery to the negative of the second battery, then on to the 12-volt positive connection of the charging system as it was originally. Connect the negative post of the first battery to the positive post of the second battery then connect the ground end to a starter mounting bolt or as close to the starter as you can get it.

Your goal is to create a direct path between the battery and the starter. You want both battery cables to be one gauge or bigger because now you have twice the current to deliver.  Connecting two 6-volt batteries in series will yield 12-volts. The negative side will work the same as the positive. And connecting two 12-volt batteries will result in 24 volts. Some antique tractors had 24 volt electrical systems, many of the early John Deere tractors for example.

Batteries connected in series should be the same size and have the same rating. The total reserve capacity of the batteries will remain the same even though there is a second battery, because each battery is independent of the other but working towards the same goal. Electric golf carts are a good example of an application that use batteries wired in series to increase voltage. Electric golf carts, are powered by drive motors that are typically 36 volts and require six (6-volt) batteries connected in series to obtain the 36 volts.

As we learned elsewhere in this blog when converting from 6-volt to 12-volts, when you double the voltage, the amperage load goes to half, so in the case of the 36 volt motor in a golf cart, the higher voltage makes the electric motor more efficient and will require less amperage from the battery than it the electric motor was 12 volts. That explains why you sometimes see a 48 volt golf cart.  Those carts (Club Car) is a popular brand will climb hills better and have more power. Many have been converted to off road applications.

The difference in those 48 volt golf carts is how they get to 48 volts. That can happen one or two ways, either (4) 12-volt batteries or (6) 8-volt batteries.

(Now you know where those 8 volt batteries come from that I tell you NOT to put in your antique to try to get it to start better)

You know from reading this blog that the (6) eight volt batteries will have more reserve capacity (more power) than the (4) 12-volt batteries, because the 8-volt batteries contain more lead (more surface area inside the battery so more output). It makes the golf cart cost more initially... and also when it comes time to replace the batteries five years down the road. But think of the fun you had in between!

That is also true in 6-volt vs 12 volt applications, two 6-volt batteries will have more reserve capacity than one 12-volt. Again two 6-volt batteries have twice the surface area so twice the output). That is why you will see off road construction equipment with two 6-volt batteries connected in series instead of one 12-volt battery. The extra cranking reserve will make it easier to start the diesel engines.

As for that 48 volt golf cart withe the 8-volt batteries...that extra efficiency will insure the cart can be driven all 18 holes without a dead battery. That extra reserve may be necessary if the players get extra thirsty, and require more trips to the club house to retrieve adult beverages.

So remember parallel battery connections are the same as you are used to...positive to positive and negative to negative and the resulting voltage will NOT change. The benefit is that you get extra reserve because now you have two batteries to drain instead of one. In applications with a heavy electrical load like an antique firetruck this is almost a must.  To remember parallel... think two parallel lines on the highway, they are both the same at the end as they are at the beginning.

Think of the series battery connections, as like baseball. Every battery connection builds voltage just like every player in baseball is scoring points. The more players that cross home plate the higher the score. In Series battery connections the more battery posts the cables connect to... the higher the voltage. In the example of the 36 volt golf carts described above...the battery cables (both the positive and the negative) will each cross 6 terminals to get the resulting 36 volts.

So...what if forget your lesson here and connect the 6-volt batteries in your golf cart in parallel instead of series? It is doubtful your 36 volt golf cart would even move... because the electric motor would only have 1/6 of the current it needs to operate. Even if it did operate... you wouldn't get very far.

The only reason I bring that up is that every spring I have one or two customers call after they put new batteries in their golf cart and it "is still dead."

Yep...you guessed it... they connected their golf cart batteries in parallel instead of series, They were ready to declare their new batteries defective! Then they realized that the chance of all 6 batteries being defective is pretty slim. It was a simple fix in both cases, they both had made the same mistake, and got the same results.

Here is a simple chart to remind you how to connect battery cables for Series AND Parallel applications. Now you know which is which and why...your welcome!

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The Nitromethane Story Part Two…Adding A Supercharger

The early days (1960’s) Nitromethane was a little rough on the pit crews

In part one of this story I explained how nitromethane came to be used as a racing fuel and some of its traits, both good and bad. It’s been over sixty years since Vic Edlebrock starting experimenting with nitromethane as a racing fuel in the early 1950’s. In the sixty years of hands-on education since…along with the help of modern technology, there have been some amazing results…lets have a look.

A Short Review
Nitromethane is known as a monopropellant fuel, which means it has the potential to combust without any air at all. That's why nitromethane was once used as a rocket fuel. Fortunately for hot rodding, nitromethane also has industrial-world uses-primarily as a dry cleaning solvent, which makes it readily available.

Nitromethane has a lasting harmful affect on everything it touches. It is also very toxic to humans. Care should be exercised to avoid exposure to the skin and lungs.

An excess of nitromethane is needed within the cylinder so that enough water is created during the combustion process to cool the valves and pistons. Not enough nitromethane will cause an engine to meltdown… literally. It is also common to see the tachometer read 2000 -2500 for up to ten seconds after the fuel is shut off. This is common until the cylinders cool down enough to stop igniting the leftover nitromethane.  – 1954 Hot Rod Yearbook

Some is Good…More is Better…
Now to this already violent racing fuel what if you added a supercharger to the engine to force yet more fuel and air into the engine to develop even more horsepower…?  As the old saying goes, if some is good, more is better, at least in theory.  So lets test that theory.

A Modern Top Fuel Dragster in Action

The engine in a modern top fuel dragster is made of solid billet aluminum (engine block and cylinder heads) and the oil pan is made of titanium. It is based on a Chrysler Hemi block of about 500 cubic inches. (NHRA rules limit size). It has no radiator, the excess nitromethane fuel that does not burn helps cool the cylinders as Vic Edlebrock also learned many years ago.

Example of Top Fuel Cylinder heads made of billet aluminum

The supercharger will build approx. fifty pounds of manifold pressure. With 3000 CFM of air being forced into the cylinders along with the fuel, the mixture is compressed into almost a solid form before ignition. At full throttle the cylinders are on the verge of hydraulic lock.

That is where the ignition comes into play. Modern top fuel dragsters run two magnetos. The output of each magneto is 44 amps to each cylinder. That is about the same amperage as an arc welder. Should ignition fail the resulting violent explosion will literally blow the cylinder heads right off of the engine block and often times will break the engine block in half sending very expensive parts and pieces flying everywhere.

Meanwhile…
Initial spark advance at the starting line is 56 degrees. At about a hundred feet from the starting line the computer controlled ignition reduces the advance to about 27 degrees to help with traction.

A top fuel engine develops about 8,000 horsepower. It takes about 700 of those horsepower to turn the supercharger the 12,000 rpms at engine redline of 9500 rpms. Maximum boost from the supercharger at redline is 45 psi.

NHRA rules say a maximum of 85 percent nitromethane is allowed. The rest is alcohol that also helps cool the cylinders. You will need to be at least 85 inches away from the header pipes to avoid getting burnt by the nitro flames exiting those pipes. A 55-gallon drum of nitromethane today costs about $900.

By the 500-foot mark about half of the spark plugs will be melted (just as Vic experienced all those years ago). It is not uncommon to see part of the cylinders not firing past the 500-foot mark. You will see the telltale white smoke instead of the bright yellow burn of firing cylinders at the exhaust. Most of the other cylinders are dieseling from the heat inside of the cylinders. The temperature of the exhaust valves at this point is about 1400 degrees.

Under full throttle a modern top fuel dragster engine burns approx.11 gallons of fuel a minute.  The fuel pump is capable of delivering seventy seven gallons per minute thru a 2.5 “ diameter fuel line. The fuel tank holds 17 gallons of fuel.

The cost of a complete top fuel dragster engine is in the  $58,000 range depending on options. The engine will be stripped down to the bare block after every run and be rebuilt in a span of 40 minutes. The engine will be torn down and rebuilt 184 times in a year if the car makes it to the finals at every race.

It costs about $5000 in replacement parts and fuel for every run if nothing major breaks. The $5000 includes things like fuel, engine bearings, spark plugs, piston rings and valve spring things that are replaced after every run. If the ignition happens to misfire you could end up with something like this…and the price increasing in proportion.

This is what happens when the ignition misfires….

The wheelbase of a modern top fuel dragster is 300 inches. There is about 250 feet of chrome moly tubing in the chassis which remains unpainted do to constantly having to repair cracks. There are 58 Bead Lock bolts used to retain each rear tire to the wheel. Tire pressures are set between 6.5 and 7.5 psi.

The slicks will grow 8.0 inches in height from 36” to 44” from the starting line thru the first fifty feet. The width of the slicks will also be reduced by a third as they grow in diameter. By the way a pair of slicks only last about four runs and cost $700 each so add that expense into the budget.

Here is a sneaky trick…
12,000 pounds is the amount of down force, in pounds, generated by the rear wing of a top fuel dragster at 325 mph. The downward thrust made by the exhaust gases escaping the headers generates 800 pounds of that down force. Pretty sneaky…eh?

        The computer controls all of the ignition and related functions…

All of the ignition is controlled by computer and are programmed at the starting line using a laptop computer. The computer in the car is set based on watching the run of the previous car. The computer can control things like timing advance, how fast the clutches engage to control traction, and at what point, along with fuel delivery. The computer also records things like top engine rpms, wheel slippage, axle revolutions and a host of other details.

To illustrate how much valuable data the race teams get from the onboard computers... race teams have learned that a top fuel engine will turn 540 revolutions light to light. Including the burnout the engine only has to survive 900 revolutions under load, before it is disassembled and all of the broken or stressed parts replaced.

So there you have it, and update to the nitromethane story. The real thrill would have been the first time a super charger was added to an engine running on nitromethane. No doubt the learning curve was a little steep but oh what a thrill it would have been when the driver nailed the throttle for the first time.

Five Top Fuel Facts You Probably Didn’t Know
The noise you here from an exploded nitro powered top fuel engine comes in part from the cylinder firing outside of the engine block.

A Top Fuel engine will consume about 14 gallons of fuel from start-up, in the burnout and the full run to the finish line.

At peak power, each 62cubic inch cylinder generates about a 1,000 horsepower, equaling 16 hp/per cubic inch.

All 12 quarts of engine oil are changed after warming the engine due to fuel dilution that turns the oil a sickly mustard color.

The horsepower in a nitro burning engine doesn’t really come from peak cylinder pressure. It actually comes from the longer burn time of the nitro. That forces the piston down deeper into the cylinder allowing for a greater volume of fuel to be pushed into the cylinders.

The long burn rate has a major effect on cam timing. For example, if you try to open the exhaust valves any sooner than 82 degrees (BBC) the cylinder pressure is high enough that the exhaust valves simply can’t open.

All this might change your mind about sponsoring a team. You can expect these expenses to go up every year which is making it more difficult each year for the teams to find sponsors, and keep the sponsors they have currently.

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What Does An Antique Car Radio and a Lear Jet Have In Common?

Most of us grew up with cars that had an "in dash" radio as an option, and if you grew up in the1970's or later a radio was pretty much standard equipment by then. FM radio has also been the standard since the 1970's, and prior to that AM Radio was the standard. We pretty much take the radio option for granted and don't really consider a radio an option anymore. So how did the car radio option get started in the first place?

William Lear

As the story goes... one evening, in 1929, two men, William Lear and Elmer Wavering drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset. It was a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.

Elmer Wavering

Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios (Lear had served as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I) and it wasn't long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car. Problems arose in spades.

Automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment all of which generates noisy static interference, which made it nearly impossible to listen to the radio with the engine running.

One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. When they finally got their car radio to work, they took it to a radio convention in Chicago. There they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a product called a "battery eliminator" a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current. But as more homes were wired for electricity, more radio manufacturers began offering AC-powered radios.

Paul Galvin

Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, it was the perfect match.  Galvin quickly determined that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.

Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin's factory, and when they perfected their first radio, they installed it in Galvin's Studebaker. Then Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had two of his employees install a radio in the banker's Packard. Good idea in theory, but it didn't work. Half an hour after the installation, the banker's Packard caught on fire. No Loan!

Galvin didn't give up. He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles to Atlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention. Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it. That idea worked -- He got enough orders to put the radio into production.

That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he needed to come up a different name, something a little catchier. In those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix "ola" for their names - Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola were three of the biggest. Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.

By the way....if you are wondering if this is the same Motorola Company that is in business today making cell phones and the like, you would be correct.

But even with the name change, the automotive radios still had problems: When the Motorola Radio went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding into the Great Depression. (By that measure, a radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today.)

In 1930, it took two men several days to put in a car radio. The dashboard had to be taken apart so that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed, and the ceiling had to be cut open to install the antenna. These early radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had to be cut into the floorboard to accommodate them. The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of instructions.

Galvin's company experienced poor sales beginning in 1930 and lasting thru the end of 1932, due in part to the depression . Things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's pre-installed at the factory. In 1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich tire company to sell and install Motorola radios in its chain of tire stores. With the help of the Ford contract, the price of the radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running. Galvin would officially change the name of his company to the "Motorola" Company in 1947.

In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios.
In 1936, the same year that Motorola introduced push-button tuning, it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts.

So...what happened to the original two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin's car? Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in life.

Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950's he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.

Lear also continued inventing. He held more than 150 patents at his death. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented those. But he really became famous for his contributions to the field of aviation. He invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963 introduced his most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world's first mass-produced, affordable business jet. Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.

From AM to FM

AM radio is very prone to background noise and fading as we all know. One thing we learned as a kid was that the AM signal carries a long  distance at night. You might remember listing to the famous AM radio stations like WLS Chicago, KOA in Denver, and other even though you lived a 800 miles from those stations like I did. You could only get them at night but they were  often crystal clear! On stormy nights they would fade in and out but they were still worth listening to. Oh...and for you tech oriented followers...

The definition of amplitude (as in AM Radio) refers to the length and width of the sound waves as they move or vibrate.
How much a radio wave moves back and forth is an example of its amplitude.

During the 1920s, Edwin Armstrong an electrical engineer, was working on ways to improve radio. FM was the logical choice to Edwin, but FM had been largely dismissed because of another engineer John Carson, whose experiments showed that FM would not be an improvement in quality over AM.

Edwin Armstrong

In 1928, Armstrong discovered a way to improve FM radio despite its detractors, the key was using a wider bandwidth. Armstrong promptly filed for patents in 1933. He then offered RCA the right of first refusal for his new system, but RCA was unimpressed with a system, that was more complex and was not compatible with existing equipment.

Armstrong then went to smaller radio companies like General Electric and Zenith. He also got the FCC to allocate a band for this new kind of radio with 40 channels in the 42 to 50 MHz range. You might notice that this isn’t where the FM band is today. Hang on...I will get to that in a minute.

A significant characteristic of FM as compared with AM is that FM stations using the same frequency do not interfere with each other. Radios simply pick up whichever FM station is the strongest. This means that low-power FM stations can operate in close proximity to each other.

In radio transmission, an advantage of frequency modulation (FM Radio) is that it has a larger signal-to-noise ratio and therefore rejects radio frequency interference better than an equal power amplitude modulation (AM) signal. 

Armstrong was hindered in his further development of FM radio by the location of the newly assigned FM spectrum by the Federal Communications Commission, which he blamed on RCA. RCA considered the new FM signal as a threat to their existing businesses and did everything they could to prevent Armstrong from demonstrating the system to the public. Despite this, Armstrong did get the FCC interested in FM and even built his own FM station W2XMN to help get things moving. In May of 1939 his first broadcast was to only 25 FM receivers... all that existed at the time.

RCA finally decided to get into the FM game, but they didn’t want to pay Armstrong royalties. So in 1940, they offered him a cool million dollars for a non-exclusive but royalty-free license. Armstrong didn’t feel like it was fair to other companies that were paying 2% on their sales. He refused the offer... which would prove to be a fateful and very costly decision

Armstrong expected to receive royalties on every FM radio set sold and, because FM was selected for the audio portion of TV broadcasting, he also expected royalties on every TV set sold. Some television manufacturers paid Armstrong, RCA didn’t. RCA soon developed and patented a FM system slightly different from Armstrong’s that he claimed involved no new principle.

So, in 1948, Armstrong filed legal suit against RCA and NBC, charging them with willfully infringing and inducing others to infringe on his FM patents.
It was to RCA’s advantage to drag the suit out. The company had more money than Armstrong did, and RCA could continue to make more money with their design until the case was settled by selling sets utilizing the technology Armstrong said was his.

To finance his lawsuit and his research facility at Columbia, Armstrong had to sell many of his assets, including stock in Zenith, RCA, and Standard Oil. By 1954, the financial burden imposed on him forced him to try to settle with RCA. RCA’s offer did not even cover Armstrong’s remaining legal fees. Not long after he received this offer he committed suicide.

And... I Know Your Gonna Ask...

Where do radio identification call letters come from? In the United States, the first letter generally is K for stations located west of the Mississippi River and W for stations east of the Mississippi. Historic exceptions in the east include KYW in Philadelphia and KDKA in Pittsburgh, while western exceptions include WHB in Kansas City.

Most all commercial radio stations have call signs made up of 4-characters. This has been the standard for close to sixty years.  Some of the very early radio stations have what are now considered historical 3-character call letters which are still in use today, such as KSL in Salt Lake City, KOA in Denver, WHO in Des Moines, WJW in Cleveland, WBT in Charlotte, WSM in Nashville, and WGN plus WLS-AM 890 and WLS-TV in Chicago. American radio stations are required to announce their call signs at the top of each hour, as well as sign-on and sign-off for stations that do not broadcast 24 hours.

All call signals are registered with the FCC and most are also assigned by the FCC as well.

And there you have it...the simplified version of the history of car radios. There were a few cars built in the early 1920's with radios installed but they were mostly converted dry cell powered home radio models that had been converted to car use. This is not your term paper history... this is just the basics so as you reach over to turn on that ivory colored knob in your dash, you can appreciate how that radio got there.

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Electronic Ignition and your Borg Warner Overdrive

The question often comes up when a customer upgrades the original mechanical points ignition system to a more modern electronic ignition...how to I make my overdrive kick down switch work with my new HEI electronic ignition? Well... there is no simple answer as it turns out. It depends on the kind of electronic ignition you have.

The most common upgrade appears to be a GM style HEI ignition from the aftermarket or from a salvage yard. They are cheap and fairly simple to adapt to most any application. The problem is using it with a Borg Warner overdrive... how do you ground out the ignition of an HEI type electronic ignition using the kick down switch so the overdrive can shift without being under load.

Originally the ground wire of the kick down switch went to the negative side of the ignition coil. Because that side of the coil was not fused and there were no solid states pieces and parts involved, all worked well.

But because and HEI uses a solid state module to provide the spark, that solid state module that is very voltage sensitive. So if you suddenly ground the ignition out on the output side of the ignition module just as you did with the old mechanical point ignition, you will create a huge voltage spike.

Because there is no condenser to absorb the voltage spikes (because solid state electronic ignition systems does not need one) there is nothing to absorb the voltage spike created by grounding out the ignition...except...you guessed it, the solid state ignition module, which quickly zaps your ignition module and your vehicle is dead in the water because you have no ignition spark.

Some HEI ignitions have an inline fuse that will protect the module from excessive voltage but the end result is that you will blow that fuse every time you hit the kick down switch. I know what you are thinking....I will just take out that fuse or put in a bigger one. Then you will for sure burn out the ignition module which is why the fuse was put there in the first place.

Some customers have tried to use the tach drive terminal on the HEI ignitions to run the kick down switch. While that terminal is a ground terminal, that typically does not work either... A tach creates no voltage spike unlike the kick down switch which does. It is that voltage spike thing again.

So basically any electronic ignition that has the coil built into the distributor will likely be damaged when you engage the kick down switch from the overdrive.

One solution might be to setup a way to interrupt the battery current going to the electronic ignition on the incoming (battery) side to the the electronic ignition itself. That is something you will have to engineer based on your application.

The other kind of electronic ignition you see is the Pertronix style that fits into the original distributor and replaces the mechanical points with an electronic ignition module, and the coil is still external just as it always was. Your kick down switch wire is connected to the external coil not to the Pertronix. You are grounding out the ignition at the ignition coil ahead of the Pertronix ignition module, ahead of the distributor. Those seem to work ok with the overdrive kick down switches, because the coil will absorb most of the voltage spike. This setup seems to work well with the Pertonix negative ground applications.

The positive ground Pertronix electronic ignition applications seem to have some issues with the kick down switch in the circuit. The manufacturer is not sure why there is a difference. Most positive ground applications work ok, however... a few do not. Something to be aware of.

I have talked to all of the aftermarket electronic ignition manufacturers and they are all telling me the same thing. We don't recommend grounding out the electronic ignition even for a brief time, because of the possible damage to the ignition modules from voltage spikes.

If it makes you feel any better we are not alone. Some boat transmissions also require a pause in the ignition the same as we do, to allow the boat transmission to shift from forward to reverse and from reverse to a forward gear. The reason was the same as for our overdrive transmission, so the transmission itself did not have to shift under load. Like our antique vehicles...those boats were manufactured when a contact point ignition was the standard.

So if you are thinking of adding of adding electronic ignition to your antique vehicle, you need to be aware of this issue with the Borg Warner overdrive transmissions.

If I figure out a good working solution I will let you know here.

UPDATE - 
It seem the best solution so far is to put a relay into the battery wire that powers the electronic ignition, that way you can safely interrupt the battery power going to the electronic ignition (before it gets there) so the overdrive can shift and you will not damage the module in your electronic ignition. This way should also not generate any voltage within the electronic ignition because everything is happening BEFORE the electronic ignition.

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