1946 Ford V8 Convertible
Was it really only a car?
I went to an all-male college, or as we joked, a small men’s college for small men. The absence of girls created a challenge when it came to dating. So, when my father bought a fifty dollar car from the wife of his friend, it enabled me and my friends to drive up to one of the all-girl colleges in Massachusetts on weekends, and to do what young men do—- chase girls. But more importantly, it also set me on a long path toward understanding and maintaining cars.
My car was a 1946 Ford V-8 convertible, and it demanded my reluctant love and attention for 14 years, rewarding me with mobility, but often also frustration. When Ford introduced the first V-8 engine in 1936, it was a sensation, delivering a lot of power in a much shorter engine block and crankshaft, raw power that has appealed to hot-rodders ever since—- one-hundred smooth horses from eight cylinders firing in the proper sequence, with in-block valves under flat heads (see image below).
Fifty dollars doesn’t sound like a lot for a car, and it wasn’t. Owning it meant mobility and freedom, but also that in order to afford it, I had to do most or all of the repairs myself, something that is almost impossible with modern cars, but that a lot of young men of my generation took pride in being able to do as a kind of rite of passage. I had no garage or shop, so all the repairs were done on the street using tools I kept in the trunk. I made friends with the wife of a biology professor who also owned a 1946 Ford V-8, and who was an accomplished grease-monkey, doing all the repairs herself, including replacing the piston rings and grinding the valves. We haunted junk yards together, and learned from each other. Maintaining and repairing the Ford on my low budget could induce considerable anxiety and sometimes led to fits of frustrated anger. During attempted repairs, I was occasionally known to kick the car so hard it left a dent. Although my car tried to teach me anger management, it more or less failed.
One of Ford’s triumphs was casting the entire engine block in one piece, but engineering the diverse accessories that make an internal combustion engine run led to arrangements whose disadvantages only became obvious with time, and which, unfortunately, I discovered one by one.
I discovered the first of these disadvantages when I drove the Ford across the country to attend graduate school in Berkeley. I had failed to recognize this disadvantage previously because Connecticut had no long, steep grades, nor was it very hot. But California had both, in spades, and this revealed a flaw in the design of the fuel system. Some brilliant Ford engineer located the fuel pump at the back of the engine on top of the block so that it would be sure to get all the heat that the engine produced and that the water cooling system and radiator fan blew back over the engine. On top of that, the hot exhaust gases were routed through the engine block in a roundabout way, assuring still more heat transfer to the engine, making it tend to run hot. Apparently, engineers didn’t know that the boiling point of gasoline depended on both the temperature and the atmospheric pressure, the latter of which, as even middle-schoolers know, decreases with altitude. The USA is not flat and level, but maybe that wasn’t apparent in Detroit. So, as I motored up long mountain grades, not only did the engine produce more heat because it was doing more work, but the atmospheric pressure was going down as I roared up the mountain.
The result was “vapor locks” as the gasoline in the pump boiled, flashing into vapor, and the pump stopped pumping because it was designed to move liquid, not gases or vapors. So, the engine would stutter and then just quit, and I coasted uphill, which as everyone knows, doesn’t work for long without input of a propulsive force. The first few times, I would simply pull off the road, raise the hood until the pump cooled enough to once again do its duty. After I began traveling with Vicki, we would both twiddle our thumbs while we waited. The image below shows an example of a steep grade on the road to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of eastern California. The road ascends 6,000 feet in only 10 miles, an average grade of 11% and a final elevation of about 11,000 feet. In some spots the grade was almost double the average. Vapor locks were almost inevitable.
Eventually, I got smart and carried an old towel and a gallon of water in my trunk. Before starting up a long grade, especially at high elevation, I soaked the towel with water and wrapped it around the fuel pump. Evaporative cooling to the rescue! A little inconvenient, but it always worked.
The mobility and adventure the car provided me in California was a far greater joy than chasing girls in New England. It treated me to many adventurous trips to remote, beautiful, and sometimes scary places. It’s hard to beat the scariness of the time my sister and I camped on Point Sublime, an extremely exposed promontory overlooking the Grand Canyon from the north. The violent thunderstorm that night made us wonder if we would be alive in the morning (we were).
As I gradually learned more about car maintenance, I came to see an internal combustion engine “simply” as a device for converting the power and motion of gasoline explosions inside the engine’s cylinders into the rotation of the wheels. Keeping the car humming along on our trips required attention to the ignition system that set off the explosions at the right time. This system was not computerized and fancy like modern cars, but was a mechanical-electrical system in which a rotating contact point in a housing with eight contacts (the distributor) sent a brief burst of 10,000 volts to each of the spark plugs in turn (grab the cable the wrong way and you would get a real shock). This spark must ignite the gasoline-air mixture at exactly the right moment, a moment that I set by rotating the distributor manually as the engine idled during a tune-up. As the engine speed increased during driving, the distributor then automatically advanced the spark because combustion was not instantaneous and had to be completed in less time.
All sounds pretty straight forward, yes? Assuming you made all the proper measurements and adjustments, it kind of was. It was not rocket surgery. The problem was that another brilliant Ford engineer put the distributor at the end of the camshaft at the front of the engine block under the fan—- easy to build, hard to work on. It was surrounded by the belts that drove the generator from the rotating crankshaft (see image of engine above). This made adjusting the timing a very difficult process accompanied by a lot of profanity, because it often required removing the fan and the drive belts in order to get my hands in there and to see what I was doing. In later models, Ford moved the distributor to a more convenient position on top and to the side of the engine, but they did that too late for me. In that position, it was possible to rotate the distributor, listen to how the engine was running and get the timing just right.
For smooth power, in addition to setting the ignition timing, one also had to adjust a needle valve in the carburetor to get the right fuel-air mixture for the best compromise between power and fuel efficiency. The gasoline was vaporized by the pressure decrease in the carburetor’s throat, then sucked into the cylinders as the intake valves opened to begin the four-part cycle that ended with expelling the exhaust and whose repetition made the engine work (for an animation of this, click here. A briefer version is inserted below). And all this exact, complex sequence took place flawlessly in every two rotations for every one of the eight cylinders. For example, cruising at 3000 rpm, the crankshaft spins through a complete rotation 50 times every second, 25 intake cycles and 25 exhaust cycles for every one of eight cylinders every second. Ordinary cars can run up to 8000 rpm, and race cars up to 22,000. Picture the blinding motion of all those connected parts. It was hard to imagine back then, and it still is now.
The remoteness of many of the places the car took us to required that I be ready to service a selection of systems “in the field”, and was the reason I carried my tools in the trunk. One of the more beautiful and remote places was a volcanic region of lava flows, cinder cones, and volcanic craters called the Cerro Pinacate in northern Mexico.
On the way into the region on remote dirt tracks, fifty miles from the nearest human habitation, we came upon a large truck whose driver and co-driver were under the truck, having dropped the oil pan and the crankshaft for some kind of (I guess major) repair. They seemed unperturbed and did not accept our offered help, and gave a friendly wave as we drove on. By comparison, my feeble attempts at “field repairs” seemed laughable.
On a very steep hill in the Sierra Nevada, I once discovered that my clutch slipped too badly to get me over the hill, followed by the realization that the brakes worked very poorly going down the hill backwards. The brakes were not disc brakes but drum brakes in which two semi-circular asbestos-lined brake shoes were forced against the inside of the drums, converting the car’s kinetic energy into heat, slowing the car down. The brake system was not power-assisted as in modern cars, so sometimes it was necessary to mash on the brake pedal real hard, praying that the car would stop in time.
Likewise, steering required a bit of strength. It was definitely not one-finger, power-assisted steering. That’s why I installed a “cowboy button” (aka a “necking button”) on the steering wheel so I could steer with one hand. The idea was that you could then put your right arm around your girl’s shoulders as she cuddled next to you on the bench seat. There were no bucket seats as in today’s cars, and forget seat belts, they generally didn’t exist. Bucket seats came into being when cars were built lower to the ground, with the result that the transmission and the shift lever were positioned under a big hump in the middle of the floor, necessitating bucket seats and making necking equal to wrecking. If you are belted in, it’s impossible to neck anyway.
But my Ford still had a bench front seat that made exploring the remote hinterlands of Nevada with my future wife, Vicki more fun. In the image below, we were camped on the edge of the Columbus Marsh. When Mark Twain traveled past here in the late 19th century, this was indeed an extensive marsh that he described in Roughing It. Today it is a dry salt flat.
An internal combustion engine’s power is low at low rpm, and increases with engine speed. Therefore getting a car to start moving when the engine speed and power are low is, so to say, a non-starter. This is why transmissions were invented. The transmission’s internal gears allow the engine to run at higher rpm and power than the drive shaft and the wheels. At one time, all cars had manual gear shifts in which the driver had to move a lever to one of four (later five) fixed positions—- first, second, third gear, and reverse. The Ford’s was on the steering column. To shift between gears, one depressed the clutch pedal to disengage the engine from the drive train, then completed the shift and let the clutch out again so that the high-friction clutch plate could once again engage the engine and transmit power to the drive train. Most modern cars have transmissions with fluid transfer of rotation, and are operated by a computer that automatically changes the gear ratio in relation to engine and car speed. Many of the steep, mountain roads I traveled required a lot of manual gear shifting, both to power up steep gradients in a lower gear, but also for the engine to act as a brake on long, steep down gradients. The mountainous West, particularly the Sierra Nevada offered many opportunities to practice shifting gears. This practice repeatedly took me to one of my favorite secret places, the magical canyon of the Middle Fork of the Feather River in the northern Sierra Nevada.
My Ford had windshield wipers, of course, but they were not driven by electric motors as in modern cars, but were connected to the intake manifold whose vacuum would suck the wiper back and forth. Unfortunately, when I stepped on the gas to accelerate the car, the intake manifold vacuum dropped and the wipers slowed down or stopped. The hills of San Francisco were especially challenging in the rain (of which there was a lot in the winter). One rainy night in Berkeley, I started through an uphill intersection after looking both ways when suddenly, a human figure hurtled headfirst across my hood— a cyclist who had been coming down the steep hill on the left at high speed, without lights and with wet brakes. I guess he assumed I had seen him, but until he rocketed across my hood, I hadn’t. He insisted on limping off with his front wheel shaped like a new moon. I never managed to fix the dent he put in my fender.
On the other hand, Ford engineers showed some real genius by installing a Southwind heater in the car. This heater was connected to the intake manifold vacuum so that it sucked a tiny stream of gasoline out of the float tank of the carburetor and burned it in the heater core in the cab, then sent the fumes back into the manifold. Unlike most car heaters, this one wasn’t just run on some tepid water sloshing through a bunch of heat-exchange coils, no sireee, it ran on a secret, hidden fire that poured out a hurricane of hot air at knee level, ready to battle the coldest outside temperatures and win. In college, on a winter snowshoeing trip to New Hampshire, it even kept us warm (at least below the waist) at 32 degrees below zero.
There were plenty of other parts and systems that I repaired or replaced, too many to go into details. Among the easy ones were the spark plugs that screwed into the engine block, one above each cylinder as I described earlier. Adjusting the gap to the nearest thousandth of an inch with a gap gauge, a gizmo in every car repair kit, was part of a tune-up. Other replacements included the right rear axle, the right rear wheel bearing, the air filter, the oil filter, the battery, the generator, the starter motor solenoid, the clutch (not sure about this one), the brake shoes, the voltage regulator, the spark coil, the tires, the canvas top, and the brake system’s master cylinder. Fortunately, most of these parts replacements were done in Berkeley with junk yards and mechanics within reach. Had they occurred on a trip to the ghost towns of Nevada with my (soon-to-be) wife, the story would have been very different.
Quite a bit of the work required me to crawl under the car, and practically all of it resulted in greasy hands and clothes, a state I got very tired of over the years. Eventually, the engine lost compression and required a piston ring job. Instead, I replaced the engine with a rebuilt one at Sears and Roebuck in Oakland. This was followed by an especially memorable trip across the USA when, as newly-weds, Vicki and I moved from Berkeley to Ithaca, New York, accompanied by very little money. The very long climb over the Sierra Nevada with its consequent overheating burned a couple of exhaust valves, causing the engine to miss occasionally from then on. To improve the cooling, we had the radiator rodded in Reno (nice alliteration, eh?), replaced the voltage regulator in Des Moines, and serviced the carburetor somewhere in between. Sadly, when I had the engine replaced, I did not immediately notice that the mechanics failed to install the gasoline line from the carburetor to the Southwind heater, and we arrived heaterless in frigid Ithaca, NY. This, along with burned valves and other problems led to the sad decision to sell my old horse, and to buy a new one (we discovered later that the replacement horse, a used VW squareback, had rusted-out fenders). Before we sold the Ford, I removed the heads, ground the valves and replaced the head gaskets. I’m not sure I got it quite right, but it ran well enough to sell it to a hot-rodder for $125. He intended to soup it up. I hope it’s still running.
When I look over what I have written, I am struck by the complexity of even that old car, all of whose clever devices were mechanical or electrical. But I also realize that keeping that old car going (I was only six years older than the car) required an astounding amount of learning, an understanding of physical principles, and the will and patience to do what needed to be done, and sometimes the need to suppress a burst of anger and frustration. It took a lot of brains, a lot of problem solving and a lot of acquired experience, some by exchange with other grease monkeys. Of course, my knowledge was far short of a trained repairman, but at least I understood what made the car work. In today’s cars, all those brains and all that knowledge are contained in computer chips, and no longer require human brains (at least at the operator level). A car no longer seems like a living and breathing organism like my 1946 Ford V-8 convertible did.
Taking stock of what my brain had to do in my old ‘46 Ford, and what onboard computers do in modern cars, here is a partial list: time the ignition, shift the gears, power the steering, power the brakes, adjust the fuel/air mixture, meter the fuel, control the wiper speed, regulate the voltage, lock/unlock the doors, and (most recently) dim/undim the headlights. Sure, modern cars are far more durable and require far less maintenance, but they can no longer teach young men (or women) a complex and satisfying skill or generate a sense of self-reliance. A car was something one could understand, that one could have some control over, that taught principles of physics and engineering, as well as solving problems. Losing this opportunity removes young men (and a few young women) one more step from the real world and, like so much in the modern world, into a mindless dependency.
Note: I am, as always, grateful to my wife, Victoria, and my daughter, Erika, for their perceptive suggestions that keep my sciency tendencies in check.
I never had the pleasure of cruising in your Ford, but I vividly recall our trip from Tallahassee to Utah in your VW Squareback. Climbing into the car for the start of the adventure, my butt (and my spirits) sagged as I looked down and realized there were rusted out holes in the floor board and that only a web of wires kept the seat from dropping to the pavement. (I think there was also a rope involved in suspending the clutch pedal.) You seemed amused by my trepidation, and fortunately, your positivity was infectious enough for me to tentatively throw caution to the wind. The resulting adventures remain among the most cherished memories in my life.
greatly enjoyed and I am sure Cliff would have emphasized with you about cars many years ago!