1925 Doble E-20 Steam Car - Jay Leno's Garage

look at this i'm beating a camaro i passed that camaro like it was standing still well with another episode of jay leno's garage we're here in the steam room of my garage which means everything in here is powered by steam we've got all sorts of steam memorabilia on the wall and this is i think uh most people do probably the greatest steam car ever built no it is the greatest steam cover build it's called the doble it was built by abner doble prior to this all steam cars required you lighting a pilot by hand using a match or a torch of some sort and waiting 10 or 15 minutes for things to heat up and doing a bunch of stuff this was the first steam car you could get in turn the key and go this car is interesting because it was owned by howard hughes howard hughes was a big doble enthusiast he liked it because it was the only car that could match his duesenberg in acceleration he went 132.5 in 1925 which is pretty amazing for a steam car we're going to show you how it works in just a little bit this is a murphy-bodied car this is the very first murphy roadster with a disappearing top now you've seen other cars like my duesenberg this one here the supercharged car the green one that's a disappearing top that was the most popular body for duesenberg but this was the very first this is the prototype the first disappearing top car does not have roll-up windows but the top goes down into the back as well it's really fast it makes a thousand foot pounds of torque from rest there is no transmission in the car it is direct drive you have so much torque you don't need gears to help transmit the power this car was originally restored by the nether cut collection my friend arnold schmidt did most of the work on this and he did a beautiful job but it was primarily a show car once we got it and we started putting a lot of miles on it uh we had to do a little bit of work to it we made new pistons for it new rings a few other things this requires a very unique blend of steam oil most stanley's most steam cars run in the 400 degree range 600 degree range this runs it's 750 to 850 degrees superheated steam so that's what makes it so powerful i think steam expands like 2500 times at that temperature that's what makes this car so powerful um i'm going to show you how the car works in just a minute because we have a display chassis which makes a little bit easier it is the most complex car to restore because everything you think you know about internal combustion engines does not apply here most cars you're trying to get the heat out of the engine this car you're trying to keep the heat in the engine anywhere heat is escaping you want to seal that up and do what you have to do because the more heat it has literally the faster it goes let me show you what it looks like under the hood now although it looks like it might be a show car under the hood here it's really not uh we run this car a lot i was running it just yesterday so it's it's a little bit grimy the engine itself is in the back of the car and i'm going to show you that in just a minute i just wanted to show you an overview of what uh what it looks like when you open the hood it's very funny when you pull on the gas stations because hey could you check the oil well they have no idea what they're doing it doesn't look like any sort of normal car in any way uh i think it's a great looking car uh it's about 142 inch wheelbase it's a big car and as i said it weighs two and a half tons but it's completely silent being a closed system it burns all the fuel you have a 3000 degree fire in here let's show you the other side show you what that looks like under the hood i love the big drum headlights that's something kind of unique to the 20s this is the other side under the hood sort of a dizzying array of stuff you have no idea what it is you know when you get one of these there's really no instruction book you have to kind of find your way but it's it's fascinating technology and once you begin to understand that it all sort of falls into place but you have problems in these you wouldn't have with an internal combustion engine water hammers and lubrication problems and water is not a lubricant at all so you have to inject a little steam oil this car was a pretty expensive car something like 20 or 25 000 in 1925 when a ford was 260 dollars in the handbook it says things for your man to do every day see if you had a car like this you had to have a man who took care of the car so it says things for your man to check on a daily basis starting the car look there are only really only 13 steps to starting the car couldn't it could be simpler it was just just a lot of stuff you have to deal with you know it's the kind of car when it's running great it's unbelievable it's the kind of kind when it's running bad it's unbelievable oh my god the problems we've had in this thing but it's been exciting it's been a lot of fun and it's such a labor of love to restore and it's a real piece of history it's just such a quirky automobile steam was dead by 1925. it was over and this is that last gas attempt you know from about the early 1800s up until 1910 steam was king steam ran everything trains boats so it seemed like the best way to go but the internal combustion engine when it came out uh it moved so quickly and then the thing that really did the steam current was the electric starter where people could get in the car you know press a button and the car would start and go they didn't have to get down there and crank it and break their arm or break their thumb that was really the death now but this was the last gasp the last chance to try and make the steam car something to to rival the gas car and this is probably the only steam car that ever did no one's ever done a better job of building a steam car than abner doble who was a quirky guy he came from a wealthy family uh he went to mit as a young man i believe he dropped out he wasn't a very good businessman liked preston tucker like some of these other guys uh he kind of got into some kind of stock manipulation thing whether he's guilty or not guilty i don't know but you know i deal with using money from this guy's car to build that guy's car he was not a businessman he was an engineer and i somewhat of a curmudgeonly guy every car he built was different e18 this is e20 these cars are completely not completely different but different enough i mean abner dobber would build a car investors would say this is perfect let's build i want to make some changes on the next one so consequently each car was hand-built and no two cars are the same uh the fuel delivery system a little bit different in that one than it is in this one but this is the pinnacle 1925 and i think this is the the best one he ever built because hey it's good enough for howard hughes as you can see it's a two-seater but it has a rumble seat comes out this way this goes like that and you can put people back there that's real safe huh yeah but that's so turns into a four-seater car it's a kind of cool and near top comes up this opens this way and the top comes up as well this is your fuel filler here your gas cap for lack of a better word why they put the gas gauge back here makes no sense to me but it is but as you can see there are 13 screws holding this on there's no reason you need 13 screws the reason has 13 screws is rolls royce had 12. so double said well i'm going to make 13. so he put 13 i it's one of those weird okay i don't get it but that's that's all right so you want to take that off you're going to be there all afternoon but let's go over and show you the chassis and show you how that works we have this chassis because it's a lot easier than trying to visualize what we're talking about here this is a cutaway chassis of a double steam car let's explain how it works you turn on your ignition you turn on your key an electric fan spins down here in this what's called the draft booster you might think of it as a supercharger a sirocco type fan it spins quickly forces air through the venturi of the carburetor as it goes through the venturi the carpet picks up speed suction pulls gas from the float bowl throws the gas into here now what you have here see 475 linear feet of steel boiler tubing this is not a boiler this is a steam generator a boiler is where it's like a tea kettle you heat up 15 gallons of water at a time this you're never heating up more than a quart or two at the time two quarts at the most but a little bit a little over a quart okay heat is forced down most steam cars the heat comes off from the bottom this heat is forced down you have this tubing which gets smaller produces 750 pounds per square inch of superheated steam a million btus in 90 seconds when this thing is really up and running it's making about 2 million btus but initially a million btus of heat heat comes back steam comes back here hits your compound engine it's a four-cylinder compound engine with a high pressure piston and a low pressure piston now what that means is you have four cylinders but the steam pushes on both sides steam pushes it up steam pushes it back an internal combustion engine it's one two three bank one two three four bank one two three four bank this every stroke is a power stroke so i think it's safe to say you would have the same number of power impulses that you would have in a v16 engine i think that's fair to say because steam makes so much torque there's no transmission it's direct drive to the rear wheel and let me show you how this works here we go press this button here all right that shows you how the engine works see it's direct drive to essentially your axle right here your crankshaft is here and there's your direct drive right there now the way it works is the steam steam gets used a lot it comes through here goes through the high pressure piston what steam is left over leaks over to the low pressure piston then the steam is not done yet notice we're also driving right here besides driving the rear wheels we're also driving an auxiliary shaft and this shaft runs your water pumps and your oil pumps that pumps oil into your steam engine because as we said before water is not a lubricant so the steam gets pumped in under extremely high pressure 200 pounds per square inch okay now the steam once it exits the engine it comes back up here hits the draft booster again overrides the electric engine and forces gasoline into the engine harder and faster now here's the real genius of this thing this is your control unit this controls as you see all pressure and functions of the water pump in here you have about six pieces of crystal about this big and it sits on a metal shaft and since glass does not expand or contract but metal does what happens is let's say my fingers the crystal okay as it gets hot the metal expands pushes the crystal forward hits his contact shuts off the fire that's how you regulate it then it cools fire comes back on so as this goes down the road you hear kind of a maybe three or four times a minute as the fire comes on and off okay that's how you control the the fire that's how you keep it at 750 degrees but the steam is not done yet the steam then exits there and hits these two turbine wheels uh those two turbine fans um you know these were built by a company in worcester massachusetts way back in the 20s the company was still in business and i called them up and i said hey i need some turbine uh i need some turbine wheels can you make them nah we can't make those and i kind of shamed the guy i said you know your grandfather made it in 1925 you mean to tell me this many years later you can't make something your grandmother so finally we they they were so embarrassed all right send us we'll make it a turbo so they made the turbine wheel i mean they were crazy expensive but anyway these two spin okay it spins the fan okay then the steam exits there goes here into the condenser this is not a radiator it's a condenser the steam goes in there and the steam is cooled immediately by the fan from the turbine wheel now remember that little experiment uh you might have done in science class where you heat the water and you hold the plate and the steam goes up and hits the plate and then comes back down and as rain or comes down as water that's basically what this is and you reuse the steam over and over again so this thing is so complicated okay now you have to lubricate it so what you have here this is your auxiliary unit okay it says this the heart of the double car this unit contains a 12 volt motor generator four piston water pumps air pump two vacuum pumps and a partridge in a pear tree but you only have one spark plug how easy is that and these spark plugs last the life of the car i've had the plug in my other double for 10 years is fine nothing ever goes wrong with it that's basically how it's supposed to work and on a good day you can get it all working doble says you're supposed to get about 1200 miles on a tank of water no way no way uh the most you might get is a couple of hundred on a cool day in the summer you get less because uh it's not condensing it's you know you're putting 850 750 150 degrees of steam into there on a cool day it'll cool it and turn it back into water sometimes it overrides it that has a safety valve and if it if it can't condense at all it just vents to atmosphere but that's basically the way it works what you have here is when you start the car you pull this up that engages your manual water pumps which fill these tubes with water before you start you don't want to turn on your fire with no water in there because you will scorch the tubes basically but that's kind of how it works did you follow that is it a little confusing it is and the fun thing about these is you know even the we've had engineers from general motors and mercedes-benz and you get to be a big shot well let me explain that to you guys again you know i didn't go to engineering college i don't know but when you work with these it's great fun but you'll be amazed at how much torque it has uh and how powerful it is you know the advantage is there's no shifting you just get in and you go you step on the gas or you open the throttle and you pull away you know don't forget 1925 you're grinding gears and pushing clutches and all that kind of thing none of that it's just direct drive the disadvantage is the engine is always engaged there's no neutral but you know it's probably time to put this all into practice and uh take it for a ride now the first thing you want to do when you get in a double steam car i've seen people much shorter back then you pull the hand brake because what that does is not only works the hand brake it also opens a drain which means any water that's in the cylinder that's left overnight will drain out because as you know water cannot compress and if you try to pull away with water in the cylinder boom you just break everything okay first thing we do is turn on the ignition and i turn on my water pump by pulling up this plunger you hear water pumping okay see then you see the pressure climbing okay that's water and it's about 500 put the pumps down and i turn on the burner and watch the window down there now we don't want to pull away until i have temperature reading here pressure shuts off at 7.50 see so i will crack it just a hair let some water out pressure goes away pressure temperatures start to build up again together as a unit now when you see that fire in the window you see the fire going in a circular motion that uh cream-colored paint you see on the inside that's a plasma coating that just works phenomenal it's good for about six or seven thousand degrees we put that it's a space it's kind of space shuttle material and uh we got them a plasma coating company they put it on with a laser and you can put on a piece of metal put that on there put the piece of metal in your hand hold the welding torch to it and the heat doesn't come through so it's worked terrifically for this because you've got as i said 3000 degrees if you want to know more about that plasma coating look up the other dopa we did the web shoot on we showed we showed you there how it was done okay i'm just trying to get a lot of heat in it now this one here is pressure you haven't seen the temperature needle yet it'll come up in a minute okay it's starting to come up now here it is see here we're at 250. top it off with water now if you want to go fast we use evian racing water no not really that's just being stupid and we're ready to motor the amazing thing is just how quiet it is they used to call steam the hand of god because the torque just pushes you you're not letting out a clutch or anything like that right now my temperature gauge about 650. see the hotter it gets the more i can close the throttle because i'm using the steam more efficiently i'm so glad we put the disc brakes on this thing oh my god i used to go sailing through red lights excuse me sorry just go away all right sorry steam car no those glass crystals i spoke about work perfectly kind of makes you wonder what uh what they can do with modern technology and computers and stuff with steam now there's no gas pedal in this car as you can see i'm controlling your throttle through this inner wheel the reason you have that is because there's no butterfly valve with a thousand pounds of steam pressure it can hold it open so this works on a sort of a screw-in screw-out technology here when you literally glide through modern traffic there's no noise imagine back in the 20s when cars are pretty noisy they backfired and all kinds of things like that this thing was dead silent okay now everything's getting nice and hot you'll notice i have almost 750 degrees of steam and a thousand pounds of pressure now that it's warming up i'm using my steam more efficiently so i'm using less fuel the amazing thing about this vehicle is you're able to maintain steam pressure you know the stanley steam car if you had 600 pounds and you're going down the road you could not make steam faster than you're using it this you can stanley you'd have 500 400 300 200 then you have to pull over build up a head of steam and pull away again with this thing you can go 65 70 miles an hour and maintain a thousand pounds or between maybe 800 and a thousand pounds of pressure that's vacuum there and when i shut off the throttle i'm now pulling water in it's such an eerie sensation to have so much torque it's so little throttle you just touch the throttle and you get this tremendous shove although this thing is only rated at 150 horsepower it's a thousand foot pounds of torque and then like a gas car watch it doesn't scare the horses see that horse never knew i went by i would say she's fully warmed up now and i just barely have to crack the throttle to maintain 40 or 50 miles an hour believe me this is a very fast car back in 1925 there weren't many cars that could do a mile a minute as you can see 60 miles an hour is no problem and the more you maintain that the higher your pressure will build again you know it's really an exciting car to drive you don't drive it so much it's sort of piloted it's uh it's just so different you know i consider it such an honor to be the custodian of this car because we've been able to to fix it and get it running properly it was done nice before but it didn't have a lot of miles on it we put about 3 000 miles on it uh we've been through two sets of pistons until we got something to fit exactly right and got the metallurgy right you know you got different metals expanding at different levels and it's very confusing it took a lot of work but i'm glad we got there the guys did a great job see when they pass the camera car there's no sound at all i bet howard hughes had a lot of fun in this car blowing off everything else on the road now even when it was new this car was something special because each owner saved it and preserved it for the next guy another cut of course went above and beyond when they restored this thing did just a beautiful job what we're going to do now is what they call blow down the engine or blow down the steam generator you do this every couple of hundred miles or maybe every second or third time you take it out this gets all the scale out of the pipes out of the steam drainer this is george swift george uh when we started george annoying about steam engines and he's become sort of a master doble mechanic he rebuilt this motor and got it to where it's running now so he's done a terrific job and uh he came from the internal combustion world so we had to but uh he picked it up pretty quickly and this is probably i think one of the best running doubles in the entire world when we take it out we put 3 000 miles on it and it runs terrific so we can thank george swift for that but he'll show you how we blow it down now go ahead judge now we do the double dance what that does is blow all the scale you know if you got hard water that blows all the scale out of it and now we're ready to uh put it back i can shut it off and i have enough power to get me back into the garage well i hope you like this little bit of history lesson on the steam cars you know i watch a lot of the car shows where the people yell and throw wrenches at each other and this kind of stuff and i don't quite get it so we try to highlight or educate a little bit to folks to some of this lost technology and i we hope you appreciate it we really enjoy doing it and uh we enjoy reading your comments and hearing from you so uh that's what we'll keep doing here we'll see you guys next week thanks you

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 3,522,898

Keywords: Jay Leno, Automotive, Cars, Garage, horsepower, Jay, Leno, mods, custom car, Speed, Fast, modded cars, mechanic, fastest car, Jay Leno's Garage, cars, exotic cars, interview, custom, Leno car, funny, Leno funny, car show, Rare, Motorcycles, racing, jay leno interview, auto, drive, power, fast, amazing, cool, the cars, vehicle, 1925 Dobl E-20 Steam Car, 1925 Doble

Id: rUg_ukBwsyo

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 13 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/ZeosPantera]

I am so jealous. I REALLY love this thing. I can't even imagine what a modern, lightweight version could accomplish.

[u/yoda17]

2 million BTU (per hour??) is 800HP or 600kw.