How To Start A Steam Car 1909 White Model M | Jay Leno's Garage

you know this is really a classic edwardian scientific instrument that's really what it is it's a brilliant design i mean it looks hysterical going down the road looks like a stagecoach if you like trains you'd love one of these because it's basically a train oh here comes a train let's hit him with a horn hear that see that they know brothers in arms welcome the episode of jay leno's garage today we're featuring a 1909 model m white steam car this was the most powerful version of this car this is what the white house used 40 horsepower uh these came in 10 20 30 and 40 horsepower 40 of course being the biggest now it's a little noisy out here today it's cause we're right next to the airport and there's a lot of planes flying normally we shoot inside but because we have an open flame and these get a little messy we're doing this one outside but we're gonna take you from complete dead cold to starting a white steam car show you exactly how long it takes it's not the end of the world but it takes a little while here so we've gone into the history of white steam cars quite a bit on this on this website if you go jay leno's garage steam cars you can see some of the other ones that will explain the history and the back story today we're going to show you uh how this thing works how it operates it's pretty interesting first thing we're going to do is uh let's open up the engine a bit here so you can see what's going on uh you all know george judge our a steam mechanic george is going to give us a hand here you can do these by yourself but it's not it's not bad to have somebody with you what you've got to do is you've got to pressurize the fuel you've got to add water to the tank you've got to put water in the steam generator it's a steam generator not a boiler a boiler a stanley has a boiler this has a steam generator what that means is kind of like a tankless water heater you have coils okay and the fire comes up through the coil and the water goes through the coil the coils glow red hot and it makes steam instantly so you're using the steam as you're making it with a stanley you're heating up 15 gallons you can which can take as long as 20 minutes or half an hour the advantage as when the fire goes out you have all that steam in reserve nice thing about this is you're making the steam you're using this theme as you're making it now what george is doing now oh come on over here let's show you what we're doing right here we have we have three fuels you have oil for the engine you have water to make the steam uh you have gasoline to heat the water and you also have pilot fuel which could also be gasoline but we use hexane because there's a low carbon fuel what the pilot does like a pilot light you'd have in your stove you only turn your stove here click pilot light's lit okay same kind of deal let me show you those two tanks come on back here this is the fuel tank which has about 15 gallons or so and it's split this side of it is the pilot fuel uh this is when we put the hexane in now what we're doing is we're pressurizing the pilot fuel george how much pressure do we have on the pilot i can't see the gauge i was hoping you'd tell me okay let me take a look at the gauge okay 25 george bring it up to about 35. now see if you're using this car every day you wouldn't have to do this but whenever we take this car out we bring it back shut off the fire drain all the fluids get all the air out of it so there's no chance of an accident okay about another a little bit more all right that's good there george hold that for one second let me close i'm coming back here i am closing the pilot okay all right george bring us up to about is the pilot open i close it here it's not open yet no you can open it half a turn three quarters all right okay give us about 55-60 pounds george on the main fuel [Music] you got it yep 40. take it up to about 60. where are we we are at 45 let me explain to you how this works okay the black needle is pressure uh the red needle is fire how much how much fire you have going basically how many pounds okay we're just about to give just another second is too good where stanley's get about one mile per gallon on water these do a lot better you can get as much as five six seven eight uh miles per gallon on the gallon of water with these depending on ambient temperature [Music] what i'm doing now is making sure there's water in the coils because you don't want to heat the coils without water in them and i want fresh water without any oil in it right now okay that looks pretty good good uh yeah i'm gonna shut this george okay shutting that now we're gonna fill up the water tank which is in the floor that holds about 17 18 gallons maybe something like that okay george is now filling the tank i got that now i know this seems like a lot of work which i guess it is but compared to gas cars today remember don't forget the uh the electric starter the self starter hadn't been invented yet so we might be sitting and doing pulling by hand and setting choke and setting magneto and there's always a chance you could break your arm whereas this it's well i suppose you get scalded to death or burn to death too like well okay okay it's pretty much pretty much 50 50. but when this thing's running it's worth it you'll see what i'm talking about all right now i'm gonna light the pilot you don't want to wear your good clothes when you got a steam car first thing i do is open the pilot window so i can see if there's a flame what i'm doing here is i'm preheating i'm preheating the pilot liquid gasoline comes in hits the pilot and it turns into a gaseous state and then it's forged under pressure into the burner where it's burnt to make the steam okay here we go okay we got a pilot get any residual fuel out of there well it sounds pretty good down to charge sounds good to me that pilot's now is gonna they'll close this pilot door now the pilot is also heating the vaporizer right and that's vaporizing the fuel so when that stops dripping fuel will be good [Music] okay got a nice healthy pilot when you can hear it going then you know okay we let that warm up for about 10 minutes and then uh who knows you might be able to drive away all right we're getting steam out of there notice bridging water out of the cylinders this this valve opens the cylinder drain you don't want to roll the engine over full of water you'll hydraulically on the stay on the cylinder the drain tucks it's closed now now it's open that's really wet steam can you hit your main burner opening your main burner hey ah see how quiet these engines are once they're running you can idle right down to 25 rpm if you want look here we go look at that that's pretty good these are fascinating things all kinds of torque you don't really need a transmission of the steam car but white's had it just because these were big heavy cars this is the 40 horsepower model yeah it's the start on a steep hill or something it's good to have top speed in this thing's about 60 65. anything over that gets a little dicey yeah it's uh with that big flat windshield that's a giant airbrush we fold the windshield down george i think we're about ready to go all right let me put these hoods on [Music] that is the backfire we don't like backfires that's cool what we got here okay this pumps into the crankcases pumps into the uh directly into the cylinder because water is not a lubricant so you need oil okay so you've got a gauge there to show you how much oil you have these are your two this is fuel pressure and fire you'll see that in a minute right now we have just a hair under 50 pounds of fuel pressure that's your steam gauge there there's your clock there's your tripometer and your odometer this has what they call a compound engine you have a high pressure cylinder and a low pressure cylinder okay the sampling valve when you push that down that allows both pistons to wobble down at the same time to turn it into a simple engine basically that's the way that works so that gives you a little more torque if you're pulling away from a hill or something of that nature uh this is here is uh it's kind of a hookup you press it down a click and it cuts the stroke so you don't use quite as much steam this is your brake this is your throttle right here this wheel and this will cause your steering wheel here the one under my heel is the whistle and this is the fuel valve here when you open that you're getting your fuel directly from the fuel tank see we fired up using the pilot fuel uh once the thing's hot then you shut off the pilot then you start using the main fuel okay i've got about 600 well 500 pounds of steam 50 pounds of fuel pressure my temperature is about 525 it should be 700 but that'll get up there pretty quick release the brake let's put that in forward and open the throttle feel quiet you know the cool thing about a steam car is once it's hot you're up for the day as long as you got fire you can go i mean actually it took a little while to get it going but that's okay i don't know there's something very romantic about these things the way they just sort of chug along and the white is the most sophisticated steam car ever built it rivals the doble in fact much of abner doble's steam car is based on the white and he realized the white was developed oh decades decades before doble so it's pretty impressive you know it says right in the manual do not attempt to modify the white in any way it cannot be made any more efficient than it is now and it just sort of makes me laugh but you know it's true unlike a stanley stanley runs on steam this runs on superheated steam now i look at my gauge and my steam is really my steam temperature is 700 degrees which is perfect for stupid superheated steam superheated steam acts like a turbocharge it gives you so much more power it's amazing how efficient it is you can go about 150 miles on a tank of water and a tank of fuel as i said before as with a stanley you only get one mile per gallon this you can do pretty well you can go maybe five five miles six miles per gallon something like that and when it runs well you just put more water in it candy roosevelt was the first person to ride in an automobile and it was in a white steam car exactly like this same color same model same everything i'm sorry that was howard tapp howard taft uh roosevelt rode in an earlier i think in 1906 white and taff was taff was known as the motoring president see as the steam gets hotter and hotter the engine becomes more efficient like now i'm closing the throttle i'm actually going faster because i'm making more steam pressure does that make sense see i'm closing the throttle and i went from 400 to 500 pounds of steep bridge because of superheated steam it's more efficient 40 is a nice cruising speed that's what i'm doing now this'll do 65 but yeah it gets a little dicey and the brakes are nothing to write home about but you know it's really so opposite of a gasoline car because with these you're trying to keep the heat in for the gasoline truck car you're trying to get the heat out anywhere heat is escaping with a steam car you're losing horsepower and i said before unlike a stanley this is a condensing car which means the water circulates goes through the condenser what looks like a radiator it cools the steam turns it back into water again and that helps you get better mileage as i said earlier this is the 40 horsepower this is the biggest engine they ever built this is the end of the line by 1910 that was the end of steam cars and white turned into the white trucking company and started building uh you know trucks and gas automobiles as well which are actually quite good if you go to some of the earlier white steam car videos we've done that'll explain the more the history and exactly how the engine works you have a diagram in there i didn't want to repeat all that information when you find a nice piece of road where there's no stop lights highway's a little busy but a nice two-lane empty road up in the hills are great these like to run between 30 and 45 miles an hour that's about where they're most comfortable uh as i said brakes are a little dodgy so you have to be careful but if you like trains you'd love one of these because it's basically a train without track you know this is really a classic edwardian scientific instrument that's really what it is it's a brilliant design a roland white invented this kind of steam generator as opposed to a boiler it has a thing called a flow motor which regulates the fuel so it keeps the it turns the fire on and off so you're constantly not turning off the fuel the thing gets too hot when it gets about 700 to 750 degrees that's where it likes to be i mean it looks hysterical going down the road looks like a stagecoach i mean look at this windshield which is like a mclaren air brake you know that's got to take 10 miles an hour off your top end right there but when you fold the windshield down you can actually get a bit more speed out of it oh here comes a train look let's hit him with a horn look at that hear that see that they know brothers and arms the nice thing is it can't overheat that's the cool part when your engines run at 800 degrees ah 10 15 degrees in the temperature not gonna bother you that much you know white built over 12 000 of these cars and sadly during world war one most got melted down because of the high aluminum content and uh in in the in the engine you know they use high quality metals so everything all the brass they all got destroyed and when the internal combustion engine came in that was seen as the future and these were just thrown away so there's only about 167 worldwide left which is set stanley only built about 3 000 cars but more stanley seems to be around because people tended to push those into barns and forget about them whereas these these were rounded up and the government bought a lot of them to use during the war during world war one actually they did use quite a few white steam tarps but most of the civilian ones got melted down once again i'm sorry this is not as in-depth technically on as some of the other ones but we've covered all that before so if you want to see more about it go to the other white steam cars that we've done on this page i just wanted to drag this one out because it's the biggest one we haven't done it it's 40 horse and i thought it was time to do one of my own cars again you know there's a calmness to driving this thing you just kind of just chuffs along you think you'd be bored to death going 40 miles an hour but there's a lot to do on this thing anyway i hope you enjoyed this little trip with a white steam car something different you know 100 years ago they thought this might be the future obviously they were wrong so we'll see what happens thanks you guys and we'll see you next week

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 297,429

Keywords: Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, compares cars, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, car gear, McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, Camaro Z28, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, episode, ford, corvette, tour, dodge, steam car, steamer, white house, the beast, william howard taft, steam punk, edwardian, art deco, carriage, historic vehicle, alternative energy, theodore roosevelt, secret service, brass era, car enthusiast

Id: pw2Tm9o6fiQ

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SpinningFeat]

Pretty awesome !

[u/SmoochTalk]

That was really interesting, good watch.