Jay Leno's Steam Machines | Behind the Scenes

you know the first thing before we go into this steam section is you're gonna drive steam cars you have to put on steam clothes that's why that's why you look marvelous absolutely did you erase that no that's just actually someone gave that to me and we're sort of putting it together this is sort of the steam section over here we got a bunch of steam cars this is an early stanley this is a 1909 what they call 20 horsepower model uh this one here is the little faster model it's a 30 horse and the amazing thing about this is all wood this is wood that's wood yeah it's all steam bent the only thing metal is the hood everything else wood chassis here these are wood poles everything i didn't realize that yeah this is what they call a dry engine this one you had to get out and about every 50 miles just squirt all the bearings and get back in there's no there's no oil in the engine per se because steamers move so slowly now are these actual louvers are they all just painted them oh just painted louvers again just to give the appearance of gas cars you know um what you do with a steamer is you have your pilot right here and you heat up your pilot just like in fact we got a fire going in there already you can see the fire going in there oh yeah it's just like a hot water heater that just keeps your boiler hot yeah and what happens is then when you open your fuel your fuel comes down here as a liquid hits the pilots immediately becomes a gas and as the gas is shot under pressure into your burner oh yeah that's kind of how it works it takes about 20 minutes to get it going see all it is let me is that a little warm that's a little warm oh nice and toasty what you do is you it's not the prettiest thing underneath here but it's basically just see a big yeah i don't imagine they showed these off at cruising or something let me pop the hood on this baby oh yeah just the big hot water heater but it's quiet i mean it's running right now you know and when you pull away in a steamer here we'll we'll pull it up to the door nothing electric on this car everything is mechanical all pumps you do everything by hand you pump it up by hand you pump up fuel pressure by hand they're carbide lights then carbide well yeah you like those with a match and then as you uh then once you're rolling see if you look under the floor here you have a whole series of [Music] is all your pumps you see all your pumps are under here you have to be a plumber to work on this not not a mechanics really uh you know steamers are great that's your whistle right here you're actually pressing my pants with that that's right that's right that's what it does let's see once you're moving well it's all sort of direct drive really there's no engine there's no there's no transmission around there's no clutch there's no gears your engine is connected directly to your wheels and once you're moving once you're rolling all these pumps will begin to pump on their own once a wheel you'll see here we'll we'll take it out for a spin all right this will be a first for me also i'll throw this in the bank right now these were like two two-cylinder but since every stroke is a power stroke it's like a v8 let me go around this side now see i'm pumping up fuel do you see the gauges [Music] this is fuel pressure i've got 100 pounds of fuel pressure once you hit 140 pounds your regulator shuts off but once you're rolling it will pump for itself first thing you do is you clear the cylinders you get all your water out all aboard but once you shut it down it's dead quiet hey john over the door this is what it sounds like yeah it's well it's quiet in this once it really warms up see unbelievable yeah you make no noise at all it's a stealth car oh yeah you can you know my wife and i sometimes go to the sanctuary near our house and you can sneak right up through the birds and stuff it sings it's like a kettle yeah man it's quiet yeah where'd you how'd you learn how to drive it even who can teach you how to drive this stanley's you're kind of like i said they're just great tinkerer cars but you see once you're moving there's no viewers there's no transmission jay what a trip make sure it's still got a fire in the hole here i'm not getting anything let's prick it it's running and they're good huh are we clean yeah all right let me bring up 240 pounds here we go [Laughter] [Music] going in getting a clean burn let me get to 140 and then we'll because i don't even have 300 pounds of pressure yet she's pretty quiet you sure we're getting full uh yeah does your jets get clogged yeah oh there's another one good steam men have no eyebrows that could be another book type actually okay let's see what we got now better there we go now we're singing on both carbon it's a nice picture give me the prickage anna it's a family show jay i'll take him around the block and then we'll come back remember don't kill the host see no clutch clean steam when it's wet yeah got the dry steam now it's actually pretty good suspension too oh it's not bad now these never came with any sort of a windshield other than oh yeah they meant all different models the later ones had a traditional type body and windshield but you could climb any hill and you didn't have to do it backwards good leg room you know you thought the other one screwed up your mustache you ain't seen nothing yet let's see they're quiet they are it's amazing the engine's still cold take a little while to get a full head yeah so there's really no with no clutch or anything there's no there's really no coasting in this right throttle on throttle up now when you're tweaking that what are you actually doing i'm increasing the amount of fuel going to the burner so you're running now about is that 400 pounds of steam yeah she should be at 550 about where you want to be these things i mean did they ever blow up no that's a lot of rumors steamers can't move up you can pop off valves or you'll just crack as you open the throttle she'll keep pulling as much as you want to go i do 70 in this on the freeway no problem i mean it's like sitting at a bar stool but when you realize we're carrying about a thousand pounds extra weight it's amazing then you got a pedal down here you do what you hook up what that does is that cuts the amount of steam and it cuts the valve to half opening so you don't waste all your steam once you're rolling you don't need all that steam the only thing you don't have in steam cars is brakes i was going to ask you about that what you do in emergency if you're not getting enough braking you just throw in reverse throw it in your verse open your steam valve like that if he stops like a train so i was going to say again that's pretty much locomotive technology right it is uncommon the only thing you don't have is not local it's that locum and this is the 20 horse one yeah the other one's called a gentleman speedy roadster and what was this called this is just called the r model a gentleman's speedy roadster but you can do 70 on the freeway and the other one all day long how often did you have to fill it up with water not be 35 miles anybody behind us uh yeah you got a pretty good sized truck but he's letting you in hey you guys are stuck it's not gonna help you out you're clear now they don't always how i just like them too [Music] that's what you call a winker down there since water is not a lubricant or at least not a good lubricant yeah what that does is it shoots a dollop of steam oil which is about 600 weight into each each spray of water gets shot with a dollop of oil so it's a carrier it's a carrier rather steam each as the steam goes into the cylinder there's a drop of oil goes in with it so that lubricates everything clears but you've got 700 pounds of torque from rest so you see where it pulls right from the dead yeah i see there isn't a gas car that could shift this quick back no way so you just keep pulling and pulling so they probably had a pretty good race record oh 127 in 1906 stanley hill was the world speed record he does hope the light turns green because you're not going to make it come on baby yeah it's pretty close people yell at me because they think it's smoke coming out the back but it's just hey it's on fire oh yeah they catch fire all the time that's a pretty common seriously these dudes yeah because of the oh just leaks and whatnot and their wood there's one a few cars that can burn you and scald you to death at the same time was that in the promotional materials or well the promotional material is hilarious because they say why these are better than an exploding engine car and i'll call it they call it exploding engine i love that sound see what you do with a steamer is the exact opposite of a regular car hey guys because this car if you find heat escaping you patch it up you try to keep as much heat in there instead of getting it out you make all your power first as steam and then you deliver it to your engine whereas the internal combustion office you make it as you use it that noisy gas car exploding engine car i believe they called it right well the best part about this thing is when you pull up to a railroad track and you pull the horn people go because they think you know i think a train is good hey guys once you start to warm up then it gets really quiet oh yeah you you really only hear it under acceleration right you know you can run a steam car all day put your hand in the crank case and grab the rods and they're warm but they're never hot because they turn so slowly and there's nothing to do you know you know when you realize in the old days you had your spark gas magneto did this one you just worked you got it fired up you just went right the thing that put the stanley out of business that was going to be my question was the uh self-starter i mean so you could just go in a car and you could turn something and drive away because with this you could go in like the pilot go back have breakfast come out your car's ready to go you didn't stand there all day doing this breaking your arm yeah plus these will climb any hill 1899 one of these clown climb mount washington which was the steepest peak in the eastern united states like this just straight up you're not affected by altitude you're not affected you know and they're real easy they're fun they probably actually you know regular cars you measure in thousands this everything's intense that's big enough that's fine yeah yeah i imagine actually work better at higher altitudes which would also be different than an internal combustion i mean you got lower atmospheric pressure you get more bang out of the steam itself you know they were running they were driving civil war cannons out in the field during the civil war i mean you had steam technology yeah guy in england 1803 richard trevor thick would think his name was he had a steam coach he was running the trouble is it just it's a bit like the electric you hit a wall and you can't get past that you've got to carry two fuels yep your your weight uh your power to weight ratio is constantly shifting because you're using water although the double later steam cars use the same water over let's go and then they needed a heavy condenser you needed an oil separator and they got so heavy that i wasn't really pregnant okay so that's why they needed the oil separator because they were they were winking all the time right the oil just goes out the back goes out in the steam but once you're running you never stall yeah you always got steam in reserve now even so even when i blow lots of people coming the other way the trainer oh my god oh my god you see why it's made of wood when you go over where our tracks because it flexes well it's supposed to flex yeah the exact opposite of everything you know about a car exactly oh flexible chassis that's what you want to have it's a it's a rolling contradiction jay it's great at night you like the gas lamps you light your dash light [Music] and they're great in the summer because you can't overheat well that's true you know i see people overheating on the freeway you idiot could i borrow some of that steam you idiot sorry it's a bit of a shocker 1909 totally freaked the dog out yeah i didn't see the dog i just gotta go along [Music] hello maybe i'll i'll blow it down for you i'll show you what that is what's happening oh yeah let me step back i smell raw fuel that coming out of right there we go it smells like raw fuel to me let's shut it down okay see what we got going here we getting that is that coming in i'm smelling it now too huh i'm smelling it too yeah but i gotta yeah i think i got fire no i mean i got fire let me see what's going on okay see what we got going here [Music] huh it does how much air you put in balance the oh oh the uh no i put 20 in by hand and then i did the rest by uh see look i'm gonna show what we're sending in there well it's not just not we got a fire now i can't tell looks like we do we don't see one okay shut down uh hang on okay give that a second yeah i think pilots out let me see hang on hang on athletic this is where you go and it goes full try to get as much uh try to get as much fuel out of there as you can hang on give it a sec let it sit for a minute all right all right it's windy we're okay great okay all right all right wearing a hole all right fire in the hole john give me pilot filing on all right we outside okay we're fine there she goes captain i she climbed [Music] so i'll show you how much power you got in one of these so all right pile it down and you got to release pressure in the tank here's your gas tank back here the way this work works is you got two balls right here one's filled with air once filled with gas okay so under pressure want to pressurize the air right and then as you're moving you're always pumping air in which works your fuel pressure then when you're finished with it you can hold pressure all night if you want or you can release it and you'll see the fuel pressure gauge drop and they're no smoking ban yeah i was going to say throwing a little bit of gas there i imagine and you release your pressure poof see if our pilot's out heard it pop one more time yeah just make sure see this is your pressurized pilot fuel this leaves your pilot on like a you can run your pilot all night or all week or all winter if you want a lot of guys ran them all winter keep it warm right yeah hard to kill a steamer the monster refuses to die a little bit left they sound like a jet plane when they're doing this well you said these things are quiet that's the little left in there just get with that residual now hey don't put that on the toolbox got it show you what kind of pressure this is what you do at night you blow it off you might want to stand back okay you got to open all of these so that's how you clean out your boiler well that's pretty cool yeah there's a lot of power in there yeah it seems like a knife you know superheated steam well it cuts like cut you right in half you always leave enough so you can fire it back up no you don't need to fire it back up or just put it away you mean yeah oh so this just leftover stuff you're running on now [Music] foreign see how quiet they are it's unbelievable i've never seen one run band breaks in back was there even any brake in front brakes we don't need no stinking brakes and you just leave that open and it blows off any residual that is so cool so you get the idea i yeah i think i get it i mean they're great fun they're just compared to turning the key you see why they went out of business i understand but for sheer power and torque yeah it's just so so constant you can you can spin those wheels in the tire on open throttle you can just twist them right in the rubber because that's how much power you got going through there it's 700 pounds from rest 700 pounds from 2 rpm just and it doesn't it can't weigh too much does it weigh 800 pounds maybe a little less but see that's the trouble is your weight constantly shifts as you're using water you know so they're you know it was a challenge yeah that's the really fast one that blew up and so that's what happens yeah well they all get driven pretty hard but then you fix them and then you play with them yeah they fix them and then you play with them again have we got it

Channel: MyClassicCarTV

Views: 124,663

Rating: 4.9413109 out of 5

Keywords: My Classic Car, Classic Car, Dennis Gage, Jay Leno, Steam Car, Jay Leno Steam Cars, Jay Leno Garage, American Steam Car, Vintage Steam Cars, Starting Steam Car, Driving Steam Car, Driving Jay Leno Steam Car, Jay Leno Starting Steam Car, Jay Leno's Steam Car Collection, jay leno's stanley steamer, jay leno's 1909 stanley steamer, stanley steam car, stanley steamer, steam power, driving steam car, jay leno driving steam car, jay leno's garage, 1909 stanley steamer, leno, cars

Id: fiTka1Ue5Xs

Length: 31min 17sec (1877 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021