Restoration Blog: 1910 Model O-O White Steam Car, Final Edition - Jay Leno's Garage

well in that episode of Jay Leno's Garage we've been this website before you know we're huge steam enthusiasts and I'm a big fan of the white steam car made by the white sewing machine company this is a 1910 double-o model this was the end of the line they stopped building steam cars after this and maybe built a few in 11 I'm not sure this is the 20 horse model and they built a 40 horse model if you've seen my other white steam cars I have to 1907 a 20 horse here it is here and a 30 horse which is like twice as big I mean an enormous thing this one is a little more sophisticated than or a little simpler I know if it's more sophisticated this does not have the sliding D valve which I'll show you later this is what they call a joy valve type mechanism it's a little easier to deal with a little simpler to build this one has all steel frame whereas the others had a lot of wood in the body as well this would be a more modern steam car now when we got this thing it ran they've been owned by a gentleman in New York who had had it close to 50 years a lot of pieces were rusted a lot of people's pieces were worn out so we really had to sort of go through and read the redo the whole thing well here here's a little bit on the restoration blocks take a look people always amazed at just how tiny a steam engine is take a look at this thing we pulled it out clean everything off inside repainted the block it's two cylinders high compression low compression piston it's a compound engine which means it uses the steam over again we've had to make a lot of new pieces for it one thing this car really needed was a new burner our other one who patched together was a hundred years old and the steel would pretty much just disintegrated a hundred years have just gone through the four seasons and cycling and the whole thing just rotted out Robin handmade this caught me the original and look what a beautiful job he did you've got all sorts of baffles underneath here your gasoline goes in here it ignites and this burner the flame comes out here and heats your boiler and this thing it was broken here was patched here was all screwed up it was coming apart we were losing heat out every corner this is real craftsmanship this is our condenser and what the condenser does in the steam car is the water turns into steam goes through the engine goes back into what looks like a radiator but it's actually condenser as it comes through here there's a fan that cools it it turns the steam back into water and use it over and over again what happened is after years and years these pieces get rotted out this is aluminum we made a new piece here the guys did a beautiful job on that as you can see right up here this is all new so now it won't leak like it did before and corrode because with a white steam car everything has to be almost hospital clinically clean under the floor here everything was just rusted out and fallen apart this controls your temperature and the edge you can see it's been welded and a bracket holding it on and just you know a hundred years of repairs so we have to remake this and we did it on our rapid prototyping machine and then we made it in our CNC this is a control for the pressure and the fuel and as you can see it's been patched and welded you see it was broken off here Bernard made a new one in plastic to see how it fit and we made a brand new piece out of stainless steel so this is good for another hundred years or so the original water tank rotted away we decided to remake a new tank and do the whole thing in in copper this is a water skimmer here this goes on the side like this as it fills with water the oil stays on top of the water goes in here and it catches in there and as you see Bernard has done a wonderful job making all the pieces for this here these are all the various lines and that we will redo in stainless for this white steam car we made a new gas tank because besides being sort of dirty the old one can you see look at that you can literally after a while stick your finger through it this tank is pressurized so you've got 70 pounds of pressure and a little bit of leak I think that equals bomb I'm not mistaken especially when you have gasoline so what we did is we cut the old fittings off George and the guys mounted into the new tank we cleaned it up and we have a brand new gas tank in here this is our feed water heater remember we made a brand new one of these for our 30 horsepower white using our 3d printer but this one was okay it doesn't seem to be leaking took the engine apart cleaned it up George went through it repack 2 with insulation we had to make a new valve guide oh that's right new valve guide a little noise are the simple involved there right we reconnected this linkage for the cylinder drains which never does is you turn that at this water a condensation in the cylinder before you start it so you don't hydraulic obviously water is not compressible so it would if you try to compress it something would break so what that does is that much like a exhaust lift there on a car that lets the or the water flow out this is a brilliant piece of engineering by Rowland white called the flow motor when the flow motor is working properly oh my god it transforms the car you get double almost triple of power instead of running at 400 degrees temperature you run it 800 degrees at 750 Ana degrees superheated steam and the car takes on a new life your water is extended by I would say 50% and the way the flow motor works is you have this piston and what this does through steam pressure and temperature regulates the amount of gasoline that goes to the burner and the amount of water that goes into the boiler and a lot of people call them flash boilers it's not it's a single tube boiler and what happens is as the water comes in instead of heating up water slowly it essentially turns into steam the minute it goes through the six hundred feet of coil now a stanley is like a giant tea kettle heating up fifteen gallons of water at one time and it takes maybe half an hour for the white you're only heating up I'd say to three quarts not not too much but it might be as much as a gallon see what this does here is this moves up and down depending on your pressure can you see that ridge that's all the amount of water that goes into the boiler as this piston moves in and out a small amount of water goes in there just just flashes into superheat seem at 800 degrees and if this is wrong as it has been on all my whites they were running not very well on this double oh here we finally got it perfect and you can go 100 miles on a tank of water which is the phloem what is not working properly probably go what maybe 15 yeah 20 miles sometimes because you're just using too much water so the real trick is to kind of lap this in so it just barely moves on its own and the steam pressure allows it to open and close the valves that allow gasoline and water to flow into the boiler now we're having problems with the big 30 horse white George has got it all apart we had a bit of a knock the piston was just loose on the rod 800 degrees of steam temperature and 600 pounds of pressure boy that's going to reverberate mix-a-lot and makes a lot of noise it seems funny the high compression would be the smaller piston you think the high compression would be the bigger piston but it's not that's basically the way that works and we'll get that running just like this one but let's go back over here again to the car come on now first thing you want to do before firing one of these up is make sure you have water in your in your steam generator or your boiler is you'd call it in the old days you just get in your hand pump at 50 or 60 times what we do is we like to drain everything every night so we start from scratch each time so I'm going to push this thing over to the door first we'll put some air in it to to pressurize our fuel tanks your fuel is forced in by air pressure as is your pilot fuel let's push it over here pretty light car it's nice to have a light car because you're pushing these things all the time okay there's your white engine two cylinders little tiny thing not particularly impressive but it makes a lot of power as you'll see in just a minute first thing we're going to do is pressurize our air tank we want to bring that up to about 40 say 40 that's good normally what you do on this is this is your pilot here you'd open this valve gasoline would fill up this cup you'd light it with a match and the heat here would heat the pilot so when the fuel comes in in a liquid form it becomes a gaseous form by the time it hits the pilot now you could do that and light it with a match and wait five or ten minutes but it's easier just to kind of hit it with the blowtorch here the liquid gasoline will go through that pilot as soon as it hits the heat it'll vaporize and turn into gas that's probably all we need you got a judge open yeah you're open okay now I need to find the pilot hole here now can you see the pilot flame in there I'm going to close that little door I have a nice strong pilot what that's doing is heating the vaporizer so the fuel that runs through there before it goes into the book this here will shoot it into the burner to heat up the coil what I'm doing is letting that sit for a few minutes and warm up as you can see virtually maintenance-free George is hooking a hose up to it on the other side that'll fall some water through the boiler here we've got a little water here I probably didn't even need to do this but we're fair amount of hair in there yeah I see I was driving this car yesterday and this water is still hot that's pretty good much now what I'm going to do now is open this valve right here what that does is is open up the ports but any water that would have condensed any steam that would have condensed overnight was back into water as you know water cannot be compressed so you won't open that valve so when the engine starts to turn you don't hydraulic and Bend a rod or something because you can't obviously compress water so that will force the water out now we're going to go back into be catacombs of the jail on a garage where we have a bunch of stuff hidden away it's a long walk are we there yet but I'm going to show you now is a very very ambitious team project this is a another 1910 white steam car project these are all the various parts we have everything we need here Oh looks like there's a hole in the water tank we don't have to pick that there's some more parts in here come on take a look the real trick is trying to buy as many parts as you can find this one will go together slowly we have the chassis next door as well well I think our pilot should be plenty toasty now that car should be ready to start come on should be about ready to fire up we this is our firing up valve right here now steam cars took a little longer to start over gas cars of the era assuming that your gas car started on the first try you know on a cold winter's day or whatever you be cranking it you could break your arm and the thing would backfire you had to set the choke yet to set the mag get to set the advance in the spark with a steam car you just sort of build a little fire and wait okay I've got 200 pounds you got that up and charge get some steam out of there should be good to go okay let's see what happens water water I'm going to close that up not sealing the steam chamber I'm going to do is put on the automatic this is the flow motor this will control the amount of fuel and fire going into it you see how quiet they are how many engines can really hi to look like five our p.m. as you can see my temperature here is only a 350 degrees I want to see about 750 to 800 degrees this is the fire that's the flow motor controlling the fire as soon as this pressure gauge hits 600 degrees the flow motor will shut off the fire so I don't over pressurize the boiler it'll hit 600 see the fire going down the fire is now shut off I really want to drop the steam pressure I'll open this in the fire coming back up again my temperatures at 500 degrees now we're just about ready to take it out for a spin look at that in the mirror 15 minutes you're ready to pull out of your driveway weight is probably the only car that I know selling american-made with a transmission you have a transaxle if you push it this way for low and all the way forward for high gear forward and reverse is right here that reverses the engine so unlike a gas car for the steam guy you actually reverse the direction the engine is turning okay we've got 550 degrees that's certainly enough to pull away this is your emergency brake here that you just phenomena let's put our side panels on we'll think of a ride now you know the white steam guys the Stanley guys they kind of throw rocks at each other once in a while and each guy has an advantage the Stanley's are faster but it's a bit like to taught us in the hair with the Stanley you heating up that 15 gallons of water you give a full-throttle you maybe go 50 60 miles an hour then you're out of steam then you got to pull over and build up and the steam and then the white guy the white steam car guys go Chuck in my bio this particular one once I hit 750 800 degrees temperature using superheated steam she will hold 35 to 40 miles an hour all day long and the condenser works very good condenser and this actually works better I think that the condenser and the Doble I went all over the place the other day was fairly cool and they only use about two gallons of water so I was getting pretty good water mileage okay this thing is starting to warm up now see I can close the throttle and actually increase my speed because I get more pressure and I'm using superheated steam my steam temperature is now seven hundred eighty degrees and I'm holding 38 miles an hour the Stanley's are actually bit more quiet than the whites because they don't have as many moving parts these are actually a lot of fun to drive they're quiet they're really torque kind of fun given to the speedometer on this thing speedo only goes to 50 but you can pin it pretty easy don't forget when this thing was built there were no paved road just so much torque just the slightest crack of the throttle this as I said is a compound engine whereas the Stanley is a simple engine now you can turn this into what they call a simple engine by pressing on the simply pedal what that means is to apply Steve to both the high pressure the low-pressure cylinder at the same time so that gives you a little extra power to pull away you might hear a slight chuff I have a little steam leak somewhere I've got to find that now although the English were really the first to utilize steam the American steam cars are really much better the white the Stanley the Doble I think they were far superior to anything that was being built in England so you might say that the England was a birthplace of steam but America was the nursery and of course the great thing is they can overheat see where's your Stanley might have run out of water by now this will hold steam pressure constant as I've mentioned the other videos these were the first white house cars White's were the first military vehicles because they were so dependable in white steamers actually went LA to San Francisco was a three-day journey and it was a regular shuttle service up and back but that Flo motor is such a brilliant invention I mean Roland white was really I think a genius there's no electronics is nothing it's all done by pressure and temperature you know other steam cars you had to open and close valves if it got too hot pumping more water do this do this this was the first sort of fully automatic steam car this is the car anybody in the family could drive you just light a match get it nice and warm and it's really nothing to do this car is got fifty nine thousand eight hundred ninety-six miles on it now mitad Li we did go through the motor and everything but that's still pretty good she is a 101 years old when you climb a hill you want to do this maybe shoot a little extra steam oil in there and as you can see right now we have no fire the fire is off we have 50 pounds of fuel pressure I have 700 pounds of steam and I got 750 degrees temperature here's the cause is your throttle right here the reason you don't have a pedal is with a steam car you've got you know 800 pounds of pressure so you don't wanna have something could stick to the floor this works like a worm and screw type deal the open and closed the real trick to operating these is temperature whites depend more on temperature than almost any other kind of steam car you want to keep that up to 750 800 degrees see with superheated steam you don't need a lot of pressure even with 300 pounds 400 pounds of pressure we're still holding 45 miles an hour unless you break your arm just windshield wiper will work all the time every time now Jim the gentleman I got this farm in New York he's passed on sadly but I still want to thank him for keeping this car for 50 years it's a great piece of American history so Jim thank you very much and his buddy Lauren who helped me get the car I want to thank him as well hope you enjoy the ride in our steam car here as you can see that two seater one there were all those parts in those two rooms at 1910 white roadster we got our work cut out for that's going to be a while we're storing that one but we're going to see we get that one up to a mile a minute we got special gears through the rear end and a few other trick things for it but just a wonderful car to drive mechanically now I think she's about as good as she's going to get anyway I hope you like this theme toughie let us know if you enjoy these steamed ones in the comments section love to hear your feedback see you guys next week thanks again

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 398,542

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, steamer, restoration blog, steam

Id: wKX1KgIkBwg

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Ukani]

I don't think I've ever seen Jay Leno be serious before. I think I like him better when he isn't trying to be funny.

[u/09384980980934]

The way this video wraps up feels like a commercial.

I wish Leno could put these into production as modern commuter cars, because now I'm thinking of all the great water-mileage and how cheap it would be to drive one of these to work..