StanleyRegister

Looks like he's leaking some exhaust from his cutout.

The White in the earlier picture was ok in the cold - the steam exhaust was condensed and recirculated, warming up all the water lines. But this Stanley was at risk - nothing to warm up the small lines coming from & retrning to the supply tank

Snow White... and the Two Regular-size Guys.

Oakland, CA, summer 1923. Doble Steam Motors had a showroom at 422 14th St from June to August.

Sept. 18, 1942, Lamb's Tavern. Front to rear, Alec Ulmann, John Fetterolf, Sam Baily. Sometime dual spares seem ok on smaller cars.

Boy. does this car look right.

That little steam van is the cutest thing since sliced bread, or something! It appears to be a Grout, manufactured in the same city as Whitman's grocery. I'm a little mystified about how they managed to operate that control lever along the entire quadrant. A little digging shows that Grout built a dozen of these for Whitman.

Here's the closest match yet, on a Brewster at the 1918 New York car show at the Astor Hotel. The reason for the rear trim lines is obvious, and you can even see the little notch above the spring mount that matches the one that was left during the Stanley body install. The mystery remains as to why the body on the Stanley flares out in front of the windshield, instead of tapering in.

More stripped jobs!

Camera must've slipped while they were taking that...

Spectacular Underslung photo! Any idea of the location?

Porcelain - sorry, I was forgetting the right word.

These two photos are from the Revs Institute Digital Library. They show Washington DC plates of 1932 and 1933, and above the plate is something that looks like a small ceramic plate, that says "C1". Does anybody know what that small plate might be?

Collection of the Charles River Museum of Industry More Matheson - a Silent Six with a glass hood. Apparently it was a demonstrator gimmick - the car was so quiet that you needed to be able to look inside to know it was running. And a different glass-hood Matheson - Collection of the Charles River Museum of Industry Collection of the Charles River Museum of Industry This photo was actually taken on Jul 28, 1911, during a massive multi-day Massachusetts militia maneuver simulating an attack on Boston.

Just showed up on an auction site today. It doesn't look like a speedster stripdown - maybe a factory test mule?

Looks like the Mercer got the pole position...

Creating something new that becomes the world's first mass-produced front-wheel-drive car is not crazy. I'm pretty sure that this object is not that kind of creation.

"When we get up to about 20, you let the clutch out slow. Make sure it's in high gear."

Unfortunately there's always loss. The condenser can't process all of the exhaust of an engine under heavy load, so the system just vents the excess. But you could probably go 100-150 miles. Enough so that you wouldn't have to worry about the disappearance of the horse troughs back in the teens.

I think the limo is in Illinois somewhere. A friend of mine maintains it for the owner. The roadster is pretty elusive - my last references to it are in Riviera Beach, FL, in 1958 and 1960. It must still be around, I'd love to know what became of it.

Pictures 2 & 4 are Raceland, so some time between 1939 and the early '50s. The Stanleys are pictures 3 & 4. 3 is the tremendous 1923 Springfield limousine #23627, during the time it was owned by Clarence Marshall of Delaware. You can see the Delaware antique car plate on the front. This photo wasn't taken at Marshalls' place. 4 is the Evans Larson car - thank you so much for this picture, it shows the back of that body very nicely, which I had never seen before. The factory roadster body dropped off steeply right behind the seat.

This is definitely Raceland. Possibly 1950, and I think the car in front is a Stanley belonging to Evans Larson. This body doesn't seem to be Stanley's standard roadster. I've always wondered about this and have no idea where this car ended up after it went to an E. S. Johnson in Florida.

Capacity varies by the car. People usually figure about 1 mile to the gallon for non-condensers, and steam tour arrangers try to make sure there's a water stop every 25 miles. or so You end up developing a sharp eye for houses with water hoses hanging out front.

Correct. It adds energy and gives more expansion in the cylinders. Some people add separators. Some float oil-soaking pigs in the water supply tank. A few resort to what Stanleys did, using steel tubes instead of copper and welding them to the bottom head. This is a harder boiler to build, and it reduces the effectiveness of one of the safety features of the Stanley boiler design - soft tubes that collapse and leak if there's a pressure incident that has managed to dodge all the other safety devices (rare), and bleeding the pressure down to 0. Some people just say the heck with it, disconnect the condenser, dump the engine exhaust, and stop for water along with all the non-condensers.

The fundamental design of the car stayed the same. They're both 20hp, and the Stanley engine design remained the same, with just some beefing up of parts. Water & fuel pumps are very similar, but the late car pushes them with a gear-reduction crank on the rear axle instead of linking them right to the engine. They're slower and quieter. Boilers are identical. The original superheater in a 1908 factory car was laid out differently from the later cars, and kind of clumsy, so people rarely build them that way now for any car. The 1908 car used a single fuel system for both pilot and main burner, gasoline, while the later car uses kerosene for the main burner. There were some mild technical advances. The later car has a boiler water level indicator that's a little easier to read. It also has an automatic device to manage the boiler water level, which makes a considerable difference in the driving experience. Less manual twiddling of valves while driving. Later cars also included an air pressure reserve tank, so that if you needed to add fuel pressure manually on the road, you wouldn't have to get out a pump. The later cars also changed the engine oil supply from a small plunger pump to an industrial box lubricator. There was actually one step backward. With the addition of the condenser, the oil-filled exhaust steam returns to the water supply tank. Oily water then goes into the boiler, which tends to coat the bottom, inhibiting heat transfer and increasing the odds of boiler damage. Oil separators were available at the time, but for some reason the Stanley company never chose to use one. They changed their boiler construction a little as a kind of workaround, but it makes much more sense to just leave the oil out. But when you can drive one, it doesn't take too many adjustments in your technique to drive the other.