Locomobile

Once all the joints were straightened and bored out new Cromoly tubing was bent and formed for the components. then it was aligned staked and brazed up, filed out and painted. good for another 120 years.

Wayne, Thank you so much. Just to provide a bit more insight into what I was referencing above and what I was up against with this particular vehicle. This is actually whats left of two same model vehicles, a body and a chassis. One vehicle burned in storage and from that vehicle we were able to salvage the necessary chassis components and it was not easy, Luckily the guy had removed many of the parts and took them in the house as it was going through a restoration, hubs, several other chassis parts that would be impossible to find. The other was just the body and angle iron subframe that the engine and boiler etc mount to and it was in unusually good shape. This is the chassis as I received it: Then I had to cut it all apart and straighten the joints and bore out all the old tubing. Boring out the old tubing, as you can see it's very thin wall. Those nail looking things sticking through the joints are called stakes, those pin the chassis together for the furnace brazing operation and keep it from shifting around in the furnace., again right from the bicycle industry. the stakes are very hard and tear up the boring tools.

Locomobile produced around 5000 steam vehicles, White produced around 10,000, Stanley about 20,000. There were around 70 different steam car manufacturers, at one period there were more steamers on the road than anything else. Yes, the bodies from one maker to another look similar from a distance, but that is the only similarity. They are from the ground up totally different and it would be nearly impossible to alter one to be another without major rebuild. I have a steadfast rule that I will not alter/destroy one antique to provide a part for another. People send me Locomobile pictures to evaluate a prospected purchase or acquisition, I can immediately spot mismatched parts or inaccurate restoration work. I've sort of quit doing it after I told a curator his $120,000 car he just purchased and had shipped to Europe for a museum had the wrong seat on it, guy had a conniption. Beautiful car, wrong seat. Yes there are "sweepings" as you put it around at the swap meets, but do know they'll need to be restored, I have to extensively rework or remake everything. Finding every piece correct for a particular make and year is very unlikely. And for this car its holy grail level availability. Luckily we had and could restore most everything for this car. Yes, for ten k one could get a start on a project. I use the analogy for vehicle restoration, it's like golfing, it's drivin' for show and puttin' for dough, that last little bit is where the money is. For instance for this project, the boiler and burner alone was $9500. The drive block chain from the engine to the rear axle was $900. The old axles and chassis parts floating around were built from what they called "gas pipe". It's a thinwall mild steel tube, about like what they make kids swing sets out of nowadays. If it's rusted at some point, there is likely not much of it left, think bicycle frame. They were furnace brazed just like bicycles which means the only way to get the tubing out of the old frame joints is to bore it out in the lathe or mill, every joint on this chassis had to be bored and new Cromoly tube bent and brazed in. So you see why the old rusty axles aren't worth a whole lot. bicycle manufacturers were heavily involved in the early chassis design. Even the wheels and tires are straight from the bicycle industry. Toledo steamer was a bicycle manufacturer that threw their hat into the automobile ring. Thanks, Ron

Thank you for doing that. Info so far has been sparse. Thanks, Ron

You're right, they do look similar and there were a frenzy of startups at that time and yes they were all copying off of each other and patents and lawsuits were flying. Coupled with the fact there were only a few coachbuilders like Currier and Cameron in Ames, and they built designs that closely resembled one another. Once studied, the details show they were not all that similar though, from a hundred feet, yes. Similar to cars today. When I was a kid in the 60's my buddies and I used to sit on the side of the road in Dearborn and we could name virtually every car, make model and year, sure couldn't do that now. As far as I can tell, the car that started this particular design was the 1896 Whitney Motorette built in Boston by George E Whitney, yeah that family (Eli Whitney, Amos Whitney of Pratt& Whitney, lumber barons, industrialists, etc).

Yes there are only a few known photographs of this particular model, only one of that particular year, they ceased production in 1902.

I thought some of you may enjoy seeing the progress on this ongoing restoration. This is a 1901 Model 65 Conrad steamer originally built in Buffalo, NY. It is the last one known to exist. The body and upholstery is completed and goes on next.

What a shame, luckily no one was injured or any other structures were damaged. Fire is always a consideration, my whole machine shop got burned out in 2001. Some stupid kids built a fire out in the parking lot in the middle of the night and the exhaust for the paint booth which always drew air out, sucked embers under the front door. It set some boxes on fire in the front and burned anything it could. The back was just heavy smoke and heat damage. I had no fire insurance because fires in machine shops are very rare, not much combustible. I ate the whole thing about $100k in damage, lost my forklift, all the office equipment, had to throw tools away because the liquid the fire department uses rusts everything immediately and I was down for two months while the building was repaired. I got an attorney and went after the kid and his family and got nothing because they had nothing. Definitely a Friday morning I'll never forget. Sometimes ya get punched in the face for no reason. Now I leave nothing flammable laying around, spare cardboard boxes, oily rags etc. Also, I have the ''one hour rule'' on welding and grinding. If leaving at 6pm, no welding or grinding past 5pm. Those little red shop towels are notorious for smoldering behind a bench and flaring up a half hour later.

Don't be, this electric car boondoggle is headed straight for the wall of reality. Yes, US automakers are offering EV's but it's only to receive some of that free taxpayer money that Musk has been getting, their footdragging effort is superficial. The supporters use the rationale that because the little European countries are doing it, we can do it here, the entire land mass of Great Britain is 1/3rd the size of Texas, the US is massive in comparison, we aren't going to buy vehicles that require three times as long to make a long trip and five times as long in cold weather. We're closing power plants right and left and there are no plans that I've read about to upgrade the nations already barely adequate power grid at all. Doesn't sound like the Government FERC sees increased load as a reality as hundreds of thousands of 40 amp chargers for EV's would be plugged in at 5pm, the same time consumers flip on everything else. They know, if this was truly happening they would be tripling output and transmission capacity. Someone made the comment just lease for three years and turn it in. Someone would need to pay for the loss in capacity of the battery and it won't be the car companies, maybe the feds will step in with the checkbook again and throw another prop under it?

😁

No, that's what box springs and old bicycles are for 😁

I've used this place several times, they do automotive work, they know what they are doing and cater to hobbyists as well. http://northfieldfoundry.com/ Just west of Detroit.

It's likely it was to align on a fixture during manufacturing i.e. dropped over a dowel, an indexing hole to clock the lug pattern to air fitting hole so they were all the same. Generally, odd holes in stamped parts are for a fixture, it's to standardize the process. It seems logical that they would just use the lug holes. Most car companies have rules for tooling, any surface that effects the mechanical assembly is called ''A finish'' and cannot be used for fixture location reference etc. They don't want it getting damaged. Thats what all those strange holes are in engine castings, they are reference location holes for the machining process. On the blueprints often a hole like that will be the central point of reference or zero datum. The part is drawn off of that point and the fixtures designed off of that reference as well.

He did. That is Fred Dibnah, he was a masterful steeplejack that is somewhat of a modern day folk hero in the UK. He was also a great artist, historian and very talented narrator. There are several videos on youtube of various series he did for British television, mainly focusing on steam power and the early industrial revolution. He was very entertaining and sadly died of cancer about ten years ago.

On the subject of working up high, have a look at this. Not car related, but interesting. Delete it if you want.

These type of pictures were sort of a thing back then, not sure why. This was taken on Mt Washington, a Locomobile steamer was allegedly the first car to successfully drive up it. I have several advertising pictures showing them in ''go anywhere, through anything'' situations.

EBay rules may have changed, but as far as I know. Keep in mind on ebay, if the buyer pays by PayPal and to protect themselves, most will, the buyer has 180 days to decide if they want to keep the item. Ebay will always support the buyer and couldn't care less about the seller. Once the buyer files a return claim, they get their money back, the car would be God knows where and it would be your responsibility to retrieve it. Any damages they caused, you can whistle for. On top of that ebay will charge 10% of the sale in fees, and they will not refund those fees after 30 days. The seller can easily wind up out the money of the sale, the fees on that sale and searching for their car. Don't ask me how I know all this.

This reminds me of the 2017? Greenfield village OCF. They sent out appeal letters stating the entry fee was being increased from 25 to 50 dollars and if your car was not accepted they were keeping the money. That was a big mistake. I just decided to not attend as did many others that year. If a person is denied the opportunity to attend the show, the entry fee should be rightfully refunded. They are keeping the money for what exactly?

My uninformed, unsolicited and untrustworthy opinion would be 1600 for the caddy being a four door and around 1200 for the gutless, it's a ragtop. It also depends exactly how complete they are. If there is alot of trim etc missing, deduct 30%.

Quite possibly, they were also using steam powered trucks (Lorries) up until recently, but also keep in mind, one of our 50 states, Texas is 2-1/2 times larger than England and it is not a lot larger geographically than Florida. It's most likely that parcel trucks here in rural areas travel 200+ Miles per day. -Ron

When the direction of what our road construction would be around 1901, some suggested and some cities experimented with ''steel roads''. A steel two track as shown in the drawing. I would guess Andrew Carnegie had a lot to do with that campaign. There is an article about it in an old Horseless Age magazine. -Ron

That has been the demise of many steam cars. It's typically a broken fuel line. Many of these used copper tubing or brass pipe for fuel lines, copper and brass can work harden and fracture very quickly and why it is illegal for use as fuel and brake lines per DOT regulations. On my steamers I use high pressure braided fuel lines throughout. McMaster Carr has it and the fittings, a little pricy and not period correct, but it's cheaper than losing the car. The same thing they use on race cars etc. The very early vehicles with pressurized fuel tanks are the most dangerous with a broken line, White used a pressurized tank as well but Roland added a metering disc with a small orifice in the tank fittings, limiting the flow in the event of a line breakage. Stanley used and patented the small fuel and air accumulator system, but it's doubtful they invented it, the 1904 Mason model C vertical twin chain drive was fitted with an engine driven fuel pump. -Ron

That was Don Hoke and Karl Peterson I think. Ken Helmick also worked on editing and getting it ready to publish. Jim originally stated the price would be $1200 per copy. I knew Jim and consulted his wisdom on many occasions. His advice was always spot on, some aspects of my very successful steam system are a direct result of his advice. I liked and respected him, some people didn't, he was a bit of a curmudgeon and had no time for people's mass over unity nonsense or other crazy ideas, and wasted no time letting them know it. Yes, he was a world renowned authority on all things Doble and White. -Ron

I've used the 3M fineline tape and the Bugler tool. The fineline tape is the most accurate, sure way to do it, but it is very time consuming, laying all the tape down, trimming the corners with an X-acto knife and I use an airbrush with thinned down Oneshot paint, so the tape has to be masked off further out. It works really well, but it's hours and hours of prep for a few minutes painting and tear off. As trimacar points out, it leaves a rough burr along the edge of the stripe. It's one inch wide with eight 1/16" pull out strips, so many combinations of line widths can be made. Again it's the most accurate, it's so accurate when finished, it looks sort of fake. Ok for a new Harley, not so much for a classic car. The Bugler tool, as Lord Sopwith said about the Camel, "You have to make friends with it", which is a nice way of saying, it flies great but it's not easy to handle. I did a lot of practice with the tool beforehand to learn it's quirks, the biggest one being, it's oddly shaped and clumsy to hold. Held the way they suggest, the hand is far away from the tip, at a weird uncomfortable angle and it's difficult to see the stripe being laid down. A good modification would be a short flat handle near the roller head in line with the roller that can be held like a pinstriping brush. I used it with good results, but the only way that happened was using a guide along the edge or in an area where I could let the wire guide hang out over the edge, I even made up some longer wire guides to get further away from the edge. They sell a flexible magnetic strip that can be laid down on the body to use as a guide which probably works really well. I was doing a wood bodied car, so that couldn't be used, I wound up taping thin straight strips of wood down for a guide and then it all went pretty well. For the ends of the lines, just lay down tape to terminate the line. Corners etc can be formed that way. If I was going to be doing a lot of it, I'd just get an actual pinstriping brush and practice practice practice. Here are some examples with the Bugler:

Glad you guys liked it, I seen it and it was remarkable to say the least. Someone mentioned they appeared to be well off, in the 20's most people were before the crash. My Dad told me when he was a kid in the early 30's they used to scrap out beautiful cars that sat for so long the tires rotted right off, people couldn't afford the gas or to make any repairs and there was no one around with any money to purchase the car. That was probably the fate of a lot of prewar cars. Ply, Hopefully the cat will forgive us both. As you know, they don't live with us, we live with them. Our old Tomcat has a very discriminating pallet, he only eats fancy feast and apparently, presentation is very important too, the food must be arranged in a pleasing, appetizing way in his bowl before he'll eat.. Thing is spoiled rotten. -Ron