OUTDATED MOTORING HINTS
Posted: 05 Apr 2026, 01:38
OUTDATED MOTORING HINTS
15 February 2005
My usual morning walk to the park with Jack the Lurcher takes me past Barnoldswick’s designated lorry park. I noticed as I passed the other morning that the wagon with the sleeper cab was occupied because the heater was gently snoring away pumping heat into the cab of the stationary wagon. This took my mind back to snatching sleep in the cab of an old Bedford wagon 45 years ago when I was on the tramp. It was very cold and you slept until the cold woke you up and then drove far enough to get the cab warm again before finding another parking spot for a further forty winks. Mind you, this was a fairly well-equipped cab for the time, it had an efficient heater. This got my mind working on how motoring has changed over the years to the point where an account of some of the strategies we had to use then becomes a valid contribution to the historical record.
Most of these tips applied equally to early cars and wagons as they all had petrol engines. The first mass market diesel engine was the Perkins and firms like Dodge and ERF started fitting these in the early 1950s. The first diesel wagon I had was the Bedford ‘S’ Type which had the Bedford Diesel fitted. This gave 90bhp on a good day. Ford entered the diesel wagon field at about the same time with the normal control Ford Thames 4D which had an uprated version of the four cylinder Fordson Major Tractor engine in it. They then brought out a forward control cab with a new six cylinder engine and called it the Thames 6D.
The early cars, vans and wagons would be regarded as very primitive nowadays. For years the standard voltage for all vehicles was 6 volts. This meant that starter motors (if you were lucky enough to have one) were almost useless in cold weather as they drained the system so severely that there wasn’t enough voltage for a good ignition spark. The starting handle was an essential item. You soon learned not to park with the front bumper up against a wall as you needed room to get the starting handle in. Starting the larger petrol engines by hand was a dangerous job. You learned not to place your thumb on the opposite side of the handle to your fingers. If you did and the engine back-fired you got a broken or badly bent thumb. Even when you thought the starter would work it was good practice to turn the engine over a few times with the ignition switched off to reduce the ‘stiction’ in the engine caused by cold thick oil.
6 volts meant very dim lights. The law was that you had to have two side lights, one headlight and one tail light on the off side. In practice this meant that although you had two headlights only one was on, at the near side, the other came on when you switched to main beam. There were no double filament bulbs, the dipping mechanism in the near side headlight was an electro-magnet that tilted the reflector and bulb holder assembly. It wasn’t a good idea to fit more lights because the dynamo didn’t give much output and it was possible to have a greater current demand than the dynamo could supply so your battery was actually quietly losing its charge as you drove along! It was the advent of the higher compression diesels that convinced manufacturers that 12 volts was essential and this became the standard voltage. The really good wagons were on 24 volts by that time.
Driving controls were primitive. The key that opened the drivers door also fitted the ignition switch and that was the only circuit it controlled. This left a myriad of possibilities for electricity leaking away during the night. Even on the heaviest wagons there was no power steering, you soon got shoulder muscles like a gorilla. The clutch linkage was direct and on the heavy clutches were almost impossible to push down. I have driven wagons where the steering wheel has bent as you used to as an anchor to hold yourself in the driving seat when you de-clutched to change gear.
It’s worth mentioning that on all cars, first gear had no synchromesh and on wagons there was none at all. You soon became an expert at ‘double de-clutching’ which was the only way to synchronise the speeds of the gears you wanted to mesh. If changing down you had to speed the primary shaft up with the accelerator at the same time. The heaviest gear boxes had a clutch brake. This was a brake which acted on the flywheel if you pressed the clutch pedal right down to the boards. This was essential when changing up as otherwise you lost so much momentum while waiting for the gears to synchronise that you had to get back into the gear you started with. The rule with all these heavy gearboxes was that you allowed one lamppost when changing up. It took that long for the engine to slow.
Accelerator pedals often had a spring on so powerful that it was a terrible job keeping it pressed down for long periods. These springs were needed because the rod linkage to the butterfly on the carburettor was so long and heavy that it needed a lot of help to get back to idle. Sometimes the designers got the linkage geometry wrong. I had one wagon on which, as the torque on the engine forced it over to one side, the fixed linkage opened the butterfly even further, so you were guaranteed a ‘kangaroo start’ every time until you got used to this little foible.
Brakes were a joke. The early vehicles had simple mechanical brakes that depended on the strength of the driver’s leg muscles. Clayton-Dewandre vacuum servos were brought in later which used the depression in the inlet manifold to aid brake pedal pressure when you took your foot off. These were a great improvement and we thought they were wonderful. In the late 1960s air brakes started to come in on wagons and these were a wonderful improvement. The first ones were very primitive but effective, every wagon so fitted had a sign on the back ‘Warning! Air Brakes’. The big problem with them was that the air compressors fitted to the engines hadn’t a very big capacity and systems were leaky. When you went to the wagon first thing in the morning you had no air pressure and therefore no brake apart from the handbrake. On the AEC Mercury they fitted a flag at the bottom of the windscreen that rose out of its casing when the air pressure fell. It had ‘STOP!’ punched through it so you could see it against the headlights in the dark. This foible led to some interesting decisions if a wagon needed running off down a hill because of a low battery. Until the engine turned and for a while afterwards you only had the handbrake.
Visibility from the cab was another big problem. Being a wagon, you only had two small mirrors (only one on the driver’s side in the old days). Thick door pillars and split windscreens with a central bar cut down a lot of the view. Windscreen wipers were always fitted at the top of the screen, this was a hangover from the days when all screens opened up on hinges at the top. The wipers and blades were puny and did nothing more than give you a small area of vision at best. They were all fitted with handles for manual operation when they failed. Some cars and wagons had vacuum operated wipers. These were interesting as they worked on the vacuum in the inlet manifold the same as vacuum servos on the brakes. If you were going uphill with your foot flat to the boards there was hardly any vacuum so the wipers slowed or stopped, if your foot was off they wagged furiously so fast that they hardly touched the screen. Later wagons with air brakes had similar wipers but powered by compressed air and so usually more reliable.
There were no heaters. This meant no demisting or defrosting of the screen. It also meant no heat in the cab. This was made worse by the fact that the only way to keep condensation off the inside of the windows was to drive with the window open. In very cold weather frost formed on the inside of the cab and all you could do was keep stopping to scrape it off or use weird and wonderful remedies like old-fashioned lemonade with sugar in it, this was an effective means of defrosting the screen. A piece of burning newspaper could melt the ice so you could wipe it off. We used to use all sorts of strategies to get some heat into the cab. On the old 'O' type Bedfords you could remove a small inspection hatch in the scuttle and allow hot air and petrol fumes in from the engine. Diesels were a big problem as they ran much cooler, I used to have a Tilley paraffin pressure heater in the cab with me. Can you imagine what Health and Safety would say about that! One useful trick on both cars and wagons was to trap a rolled up fag packet in the bonnet lid near the screen. This held a gap open and allowed some warm air to flow over the screen from the engine.
One of the less-endearing foibles of the old petrol engines was that if they backfired they could start a carburettor fire. We soon learned that there was no need to panic. Just put your foot hard to the boards and the inrush of air sucked the flame into the manifold. This knowledge came in handy with the diesels, we found that a roll of flaming newspaper held near the air intake meant that flames were drawn into the manifold and aided starting. A sort of primitive heater system. Another aid to starting diesels was a setting on the pump which gave excess fuel. On the Fords there was a lever on the scuttle for engaging this. We soon found that if we were running short of grunt on a hill we could hold this lever down and get more power. The only problem was that we also got a tremendous cloud of black smoke.
We had no trafficators or direction indicators. We still used the hand signals first brought in for horse-drawn transport. I know this sounds incredible to modern drivers but remember that much of the time we were doing a lot less than twenty miles an hour. The vehicle was your best indicator of what you were going to do next and one often wishes that this was still the case. I always ignore what indicators are saying until I see the front wheels turn, only then can you be completely certain what direction a vehicle is moving in.
Looking back it makes you wonder how any of the old drivers survived, many didn’t of course and it took Barbara Castle’s 1968 Transport Act to drag the haulage industry kicking and screaming into the 20th century. The old Albion at West Marton had to go simply because its brakes were useless. When we tested them with the Tapley Meter the handbrake was better than the foot-brake! We were driving much more slowly of course and there was less traffic on the roads. We drove within the limits of our equipment. You never saw a driver tail-gating in those days, it was suicide. Only yesterday my daughter said that what she liked about my driving was that I always allowed plenty of room between me and the vehicle in front. This is a good habit learned in the days when we had no efficient brakes. You also learned to read the road ahead as far as you could see. You needed plenty of warning if there was going to be trouble. I often think that the modern driver is so well insulated from the outside world and real road conditions that they get lulled into a sense of false security. Perhaps all student drivers should be forced to drive under the conditions we had to endure. Who knows, it might promote some thought and good road sense. One thing is certain, when they get their first vehicle with an efficient heater they will think they are in heaven.
15 February 2005
15 February 2005
My usual morning walk to the park with Jack the Lurcher takes me past Barnoldswick’s designated lorry park. I noticed as I passed the other morning that the wagon with the sleeper cab was occupied because the heater was gently snoring away pumping heat into the cab of the stationary wagon. This took my mind back to snatching sleep in the cab of an old Bedford wagon 45 years ago when I was on the tramp. It was very cold and you slept until the cold woke you up and then drove far enough to get the cab warm again before finding another parking spot for a further forty winks. Mind you, this was a fairly well-equipped cab for the time, it had an efficient heater. This got my mind working on how motoring has changed over the years to the point where an account of some of the strategies we had to use then becomes a valid contribution to the historical record.
Most of these tips applied equally to early cars and wagons as they all had petrol engines. The first mass market diesel engine was the Perkins and firms like Dodge and ERF started fitting these in the early 1950s. The first diesel wagon I had was the Bedford ‘S’ Type which had the Bedford Diesel fitted. This gave 90bhp on a good day. Ford entered the diesel wagon field at about the same time with the normal control Ford Thames 4D which had an uprated version of the four cylinder Fordson Major Tractor engine in it. They then brought out a forward control cab with a new six cylinder engine and called it the Thames 6D.
The early cars, vans and wagons would be regarded as very primitive nowadays. For years the standard voltage for all vehicles was 6 volts. This meant that starter motors (if you were lucky enough to have one) were almost useless in cold weather as they drained the system so severely that there wasn’t enough voltage for a good ignition spark. The starting handle was an essential item. You soon learned not to park with the front bumper up against a wall as you needed room to get the starting handle in. Starting the larger petrol engines by hand was a dangerous job. You learned not to place your thumb on the opposite side of the handle to your fingers. If you did and the engine back-fired you got a broken or badly bent thumb. Even when you thought the starter would work it was good practice to turn the engine over a few times with the ignition switched off to reduce the ‘stiction’ in the engine caused by cold thick oil.
6 volts meant very dim lights. The law was that you had to have two side lights, one headlight and one tail light on the off side. In practice this meant that although you had two headlights only one was on, at the near side, the other came on when you switched to main beam. There were no double filament bulbs, the dipping mechanism in the near side headlight was an electro-magnet that tilted the reflector and bulb holder assembly. It wasn’t a good idea to fit more lights because the dynamo didn’t give much output and it was possible to have a greater current demand than the dynamo could supply so your battery was actually quietly losing its charge as you drove along! It was the advent of the higher compression diesels that convinced manufacturers that 12 volts was essential and this became the standard voltage. The really good wagons were on 24 volts by that time.
Driving controls were primitive. The key that opened the drivers door also fitted the ignition switch and that was the only circuit it controlled. This left a myriad of possibilities for electricity leaking away during the night. Even on the heaviest wagons there was no power steering, you soon got shoulder muscles like a gorilla. The clutch linkage was direct and on the heavy clutches were almost impossible to push down. I have driven wagons where the steering wheel has bent as you used to as an anchor to hold yourself in the driving seat when you de-clutched to change gear.
It’s worth mentioning that on all cars, first gear had no synchromesh and on wagons there was none at all. You soon became an expert at ‘double de-clutching’ which was the only way to synchronise the speeds of the gears you wanted to mesh. If changing down you had to speed the primary shaft up with the accelerator at the same time. The heaviest gear boxes had a clutch brake. This was a brake which acted on the flywheel if you pressed the clutch pedal right down to the boards. This was essential when changing up as otherwise you lost so much momentum while waiting for the gears to synchronise that you had to get back into the gear you started with. The rule with all these heavy gearboxes was that you allowed one lamppost when changing up. It took that long for the engine to slow.
Accelerator pedals often had a spring on so powerful that it was a terrible job keeping it pressed down for long periods. These springs were needed because the rod linkage to the butterfly on the carburettor was so long and heavy that it needed a lot of help to get back to idle. Sometimes the designers got the linkage geometry wrong. I had one wagon on which, as the torque on the engine forced it over to one side, the fixed linkage opened the butterfly even further, so you were guaranteed a ‘kangaroo start’ every time until you got used to this little foible.
Brakes were a joke. The early vehicles had simple mechanical brakes that depended on the strength of the driver’s leg muscles. Clayton-Dewandre vacuum servos were brought in later which used the depression in the inlet manifold to aid brake pedal pressure when you took your foot off. These were a great improvement and we thought they were wonderful. In the late 1960s air brakes started to come in on wagons and these were a wonderful improvement. The first ones were very primitive but effective, every wagon so fitted had a sign on the back ‘Warning! Air Brakes’. The big problem with them was that the air compressors fitted to the engines hadn’t a very big capacity and systems were leaky. When you went to the wagon first thing in the morning you had no air pressure and therefore no brake apart from the handbrake. On the AEC Mercury they fitted a flag at the bottom of the windscreen that rose out of its casing when the air pressure fell. It had ‘STOP!’ punched through it so you could see it against the headlights in the dark. This foible led to some interesting decisions if a wagon needed running off down a hill because of a low battery. Until the engine turned and for a while afterwards you only had the handbrake.
Visibility from the cab was another big problem. Being a wagon, you only had two small mirrors (only one on the driver’s side in the old days). Thick door pillars and split windscreens with a central bar cut down a lot of the view. Windscreen wipers were always fitted at the top of the screen, this was a hangover from the days when all screens opened up on hinges at the top. The wipers and blades were puny and did nothing more than give you a small area of vision at best. They were all fitted with handles for manual operation when they failed. Some cars and wagons had vacuum operated wipers. These were interesting as they worked on the vacuum in the inlet manifold the same as vacuum servos on the brakes. If you were going uphill with your foot flat to the boards there was hardly any vacuum so the wipers slowed or stopped, if your foot was off they wagged furiously so fast that they hardly touched the screen. Later wagons with air brakes had similar wipers but powered by compressed air and so usually more reliable.
There were no heaters. This meant no demisting or defrosting of the screen. It also meant no heat in the cab. This was made worse by the fact that the only way to keep condensation off the inside of the windows was to drive with the window open. In very cold weather frost formed on the inside of the cab and all you could do was keep stopping to scrape it off or use weird and wonderful remedies like old-fashioned lemonade with sugar in it, this was an effective means of defrosting the screen. A piece of burning newspaper could melt the ice so you could wipe it off. We used to use all sorts of strategies to get some heat into the cab. On the old 'O' type Bedfords you could remove a small inspection hatch in the scuttle and allow hot air and petrol fumes in from the engine. Diesels were a big problem as they ran much cooler, I used to have a Tilley paraffin pressure heater in the cab with me. Can you imagine what Health and Safety would say about that! One useful trick on both cars and wagons was to trap a rolled up fag packet in the bonnet lid near the screen. This held a gap open and allowed some warm air to flow over the screen from the engine.
One of the less-endearing foibles of the old petrol engines was that if they backfired they could start a carburettor fire. We soon learned that there was no need to panic. Just put your foot hard to the boards and the inrush of air sucked the flame into the manifold. This knowledge came in handy with the diesels, we found that a roll of flaming newspaper held near the air intake meant that flames were drawn into the manifold and aided starting. A sort of primitive heater system. Another aid to starting diesels was a setting on the pump which gave excess fuel. On the Fords there was a lever on the scuttle for engaging this. We soon found that if we were running short of grunt on a hill we could hold this lever down and get more power. The only problem was that we also got a tremendous cloud of black smoke.
We had no trafficators or direction indicators. We still used the hand signals first brought in for horse-drawn transport. I know this sounds incredible to modern drivers but remember that much of the time we were doing a lot less than twenty miles an hour. The vehicle was your best indicator of what you were going to do next and one often wishes that this was still the case. I always ignore what indicators are saying until I see the front wheels turn, only then can you be completely certain what direction a vehicle is moving in.
Looking back it makes you wonder how any of the old drivers survived, many didn’t of course and it took Barbara Castle’s 1968 Transport Act to drag the haulage industry kicking and screaming into the 20th century. The old Albion at West Marton had to go simply because its brakes were useless. When we tested them with the Tapley Meter the handbrake was better than the foot-brake! We were driving much more slowly of course and there was less traffic on the roads. We drove within the limits of our equipment. You never saw a driver tail-gating in those days, it was suicide. Only yesterday my daughter said that what she liked about my driving was that I always allowed plenty of room between me and the vehicle in front. This is a good habit learned in the days when we had no efficient brakes. You also learned to read the road ahead as far as you could see. You needed plenty of warning if there was going to be trouble. I often think that the modern driver is so well insulated from the outside world and real road conditions that they get lulled into a sense of false security. Perhaps all student drivers should be forced to drive under the conditions we had to endure. Who knows, it might promote some thought and good road sense. One thing is certain, when they get their first vehicle with an efficient heater they will think they are in heaven.
15 February 2005