The chuffing and clattering charm of pre-1916 automobiledom comes alive when The Horseless Carriage Club of America gets together. Their “tours” with Brass Era cars saunter throughout America and soon, internationally, with rumors bubbling of a tour through Ireland. Part rolling museum, part living history, part mobile art, these automotive elder statesmen are all of the above.

In mid-February, Ford Model Ts, Buicks, REOs, Cadlliacs, Abbot Detroits, Chalmerses, Mitchells, Maxwells and Renaults gathered their owners for a week-long fling in the Arizona desert where they can flex their low-rpm muscle. Pre-selected low-traffic routes to and from a home base in Sierra Vista, south of Tucson, recapture an era before world wars, before fuel injection and before an Interstate highway system siphoned most of the challenge, adventure and romance out of the road.

The most significant component of pre-1916 automobiles’ charm –- and simultaneously, their biggest limiting factor –- is no uniformity in configuration or engineering.

“There was little commonality in the industry,” Alan Travis, a member from Wisconsin, said during a little confab before setting off for a long day’s drive.

In that era, if you manufactured a car, you literally manufactured just about every part on the car, except perhaps its tires. There was an enormous variance in engineering solutions to common issues. One extreme example was the Adams-Farwell, which used a rotary engine, but not like the rotary we understand today. It had a stationary crank mounted vertically in the frame and the engine’s cylinder cases rotated around it like satellites. Clearly, the brass era was an engineer’s delight.

“Also, if you wanted the best car in 1905, you bought European,” said Travis. “The business climate there was much better for success with these new contraptions. Imagine that in 1905, Cadillac only had single-cylinder motors. Several years later, though, they were ‘The Standard of the World’ with the first electric starter, ignition and lighting, and then the first with a series-produced V8 engine.”

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Often, if you do need parts, you’re going to machine them yourself.”

— Bill Ottemann

 

[/pullquote]Until 1912, most cars in the United States were actually right-hand-drive for several reasons. First, horse-drawn carriages were always controlled from the right side. Second, road conditions and signage was universally suspect. Most roads were still dirt or worse. You needed a very clear line of sight to the roads’ edge, especially when oncoming traffic approached to see what kind of trouble awaited you. Third, European cars –- which were about 10 years’ more advanced in metallurgy, engineering and organization at the time than domestics –- were largely right-hand-drive.

When Ford’s Model T debuted in 1909, it was left-hand-drive and the T’s bombshell success steered almost the whole industry.

“This Brass Era section of the old car hobby has been pretty level, perhaps gaining somewhat,” said Bill Ottemann, the Horseless Carriage club’s president. “Where most clubs have gone down in memberships, we’ve increased slightly, but this hobby is kind of limited. Most people don’t have the time to devote to it. It’s more time-consuming because there are so few specialists really conversant with how these cars work. They all work differently! Often, if you do need parts, you’re going to machine them yourself or rely on another owner with the tools to machine them.

Horseless Club members dance to the beat of a different drum.

Better put, they drive to the rhythm of a slow-turning engine. And the world’s richer for it.

About The Horseless Carriage Club of America: Started in 1937 in Los Angeles, the club has always been keenly interested in welcoming even non-owners to socialize and find which cars appeal most to prospective members. Members are tinkerers, engineers, some who have no mechanical ability and some old hot rodders. But the common thread among members is that everyone loves keeping these old Brass Era cars running. The National Club does three to four tours per year. Through the 40-50 regional chapters, the club holds a total of around 200 local tours each year. see www.hcca.org for more information.

Four for the road:

Jim & Donna Bunch of Glendale, Ariz., were miraculously reunited with a 1909 Sears that had left Donna’s family for 55 years. On a lark after joining the Horseless Carriage Club, Donna searched for the car her grandfather owned back in Pennsylvania when he was a big political campaigner. After verifying a few details, they knew they found the exact car. Her grandfather had painted his name on the back, his initials across the sides and the Sears had two Pennsylvania state inspection stickers under the seat. They began a campaign of their own, lobbying the then-present owner to sell it back to the original family. After a multitude of calls and e-mails, the owner relented: “Between you, your family and all the others always calling, I can’t take it anymore! I’ll sell it to you for what I have in it.” Three years hence, Jim and Donna bring it out for special occasions, though it’s too slow even for Horseless tours, so they trailer it to events.

Keene Brewer bought his 1911 Chalmers Model 30 M Touring after it won the Ansel Adams award at Pebble Beach in 1996, but he found it wouldn’t go up a hill very well. It won at Pebble but you could tell it had no grease anywhere and was a looker, not a runner. Brewer redid the entire car mechanically and is now a regular on Horseless Club tours.

 

Robert Trenley restored his 1912 Abbott-Detroit roadster in the early 1990s. It’s powered by a 350-cubic-inch, four-cylinder engine rated at 44 hp whereas a Model T of the time made 20 hp; very powerful for the period. This Abbot-Detroit won the President’s Choice award at the 1996 Tour of the Century in Wisconsin, competing against more than 200 other Brass Era cars.

Bill Paul’s 1911 Cadillac Model 30 had been in dead storage for 80 years. The car’s second owner bought it in 1927 to deliver newspapers in Beverly Hills, Calif.,and Bill has the photos to prove it, along with the original sales receipt from the Cadillac dealer in Los Angeles. The only items replaced on the car from new are the mats on the running boards (they turned to dust), the top (replaced in 1960) and the tires. It is otherwise completely original with the paint brought back to life with tons of elbow grease and the brass revived with treatments of muriatic acid. As for the engine, Bill freed it up and rebuilt the original parts. It fired up on the second crank.

 Editor’s note: Tune in Saturday for an ‘Eye candy’ photo gallery from the Tour.

Think “Clydesdale” and the images that probably come to mind are those strong and majestic horses in the Budweiser beer commercials. But did you know that a couple of decades before the Anheuser-Busch brewery trotted out its now iconic horse-drawn wagons in 1933, the Clydesdale was the emblem of a car company?

Well, not exactly a car company, but the Clydesdale Motor Truck Company?

I’d never heard of Clydesdale trucks, let alone their “Driver Under the Hood” engine governor system or their pioneering work in diesel technology, until receiving notice of a new book, The Clydesdale Motor Truck Company An Illustrated History, 1917-1939, from what has become my favorite book publisher, and if you really like classic cars, should become yours as well: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Based in Jefferson, a small Blue Ridge town in northwestern North Carolina near the state’s borders with Tennessee and Virginia, McFarland was founded in 1979 by Robert McFarland Franklin to publish library-oriented reference books and “scholarly monographs on a variety of subjects,” according to the company’s website. McFarland publishes about 400 books a year, several of them on automotive history.

I’ve read more than two dozen of McFarland’s automotive books and have seven more on my “yet to read” stack (see photo).

Among those I’ve yet to read is one of McFarland’s newest, Tiffany Willey Middleton and James M. Semon’s book on Clydesdale.  Although, I have peeked into the book enough to learn that while the Clydesdale Motor Truck Co. used the big work horse as its emblem, the company’s name really traces to Clyde, Ohio, where it was founded and where Middleton was born.

Semon, whose specialty is the history of railroads, also is from Ohio.

McFarland books not only are well-written histories — often with appendices, vehicle specifications, chapter notes, bibliographies and complete indexes – but they are wonderfully illustrated histories as well, though by their nature most of the photographs are black and white.

I’ve also thumbed through American Automobiles of the Brass Era: Essential Specifications of 4,000+ Gasoline Powered Passenger Cars, 1906-1915, with a Statistical and Historical Overview, by Robert D. Dluhy. While short on words and pictures, it’s chock full of charts and statistical tables.

For example, a 1907 American Napier 18/20hp Nike Runabout sat two, had a four-cylinder engine with a 3.5-inch bore, 4-inch stroke, displaced 153.9 cubic inches, produced 18 horsepower, had a 90-inch wheelbase, was steered from the right-seat position, was priced at $2,250, rode on 32 x 3.5-inch tires, and weighed 1,500 pounds.

And there is similar information for more than 4,000 such vehicles from that period.

In that pile of books I’ve yet to read, you might notice Gold Thunder, Autobiography of a NASCAR Champion, by Rex White as told to Anne B. Jones. While I haven’t read it, I have read several other McFarland books on motorsports, including a couple of early accounts about NASCAR, a book on American sports car racing in the 1950s, a history of the auto races held in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park from 1908-1911, and the amazing biography of Joan Newton Cuneo, the Lyn St. James or Danica Patrick of her era, which was 1905-1915.

I also made mention of McFarland publishing scholarly books. The Corvette in Literature and Culture: Symbolic Dimensions of America’s Sports Car actually started out as author Jerry W. Passon’s Ph.D. dissertation at Southern Illinois University.

As I said before, if you’re into classic cars and their specifications and corporate histories, or into the early history of auto racing, McFarland probably should be your favorite publisher as well.

To learn more about McFarland and its books, visit the www.mcfarlandbooks.com website.

Did you know that the names of nine Spanish cities — Cordoba, Granada, Ibiza, Leon, Malaga, Marbella, Rondo, Seville and Toledo — have been appropriated by automakers for their own vehicles?

You no doubt know that England’s national racing color was green and Italy’s was red. You even may know that Spain’s was red with a yellow hood. But did you know the national racing color assigned to Jordan was brown, or that Egypt’s color was purple?

Neither did I until I spent a dollar Sunday to buy a copy of Chapman’s Car Compendium: The Essential Book of Car Facts and Trivia. When British auto writer Giles Chapman wrote his book in 2007, it cost $21.95 to buy a copy.

Seven years later, it carried a $2 sticker at the 58th annual VNSA (now known as the Volunteer Nonprofit Service Association but originally the Visiting Nurse Service Auxiliary association) Used Book Sale in the huge Exhibit Hall at the Arizona State Fairgrounds.

There are somewhere around half-a-million books available at the sale, and all of them have been separated into one of 27 categories to make finding what you want that much easier. I usually go to the sale Sunday after church, partly because the church I attend is 25 blocks east of downtown Phoenix and the fairgrounds is 19 blocks west of downtown, partly because on Sunday almost all the books are half price.

In addition to Chapman’s book of car facts, I bought a copy of Cars of the World in Color, by J.D. Scheel, translated by D. Cook-Radmore and illustrated by Verner Hancke.

I paid a whole $1.50 for this book but, after all, it is a first edition, begins with a 35-page historical survey of automotive history, has color illustrations of everything from an 1875 Markus to a 1962 Pontiac Tempest, and concludes with 10 gorgeous illustrations of famous auto races.

And even though I already have a copy, I also bought Driven: The American Four-Wheels Love Affair, because it was written (in 1977) by my former publisher and AutoWeek mentor Leon Mandel.

I also bought a book on the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, three books on baseball (including a collection of baseball stories by Zane Grey, the minor-league player turned Western novelist) and, as a gift for one of my daughters and her daughter, Clues for Real Life: The Classic Wit & Wisdom of Nancy Drew.

And for those eight books and the hours of enlightenment and entertainment they’ll provide, I spent a grand total of $7.50.

Actually, though, I’ll be spending a little more than that. As I mentioned, I already have a copy of Leon’s book, Driven. So here’s what I’m going to do: Use the comments section (Share your thoughts) below to share the title of your favorite automotive book and I’ll enter your name into a drawing. If you win, you’ll get my “barn-found” copy of Leon’s book.