1907 White Steam Car

Welcome to another episode of Jay Leno's Garage. Now we're going to be talking about the white steam car. Now if you've been to this website before, you see my other white steam car. That's the 20 horse. That's the smaller model. This is the 30 horse. This whole car is about a third bigger than that other car. Here's the other one. Take a look. Now we pretty much went into the history of white on the, uh, on the other car. And we'll go over it briefly. A Roland white was pretty much a genius in 1906. There were more white steam cars on the road than any other car in America. It was the most popular car there was. It was reliable. It was extremely dependable. They were quiet and they were very, very popular. This was all before the self starter. You could start a steam car without breaking your arm and cranking it. And that's why they were popular. These were the first white house cars. A Taft had one, Teddy Roosevelt had one. Uh, the army bought thousands of these and they used them in Europe and all around the world. In fact, whites were actually quite popular in England and France and they sold in Europe quite well as well because they were extremely dependable. It's an offshoot of the white sewing machine company. When you hear the phrase runs like a sewing machine, that's where it comes from. Roland white was, uh, I would say pretty much a genius. Uh, he invented a totally new type of steam generator or boiler. You know, since James Watt and the mid 1700s, 1775, James Watt was obviously a genius and every steam engine is a variation of his and white was the first guy to come up with a totally new type of boiler. Prior to that, you build a fire under a big canister and a fire tube boiler and you'd wait 20 minutes to half an hour or whatever it is to make steam and then you'd go. Uh, what this has is this has like a single strand. You're only heating up a few quarts of maybe a quarter water at a time. So consequently it can't blow up, it can't burst. The water comes in from the top and the steam goes off through the bottom. You've got a coil under the seat, a coil stack that is your steam generator. We're going to try and fire this thing off in real time and show you exactly how long it takes to run one of these from dead cold. Now we're at a bit of a disadvantage because sometimes if you ran these every day, you could start a little bit quicker, but we're going from dead cold. So we'll show you what we have to do. Uh, George is going to help out here. George, come on in here. First thing we want to do is put water into the coil. That's what we're going to do. We'll hook that up. What I'm going to do now is pressurize the fuel system. Now on our restoration blog, you've seen we pulled this whole engine apart and redid it. This is the part we made using our 3d printer. We scanned it with a computer. We made a plastic model using the 3d printer and then we cast it in aluminum and Bernard welded it up and it looks like a brand new factory piece. What I'm going to do now is pressurize my fuel system. Now look at the gauge on my dashboard. You want about 35 pounds in your pilot. That's your pilot fuel. What I'm going to do now is go to the back of the car. This all seems very confusing and uh, open my pilot fuel. What I'm doing is I am putting that 35 pounds of pressure. You hear it whooshing into this pilot tank, closing it. You'll notice George is filling the water tank. Now I'm going to pressurize the gas tank. All right, that's good. Now I'm opening the pilot fuel and pressurizing the tank. See, everything is done under pressure. This is gasoline. This is pilot fuel to light your pilot. A steam car has a pilot like a hot water heater and what it does is the gas comes in as a liquid. It hits the metal pipe. The liquid goes through the metal pipe, which is heated by the pilot flame, turns it into a gas. The gas is then forced into the burner. And what we're going to do now is light the pilot and we should be ready to go. There we go. This is your vaporizer. When I open this here, I'm introducing fuel. What I want to do is have fire in there. Okay. Okay. You see it burning up there. Okay. A little too much. Notice how I burned my hand. Okay. I don't want to burn my check writing hand or the guys won't be able to get paid. Now what will happen is this is all wet fuel dripping down here. As soon as that gets hot enough, that fuel will vaporize and stay at the top and that's what I want up there. Okay. I'm introducing too much fuel. Hard to believe a lot of these cars caught fire. Isn't that? I mean it's made of wood. You can hear the liquid gurgling in there. The fuel goes through here. See that's insulated. It comes out here and it shoots into the burner as a vapor. You don't want it shooting in as a liquid. Now this will take about five or six minutes. Now you don't want to go in the house and have a cup of coffee. That's what they will say. I'll go in the house, have a cup of coffee when you are, when you come back, the house is burned down. You might just want to stay here. Okay. Getting better over here. We have one of the greatest inventions of all time. This little device right here is called your flow motor. This is quite ingenious. This little needle works under pressure under steam pressure and to open and close. When steam hits 600 it closes and shuts off the fuel. When it goes below 600 it opens and let more fuel in and also pump more water. So it's a, but you have to keep that extremely clean. There's nothing electric on this. Everything is mechanically driven, which is what makes it so fascinating to me. The white was the only car with a only steam car with a transmission. It has a two speed transmission, high and low. You don't really need low. Now see now we've got a nice roaring fire. Okay. I'm opening it up more. Okay. I can close that. This is the firing up valve. This works independent of the flow motor. You open that and that will just continue to shoot fuel into the burner. Once you get steam pressure, you shut that off and you open a regulating valve on the floor and it bypasses this and allows the flow motor to work. I'm closing this little window because I'm confident that the fire will stay lit. Okay. Right here you have your crankcase oil. Pump a little bit of oil directly into the crankcase steam oil and this puts a little bit of cylinder oil into the steam cylinder. As we said before on this website, water, obviously not a lubricant. So what you need to do is inject a dollop of steam oil in with the steam to lubricate the cylinders. Now, unlike a Stanley, this car works on what they call superheated steam. Most, as you know, steam happens at sea level at 212 degrees. This will make steam at 800 degrees. It's almost like supercharging a regular engine between a white and a Stanley is with superheated steam. You almost double the amount of power you have. This is what they call a compound engine. Now, if you look over here, this one here is a Stanley engine. This is quite simple. You have a little slide valve that slides back and forward. It lets steam in, push the piston one way, exits, lets steam in, pushes it, it goes back and forward, back and forth. A compound engine, you have a high compression piston and a low compression piston. And the high compression piston is a smaller one that uses the steam and then feeds it over into the low compression cylinder. This is what this is. This is what they call a simpling valve. This allows you to turn a compound engine into a simple engine. What that means is instead of working as a compound engine, when you press that button, it lets both cylinders, it brings steam into both cylinders equally. So it works as a simple engine. If this is confusing, you can go to some of the Stanley websites and whatnot, and it'll explain perhaps better than I can how these things work. Now we're going to open the firing up valve. And when you have one of these things, what you want to do is just crack the valve to the generator or the boiler. So it will, it'll force water out. Here we go. Let's see if we're hot enough. Here's, here is our nozzle right here. Tell me if it looks like liquid or vapor. Okay. Looks like vapor, doesn't it? Okay. Hear it? Whereas a Stanley takes 15 to 20 minutes. This thing is making steam almost immediately. The steam gauge just starting to move. What I'm doing now is having the engine go back and forward and get all the water out. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to have George close that firing up valve. And I'm going to open the valve that regulates the flow motor right here. Okay. There's your pyrometer right there. That measures temperature with 400 degrees steam. What I'm looking for is about 700 degrees, but this is really just a train without tracks. That's all this thing is. What we're doing now is just letting it warm up a little bit. This tells you if your fire is on, that tells you steam pressure. That's how much air you have. Now this right here, this center button, that's an air pump. If I hold that down, that will pump up right there and pressurize this fuel tank. Now we're pressurizing. I want to get up to about 55 pounds. Unlike a Stanley where the steam goes right out the back, the steam circulates, goes into the condenser where it's cooled by the fan and by the breeze of the car moving forward. It cools it and turns it back into water again, which goes back to the tank. You can go about 150 miles on a tank of water on a cool day, maybe about 40 or 50 miles on a hot day. But what you're seeing now is steam coming out of there because we're not moving. There's not enough air flowing through it. Okay. We are probably ready to pull away. You have put you in gear. It's your emergency brake. This is your high and low speed, and this is your forward or reverse. Let's see how we go. See, it's pretty quiet when you're moving. It's really chilly today. You know, like a train, this thing needs a bit of time to get all the pipes hot, to heat it up and get it going. But we're getting there. Now whites were never as fast as a Stanley, but they could cover greater distance. But that, I mean, with a Stanley, you can rock it up to 60 miles an hour. Then you run out of steam and you pull over and you wait to build them up ahead of steam. Like the tortoise and the hare, the white just keeps chugging along and the white is a much more sophisticated car. Now this car was in very nice shape when I got it, but it needed a few things. We had to make a new gas tank because the gas tank is pressurized. It was oozing a little bit of fuel. And when you have an open fire, obviously you don't want any fuel leaks. So we made a new fuel tank. We tore the whole engine apart. We repaired all the little cracks. One thing about a white is it has to be surgically clean. There could be nothing stopping the fuel flow because you have those, that flow motor with that needle. And if there's any dirt or anything in that needle, it'll screw up the whole thing. What I'm doing now is as it gets hot, I'm slowly closing the throttle because I'm making more steam pressure with less effort. You know, all the pipes are cold. As soon as the steam hits those cold pipes, it condenses back into water. Again, this is a big car. This car costs about $4,500 in 1907. That would buy you two or three homes back in the day. This car costs more money than a Rolls Royce. In a lot of ways, it was better built. The great thing about these cars is they're dead quiet. There's no noise. There's no howling and almost no pollution. You know, you can run one of these inside. They didn't have the noxious fumes of most cars of the period. Oh my gosh, almost 35 miles an hour. Mayday, mayday. Yeah, there's no electric on this car. You have a acetylene lights. Then you have kerosene lamp here and those are kerosene lamps as well. When you want to get started, first thing is you hold down the simpling valve. You put it in forward, put it in first gear, and this is your throttle. This is your steering wheel. You open your throttle a little bit, let up on the simpling valve and you pull away. Here's your clock. Here's your speedometer. You can see how big this thing is. We put our cameraman in the very back seat. There's three rows of seating. This is like the first SUV. You know, it's funny when you read the manual to this, it says there's no reason to speed. Speeds in excess of 20 miles an hour are dangerous. Well, this thing will do 50, but don't forget, they didn't have paved roads when this thing was built. Notice we're making fire. As soon as that hits 600 pounds of pressure, the fire will shut off. Watch. See the fire go down. The fire goes down because the pressure regulator is shut off the fire and shut off the fuel. Now what this is doing is that spinning has to let you know that is constantly pumping oil into the crankcase to lubricate everything. When you shift these things, there's no clutch. You just drop it into high gear and you pull away. That's maximizing your steam and they're great fun in the summertime because they can't overheat. The hotter it gets, the better. Right now we're looking at about 550 degrees. 700 is about where I want it to be. That there's an air pump so you can hand pump air in if you don't want to use the high pressure line. That rolls down. You got a clear plastic windshield. Here's your horn right there. Not many cars that have two stories. It's like driving a double decker bus sitting up here. They built these from about 1901 or two to about 1910. And the writing was on the wall and the gas car took over. But this is one of the greatest steam cars of all time. Nobody else built a better car up to this point than the White. Cepulet was pretty good and there are a few others, but this was the one to have. Nobody has built a better steam car. Abner Doble, arguably, but he used a lot of White's principles as well. And I would say he got the idea for his boiler generator from the White. But if you're not in any hurry to get somewhere, these are great way to travel. Another advantage of the White steam car was you could run the engine without the car moving. You can put it in neutral. See a Stanley, if it ran out of water, you'd have to jack up the rear wheels, let the engine run. And while the wheels are turning, that would pump the water. With a White, I can do this and build up enough heat and pump water through the system to keep the boiler going. So these are just so far superior. I mean, the Stanley's are wonderful, but these were precision engineered automobiles. The interesting thing is you can improve a White. All you can do is restore it to exactly the way it was supposed to be. There's never been anybody that's done an improvement on one of these that made it better. It's perfect as it left the factory. That's as good as it could possibly get. And if you try to, if you make the nozzle, the holes in the nozzles bigger to get more fuel, it'll run worse. You make them smaller, it'll run worse. This was a well thought out scientifically designed machine. You know, these were so dependable. They went Los Angeles to San Francisco every single day. That was part of a shuttle service. It took three days to get there. And there were water stops along the way. And people, uh, they didn't drive at night. Don't forget the roads were not paved, but this was the most dependable way to get around. As I said, they were the first white house cars and they were the first cars bought by the military. Plus, as you can see, you can, you can stop a steam car right there like that. So anyway, I hope you enjoy this. If you'd like to see the other white steam car, that's also on the website, that's a 20 horse model. That's a smaller one, basically the same type of setup as this. Uh, we made a lot of these parts on our, uh, on our 3d printer. You know, these days you don't find white steam parts and garage sales or junkyards. So you have to make everything yourself, but you know, they were made them, they made them once in America and by golly, we can make them again. See you next week.