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The Well-Run Machine
How often do you really think about how your car works? I’m guessing not that often.
Perhaps you have a dim recollection of 4-stroke engine operation from a high school textbook. At any rate, you know that gasoline goes in, the car goes forward, and you are a wretched sinner for polluting the atmosphere in the process. You will also be late for work if it should fail to operate properly, or if that jerk in the left lane doing 50 in a 65 zone doesn’t get the heck over! If you think about it more you should remember that the combustion of the gasoline happens with pistons. But do you think about the details beyond that? Again, I would guess the odds are against it, unless you’ve had recent compelling need to do so, or are a gearhead.
Yet it would be worth your while to grab an engine repair manual sometime, not necessarily with the intention of being able to name each individual part, but with an eye towards marveling at the complexity. You see, every part in that engine has a 
purpose, every part was put there by design to perform some job, every part had a designer, and every function performed by every part is a reaction to some other function. The engine itself ostensibly performs a very simple function, the conversion of chemical energy (gasoline and oxygen) into mechanical energy and heat, but the process for controlling that conversion is complex and full of nuance. When even small components fail the results can range from simple irritations to lethal failures.
Let’s start with the gas tank. You put in the fuel, but what happens next? The fuel must travel along a line to the engine, but how? Gravity? It would be amusing to contemplate vehicles with roof-mounted gas tanks like the old high-wall toilet tanks, but the real solution is to use a pump to draw the gas from the tank and shove it towards the engine.
So do we just throw the gas at the engine? Is it poured directly into the piston cylinders? No, you’ve got to turn it into a spray (atomize) so it mixes with the air, then you’ve got to somehow get the fuel and air mix into the cylinders. How is that done? Older engines used carburetors to mix the fuel and air, and that mix would be sucked down through a series of pipes towards the cylinders. The cylinders have valves that open just in time to draw in the mix. The valves snap shut, the spark plug triggers a detonation sending the piston speeding downward, imparting rotation to the crank shaft by way of a linkage on a pivot.
Already we can see the variety of mechanisms in play, and we must assume that each of the parts mentioned above has other more subtle interplays with further components. I said that the valves open, and shut-this implies some mechanisms for doing so, as well as other governing mechanisms ensuring that the openings and closings occur at the right moments. What makes the spark plug spark, much less what makes it spark at the right moment? How does the piston connect to the crank shaft? That explosion of fuel must generate some heat, what keeps that heat under control? Presumably the moving metal parts generate friction too; how do we reduce or compensate for it?
Systems and subsystems abound, even in the simplest of engines, yet they work. In the past thirty years, spurred on by rising gas prices, competition for fickle customers, and, yes, even regulatory pressure, engineers have made tremendous improvements in efficiency, strength, power, and safety, and the vast majority of these improvements have all been in the nuances of the subsystems. The fundamental operation of the engine, however, has not changed-we are still converting, by way of combustion — rapid oxidation really — the energy of the chemical bonds in gasoline into the energy of movement.
My grandfather, a mechanic who passed away in 1984, would certainly be astounded at the engine advances. Yet he would also find many things still very familiar. The pistons, though far advanced, would still be there; the camshaft and pushrods would still be there; the oil pump and radiator would still be there. There are only so many conceivable ways of burning a fuel-air mixture and capturing that energy, and we know them well. The main alternatives to piston engines-the jet turbine, the rocket, and the Wankel Rotary, are all old technologies themselves. Click here for a great view of other types.
Society as An Engine
American society is much like that engine, with a myriad of components, sub assemblies, regulating mechanisms, intakes, outputs, and waste products, but the complexity is at a level far beyond our mere motor. Our fundamental “motor” since 1787 has been our Constitution, which is not a very long or complicated document. Like an early motor, it is simple in concept, but with an implied complexity of regulating mechanisms ranging from taxing structures (the “fuel supply” to stretch this analogy), balancers, timing mechanisms, and exhaust systems. Yet the core mechanism — like our 4-stroke gas engine — has remained unchanged in over two centuries.
We have certainly added complexity to our systems. Sometimes, just as the smog and environmental regulations of the 1970s sapped the horsepower of the engines of that time, the regulations and arbitrary limits we impose on ourselves derange and compromise our government, yet still our system chugs along. But there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so indefinitely. Capricious and ill-thought law changes have nearly killed the 4-stroke engine as we know it, and capricious or ill-thought law changes could end the government system we have enjoyed.
The peril from ill-thought change is great. Automotive history is full of questionable design flaws, from the maligned Corvair to the fiery Pinto, from the junky Fiat Spyder to the ugly Edsel. Of course the marketplace weeded these out over time, but removing dangerous modifications from our government is far harder. Modifications can, of course, improve the performance, but they can also upset the delicate balance that kept the apparatus working.
Worse still, the extreme left, the Socialists and Progressives — or whatever they’re calling themselves this week — actually want to break our motor and replace it with something else. They think they’ve discovered a new concept, a newer cleaner society, more efficient and more controlled, with fewer moving parts and better self-regulation. Yet they fail to see that the totalitarian model, in whatever guise imaginable, is old beyond recorded history. Within that history, its flaws are well documented from The Book of Kings, the records of the Pharaohs, or the archives of the Soviet Union. Just as the 4-stroke engine’s fundamentals have been constant from the 1800s to today, so too are the fundamentals of absolute rulers, regardless of modern bells and whistles.
And for the anarchists, no engine ever assembled itself. No human society of any complexity ever self-ordered. Some strong visionary individual, or some strong group of power holders always established the order, even if that initial order were nothing more than a sworn band of warriors dividing their spoils. Our society was designed.
Our civilization has many flaws, inefficiencies, unnecessary waste, misdirected energies, and design weaknesses not anticipated by its designers. Yet still it works.From time to time it needs a major overhaul (we’re past due for one right now). It may even need a total teardown and rebuild to root out the damage and wear, but still it runs, in many cases far better than the competing designs out there. Yet when mechanisms start to wear out, when ill-conceived tinkering throws the system out of balance, or when revolutionaries attempt to gut the entire system, we run the terrible risk of it all flying apart.
Cover image: Shutterstock user Oliver Sved.
Published in General
The problem is Progressives do not see society as a a well-run machine as an analogy. Rather for them, it is a seductive vision.
Come the revolution everyone will eat strawberries. And if you don’t like strawberries or they make you break out? Come the revolution everyone will eat strawberries, and like them.
It is a seductive vision that paves the road to tyranny.
Seawriter
The Lopez: #1 “It makes me shiver when I think about how many people have no clue how our government works yet are absolutely positive they know how to fix it.”
What was not noted was that many of these people are elected, appointed, and that they assume greater authority than they really have, but do have the power to pull off their miscreant efforts.
They also fail to grasp that a machine is there to work for others, that others direct what work the machine performs. They instead worship the machine as the end in itself, the mechanism for control. We are supposed to be at the wheel, we are not the machine. We made this to work for us, we are not made to work for it.
I have gotten 35mpg with the cruise on in my 2007 (ethanol free gas)
typically 29-32
I get high teens in my 73 on the open highway (when it was not disassembled).
Heh. How often is that?
In the 2 months I’ve had my ’73 it already spent 1 month on jackstands while I rebuilt the brake system. (Special thanks to GLD III for the tip on the pressure bleeder, that was just too easy)
Since it’s been running again, the weather has been too rainy to take it out on highway, so it’s been mostly city driving. I’ll try to see how it really does later when things dry out.
This is a timely post for me, as I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about engines lately. I’m not a gearhead, but I’m good with my hands and I used to help my old man change the oil. I also used to tinker with minibikes, mopeds, and motorcycles.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought my wife for her 50th birthday a vehicle Skip characterizes as “junky” (ouch!)—a 1981 Fiat Spider 2000. (This latter-day iteration of the beloved, temperamental 124 ragtop has a 1,995cc engine—hence, the “2000”. The larger engine was an attempt to address the horsepower-robbing regulations of the time.) The color? Not Italian red; per her instructions, it is British Racing Green with a tan interior. This being a Fiat (“Fix It Again, Tony”), the 1.3 hour drive home proved too much for the 33-year-old roadster. The bumps and shakes must have stirred up sediment and rust in the fuel tank. As Skip notes, the Spider (please, not “Spyder”) has some design flaws—one of which being that it lacks a fuel strainer upstream of the fuel pump, which means that the delicate instrument chops up tank crud and then pushes the fuel through a filter. Fuel pumps don’t like tank crud. The next day, when I turned the key I could hear the Bosch screaming for mercy. Last night, I started the process of changing the fuel filter and pump, and retrofitting a fuel strainer under the tank. In the coming months (perhaps years, if I’m honest with myself), I’ll address the Spider’s other shortcomings, including wiring that causes dim headlights, and a shift lever that’s a bit too tall for many folks’ tastes.
(Notwithstanding these issues, Spiders of this vintage are good “starter-classics.” They are inexpensive–to purchase, anyway–and they represent the best of two worlds: The aesthetics say “1968” and the mechanicals say “1981”. The Spider engine, designed by a Ferrari engineer, was produced for three decades and compared to, say, an MGB from that era, it is fairly advanced with dual overhead cams, fuel injection, and a five-speed transmission. Therefore, the 1981 Fiat Spider appeals to this conservative because it looks essentially like a 1968, with the only changes over the years being incremental ones that generally were improvements. One exception is the regulator-mandated bumper, which, while lacking the charm of the original, chrome bumper, is nowhere near as hideous as the notorious “rubber” bumper of the later MGBs.)
For both me and my wife, this little car harkens back to our youth. For her, it reminds her of riding in a Spider to the beach with its owner, her high school friend Paul, who is no longer with us, having succumbed to the disease that coincidentally first appeared the year my wife’s Fiat was built. For me, it reminds me of helping my dad install a new horn in his Mustang, and tuning my minibike. The Spider’s throttle is exactly like my minibike’s–all it takes is a couple of turns with a screwdriver to adjust the idle.
My wife and I are also in the process of buying a “real” car–the kind of vehicle that will ferry kids to sports and scouting activities, not just carry us two to brunch on a sunny day. This past weekend, we found the perfect one for us, and my wife suggested I look under the hood, knowing that I’ve been getting my hands greasy with her birthday present. I said, “What’s the point?” but she popped the hood, anyway. It was a typical modern engine: Shielded, almost armored, as if to say, “Nuh-uh, don’t touch–nothing to do or see here.” Only the “owner-friendly” parts offer themselves for manipulation: A brightly-colored oil dipstick handle here, a flip-up windshield washer cap there. Most people don’t change their own oil anymore, though some will deign to check the dipstick. Driving a manual transmission is also a dying skill.
I like Skip’s metaphor, but one needn’t go that far to see the automobile as demonstrating “progress” that is detrimental. What kind of a man is unable to drive a stick or check a dipstick? I’ll tell you what kind: He is the metrosexual homeowner I saw last night on “Catch A Contractor”. The kind of guy who hires a handyman to build his deck and is blissfully unaware of how hopelessly shoddy it is. The host of the show is right-leaning comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla, a gearhead and former carpenter who regularly derides his 30-year-old assistant Matt for being unable to negotiate four-on-the-floor.
I myself was becoming a bit like Matt, so my wife’s gift–which is sure to require a lot of tender, loving care involving dirty fingernails–is in some ways a gift to me, too.
Johnny D, The harsh remark on the Fiat is born of longstanding family misery. My parents owned an early 70’s model, bought it new. Within 2 years they were on their 2nd engine, 4th clutch, 3rd starter (one starter actually sheared off when cranking the engine), and probably 13th headgasket. My father recalls one day limping it home, then standing by it and slamming the door over and over and over into the metal support pole in the middle of the garage. By the time they sold it off, the boot was filled with spare parts in anticipation of its next breakdown.
My wife had an uncle who died this past summer. He loved the Fiats, but to support the 1 working example he had a fleet of 13 “donor cars” stored in a hangar he rented at the airport, plus another 2 in his garage that he hoped to eventually get running. The kicker is that 2 years ago he moved from California to Florida, and actually paid to have all those cars shipped by rail. I don’t know if it was mania or incompetence with him, but his family is still, I think, trying to dispose of the Fiat boneyard.
As for your Fiat breaking down on your way home, my Corvette failed me about 8 hours after I bought it. I was at a gas station and it wouldn’t start, could not be jumped. Alternator had died. The really embarassing moment, though, was when a guy in a brand new 2014 vette, in a color matching my own (racing green too!) pulled up beside me and shouted “great color choice!”. Hrmph.
Skip,
Tears coming out of my eyes (laughter or anticipated pain?) at your stories.
Before buying the Spider, I looked at a couple of MGBs, and one owner, an elderly gentleman paring down his collection for estate purposes, told me that he owns 60 cars in all–and his wife is unaware of any of them! It is a sickness.
The day before I bought the Spider, we sold a 2002 Volvo V70XC–and the new owner later called my wife to say that the alternator failed on the way home!
My only experience with a Corvette was riding shotgun with my gearhead fraternity brother. He had worked hard to get that classic running again. Said, “Let’s go for a ride!” A mile down the road the engine blew up.
Li’l Spidey has 117,000 miles on the odometer, which is kinda steep. But I take it as a good sign–it has managed to stay running often enough to rack up all those miles. And the previous owners seem to have taken good care of it. Lots of new parts and improvements and careful repair of a few rust spots in the floor. Will we be looking at an engine rebuild? Maybe so, maybe not. We have “historic” plates and insurance, so we can’t put too many miles on Giuseppe.
Skipsul’s post crystallized a thought that sits at the back of my mind, but which I can’t fully express: the Left is useless when it comes to creating or building institutions (businesses, infrastructure, etc.) in society — but they’re very, very good at restricting, limiting, and even destroying those same institutions when it suits them, which is a lot of the time.
Unless of course the redesigning modifier (translation: destructor) is a complete moo-ron and has no comprehension of the core function of the original design and ends up with a car (or country) functioning something like this:
fyi, I love the engine photo at the top, it is so clean and shiny. Does the engine ever get to go out and play? or does it live in a cage, I mean garage.
Johnny & Skipsul
Well now that I finished my real job, I can come back to comment on what is becoming an ancient tin love fest. Johnny I am with you on the Fiat. Mrs III & I graduated from a TR4 and TR6 household to a 79′ Spider 2000 (circa 83’/84), which was positively civilized after 8 years of “British reliability”. I’d trade Prince Lucas for Magneti Marelli any day of the week. My vintage Fiat was one or two years prior to the fuel injection which I believe gave a smoother operation of the 2 liter DOHC screamer. I knew of three other Fiats of that era with the same engine/drive train and I am guessing that Skipsul’s family took the all of the lemon hits for the rest of us. Mine need regular attention, but nothing like what the Brit’s needed, nor what Skip describes (It always made me wonder how the heck the Brit’s ruled the world for at least a century)
Which brings me full circle back to the improving evolution of a machine vs improving the society analogy. I guess I am seeing two entirely different beasts. Technology evolution vs human nature’s perfectibility. One is straight forward application of a predictable Newtonian physical world, which sees improvements with incremental developments in materials and processes. History is littered with examples of when all of the pieces were in place then things got invented, steam engines, airplanes, automobiles, etc, etc. James Watts got invention credit and many competitors were fast on his heels. The Wright Bros were in the same boat. It was time to fly, they were methodical and got lucky first, but other were so very close as well. History is rarely kind to recalling number two and the runners up.
Society to me seems fixed to the nature of man, which has been commented on with perhaps increasing clarity since the Greeks, to the Romans, and through to the period of the Enlightenment. We here in these United State, I believe, are the beneficiaries of a very astute group of gentlemen, who given their review on the breath of history, and a clean slate, pitted that fallen nature against itself with a pair of fabulous documents. The Declaration and the Constitution. At times I feel we are letting those founders down and we are failing to heed Mr Franklin’s admonition of “A republic….if you can keep it”.
Speaking of fallen natures, why is it that Mrs III and I have been lately looking for a rust free TR4 to restore now that the kids are deep into college and the house is getting quite. I guess I need to start banging my skull on a concrete wall.
It is a generic four banger of which the identity of it origins is scrub from the picture. I am guessing the editor swapped it in when we went to the main page. Judging by the strict utilitarian layout of all of the plumbing, it is probably from a low end Asian manufacturer. Skip’s original image of the Vette engine expresses a manufacturer’s desire for an esthetic statement as well as bragging rights on outrageous and social improper levels of power.
I love the smell of combusted high test fuel in the morning at the track, it reeks of victory.
III, your comments put Mrs. Dubya in a better mood after I had read to her Skip’s tales of Fiat woes.
I do believe one of the problems with the early Fiats exported to the U.S. was that they didn’t have a strong dealer/service network, and a lot of the mechanics didn’t know what they were doing, servicing a product that admittedly had some quirks. The owners were even more in the dark. Mrs. Dubya’s friend’s Spider caught on fire, I suspect because he didn’t know how to “burp” the cooling system. (Yes, it’s a car that needs babying to such an extent that the owner actually has to learn how to burp it.)
The current “network” of owner-mechanics is a hive-mind that shares information on the web and has several ready suppliers of parts and upgrades only a click away–factors that make ownership much less of a headache.
Here’s Mrs. Dubya the day she picked up her new, old car:
Like a restrictor plate used to control airflow into the engine. The purpose is to “even the playing field” if one engine/chassis combination outclasses the others.
I don’t see an analogy between an engine and the constitution at all. The engine turns raw materials into useful output. That has no relation at all to what the constitution does.
Microbial engines are interesting, though. As are motor proteins. They are self-assembled in a meaningful sense, though there’s no way of proving that a Creator-God’s loving purpose isn’t behind such self-assembly.
Think about it not so much in terms of I/O, but in the sense that an engine is deliberately engineered to capture, control, and counter-balance a number of different forces, and our Constitution was originally conceived in the same manner. It was designed and crafted. As I’ve said elsewhere in the comments, the engine analogy has its limits, and as others here have pointed out it can also give the wrong impression of things too. For me it was just something that occurred to me while tinkering on an old car.
They are pretty cars and fun to drive, no doubt, and like so many other classics with sufficiently large fan bases, the enthusiasts have done a fantastic job of correcting the faults and improving on the cars, making them better today than their designers could have conceived.
What has been amusing to me regarding Corvettes is how there is such a wealth of parts out there, often improved over their originals, that I could build a “classic” corvette entirely out of new parts. (I’ve got an essay in the works right now on that subject).
Anyone here a fan of Jay Leno’s garage? He did one recently on the Pantera, making just this same point:
Seawriter: #31 “The problem is Progressives do not see society as a well-run machine as an analogy. Rather for them, it is a seductive vision.”
I don’t believe most conservatives see society as overly well run given the proclivities of human beings to regularly operate at the expense of the good, but we also don’t see it as paradise in the making. For most of us conservatives, it is a place on the journey to somewhere else, albeit that we do want to prohibit evil as we are able.
The efforts of progressives is to manipulate society to some seemingly ever changing effort at perfection, a heaven on earth. Yet, it is better to risk the foibles and failures of individuals than to enable a societal demand that looks a lot like the attempt at regimentation of the Soviet Union, with what now appears to be the progressive application of a new Article 58 whatever when their vision runs into a problem. Of note, a lot of pro-lifers went to jail or prison for protesting abortion. A gulag in support of evil was maintained for that purpose.
What used to be recognized as a common good is now open to question or derided, and what used to be recognized as evil is often celebrated as a right. For instance, before the Civil Rights Act, children born out of wedlock were about four percent in both the black and white communities. So a normative family life was common and commonly recognized as “good” no matter who you were, black, white, Hispanic, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish. This is much too often no longer true. Might it be said that the new norm is abnormal given what it has done to men, women and children? If, per a recent report, a black man is safer in jail than on the street, that is not “good” by any reference I possess.
The progressive control not only the “morality” but also the media so their positions are displayed, sans facts. The facts don’t support them, so the facts don’t get reported by the organs of information, who tend to share the progressives’ vision. An easy instance of this is concealed carry which benefits women and children but the emotional animus works against it in many places and the organs of information are loathe to present the facts. Better dead innocents and a bit of moral outrage than dead bad guys. Just ask a progressive.
Skipsul, I was fascinated by this and wanted to learn more about the alternatives to piston engines, but the link you embedded is behaving strangely on my computer. Is anyone else able to open it? It opens an e-mail on my computer (Mac OX 10.9.5) that’s addressed to what I reckon is the link you embedded–but the weird part is that it absolutely refuses to allow me to copy and paste that address into my browser.
Just me?
Claire, try this:
http://www.animatedengines.com/index.html
The formatting might have gotten hosed either in the copy from MS Word, where I composed it, or when the editor who promoted the post did some cleanup.
Also check here for other nifty mechanical movements by the same guy:
http://507movements.com
Personally I like the Gnome Rotary engine – an early aircraft engine type. Must have been a white-knuckle engine to fly, though, as the rotational inertia would have played havoc with the flight controls.
The Sopwith Camel, for instance, was already an unstable airframe (good for aerial maneuvering), but the engine had such torque on the frame that a neutral stick position actually would have put the plane into a spinning dive.
Front-wheel drive cars have a similar problem as the sideways mounted engine can cause torque steering on hard acceleration.
If you are really interested in weird and innovative engines, you should check out the model engineering shows.
Many many different models of antique engines, like the original otto, and the engine henry ford built on his desk.
so much cool stuff
Now imagine taking off from a the short “flying off” deck of a World War I aircraft carrier with a Sopwith Camel. Better, imagine landing a Sopwith Camel on the “landing-on” deck of one of those beasts. At the end of the landing-on deck was the funnel, creating turbulence with hot gasses, and offering a target to hit if you went long.
Seawriter
Thank you! I am now planning my next eccentricity: insisting that I will only be conveyed in devices powered by a Newcomen atmospheric engine. I think it would be a bit like refusing to eat gluten, but more original. And rational.
Isn’t torque steer is typically caused by left-to-right driveline asymmetries when trying to go straight?
If so, torque steer is a dissimilar phenomenon from the effect of engine angular momentum on the Sopwith when turning.
Even today, your basic single engine piston planes require a constant pressure on the right rudder to correct for engine rotation and propeller backlash. It’s not much, and you do it without thinking.
Still, I think back to those Sopwiths, where all of the controls were, in effect, about 90 degrees off. Wanted to bank right? Stick back. Pull up? Stick left. No wonder the RAC gave the pilots a canteen with an open bar.
Any of the engineers here want to clarify this point?