Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time in TAFE libraries (for those not living in Australia, technical college libraries). In addition to the very valuable automotive books, it’s the engineering papers that are the most interesting.

Each year the Society of Automotive Engineers publishes numerous technical papers on all topics automotive. You can buy them as downloadable pdfs by going to www.sae.org – but because you can see only a précis of the paper before you need to get out your credit card, this can be an expensive way of acquiring information. However, technical college libraries often have some of the papers, especially in the book form that the SAE occasionally publishes.

The ability to keep on the cutting edge of change is one clear advantage of the SAE engineering papers, but there’s another major advantage that’s often overlooked. And what’s this other advantage? If you own an older car, it’s possible by consulting the papers of that era to find stuff that’s directly relevant to your machine.

In 1990, when I owned a VL Holden Commodore Turbo, I was frustrated by its lack of aerodynamic development. The standard car was lousy and there were no simple off-the-shelf improvements available. The HDT Brock Commodores had body kits developed with no scientific input, and the pictured groundbreaking ‘Walkinshaw’ Group A, the first HSV model and one shaped with a huge amount of wind tunnel work, was too expensive to buy. (And it didn’t have the turbo engine.) And because the Walky was a near new car, you also couldn’t buy copies of its body kit.

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As I have often written here, I love buying (and reading too, of course!) car books. I have a very extensive library of automotive books, including many technical examples dating back up to ninety years.

Invariably, even when opening a very old book, I learn something. For example, a few months ago I bought a series on automotive engineering published in the late 1920s. I was amazed at the coverage given to steam and electric cars, and that in part triggered the series we ran in AutoSpeed on alternative forms of propulsion.

After all, if steam and electric were then so strong in comparison to the internal combustion engine, why not now as well?

However, there’s one type of old book which is usually a dead loss. Except, I guess, as a historical curiosity. And the type of book? Those that cover modification, or as it was often called then, ‘tuning’. Even the tuning books seen as classics – and so worth quite a lot of money – are today usually irrelevant.

For example, Automobile Engine Tuning (1962) is a book that is usually commands very good secondhand prices. Its author, Phil Irving, was a highly regarded automotive and motorcycle engineer. But open the book today and it’s all so dated that there’s nearly nothing you can use. Before people write defending the man, I’ve no doubt that in its time the information was all useful. But today I couldn’t find a single thing that benefited me. Not one thing.

David Vizard is another very well known and well regarded technical writer. But his Performance with Economy (published 1981 and 1987) is another that time has not treated favourably. I recently bought it, thinking that at least in an area like camshaft design and tuning there may be relevant material. But I was wrong. Instead, there’s excitement about electronic ignition…

Simply, the use of 4-valve heads, full engine management with closed loop control, variable valve timing – and all the rest – makes the technologies covered in these books pedestrian. Like, they get enormously excited dealing with stuff that was available mainstream 20 years ago. Or, to put it another way, what was then exotic and on the cutting edge is now available in cars so old they’re being sent to the wreckers for a hundred bucks.

But there’s another side. If the modification book looks not at hands-on tweaks but instead at the theory behind them, the material dates far less quickly. The superbly named Souping the Stock Engine, published in 1950, has plenty in it as relevant today as when it was published. For example, its Five Paths to Power are: increase piston displacement; increase the weight of the mixture drawn in on the intake stroke; increase the efficiency of combustion; increase the mechanical efficiency; increase the peak rpm.

Doesn’t get much more relevant that that, eh?

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We’ve all heard of short-shifters, where the throw of the gear lever is reduced. Short-shifters are available aftermarket for many cars and some performance models of mainstream cars use a shorter gear throw.

Generally a short-shifter moves the fulcrum point so that less movement is required of the gear-knob to achieve the necessary movement of the selector forks. Some short-shifters provide a movement so abbreviated that the gear lever feels more like a light switch.

However, in any gearbox, a shorter throw will require more effort – that is, the gear shift will be heavier.

Most enthusiasts agree that a shorter gear throw is attractive, purportedly because quicker shifts can be made. But in the real world, I doubt that’s actually the attraction. Instead, it’s probably because it makes the car feel more responsive and quicker – snick, snick, snick the gear lever on the way up and down the ‘box.

I once had a Rover 2000, a very British car with a large steering wheel, low-power 2 litre 4-cylinder – and about the quickest factory shifter you’re ever likely to come across! The movement of the very short gear lever movement was completely at odds with the feel of the rest of the controls.

These thoughts all became relevant yesterday when I went off to the wreckers to find a new gear knob for my Peugeot 405 SRDT. The original was cracked and tired and wrecker replacements are so cheap that the upgrade was well worth it. And $5 later, I had a nice, heavy, ex late model Kia gear knob that had the right shift pattern shown on top. The thread wasn’t a match for the odd, vertically splined (except they’re much too crude to be called splines!) Pug gear lever, but I figured I could adapt it.

At the wreckers I’d taken off the Pug gear knob, only to have it come to pieces in my hands. So on the trip home, I simply bunged the new gear knob on top of the shaft, so extending it by about 50mm.  And you know what? The slower, lighter gear shift that resulted actually felt pretty good! But I was sure that I was confused – how could a slower shift be better? – and left the gear knob in this position for a few days. I also got my wife to drive the car.

And we both agreed that the lighter, longer travel gear shift felt better than standard.

So, instead of shortening the gear lever and putting the new knob closer to the floor – so resulting in a poor man’s short shift – I went the other way…. installing a “long shift”!

Selecting second gear on a down-change is easier and on the up-changes, the synchro seems to like the slower shift. The gear-box, a design with a pretty horrible standard shift quality, is simply much improved….

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Last weekend I attended an electric car show. Organised by the Sydney branch of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association, it was unlike any other car show I’ve ever been to.

Why?

Well, firstly, the cars were different to 99 per cent of vehicles on the road. With the exception of a few current model Prius Toyotas, they were all home-converted battery electric vehicles. That’s right, (mostly) road-registered and street driven, these cars never visited petrol stations but instead needed only to be plugged into mains power.

Another thing rather different about the show was the interest being shown by visitors.

At a typical car sow you’ll get lots of lookers but few talkers. Here, every visitor had dozens of questions – and some even came equipped with notebooks and were writing down the answers. One guy had come all the way from Canberra and was actively seeking the information to enable him to have a car converted to electric power for his daily commute.

Others were asking about conversion costs, battery life, range, performance – and everything else you could imagine.

There was a constant buzz of interested conversation.

Along with the road-registered cars, there was also an electric kart, a half-built electric clubman and an electric motorbike. The road vehicles included a Camry wagon, Daihatsu Charade, Hyundai Excel, Daewoo Lanos and even a Mazda ute.

I was attending the show to gather material for some AutoSpeed stories, and got to drive three of the cars. We’ll be running these stories in due course, but in the mean time, if you’re at all interested in building your own battery electric car – or having a car converted to battery electric power – be aware that there’s a bunch of very enthusiastic and helpful people available to you as a resource.

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Perhaps I am unusual in that as a guy in his mid-forties, I’ve owned relatively few carburetted cars. My first two cars were carby, but after that my main cars have always had electronic injection. And so I’ve got completely used to thinking in terms of cars with plenty of electronics controlling the fuel and ignition.

So it’s a real shock when I start thinking through modifications for my newly-acquired Peugeot 405 SRDT diesel. Clearly, being a diesel, you don’t expect to see spark plugs and an ignition coil and coil module and stuff like that. But the absence of a crank-angle sensor, MAP sensor or airflow meter, intake air temperature sensor and ECU comes as a bit of a shock. (The Pug injection is the old mechanical Bosch system, rather than today’s electronically controlled common rail system, that in many ways resembles a conventional petrol injection system.)

The shock isn’t so much in making changes to the fuel system; it’s in all the other avenues which are no longer viable. For example, the Independent Electronic Boost Control kit worked extremely well when I developed it. But I can’t use it on the Pug because there’s no electronically varying injector pulse width!  The Intelligent Turbo Timer  is another project that immediately springs to mind – but again I can’t use it because there’s no electronic indication of load.

And I’m finding that I really need to change completely how I think. A week or so after buying the car I was finding it harder and harder to get it started. The engine would crank many times before it sprang into action – to then, paradoxically, idle and run perfectly. What could be the problem? The cranking speed sounded a bit low so I put a multimeter across the battery – it showed just 7 volts on cranking! Hmm, I immediately thought, I bet the ECU can’t compensate in its injector pulse width when the voltage is so low – and the spark’ll be weak too! Except, there’s no spark and no ECU! Instead, the low cranking speed results in less compression pressure, and so temp build-up, and so ignited fuel. (I put in a new battery and the problem was immediately solved.)

None of these ideas is earth-shattering. But it’s interesting how I need to so dramatically change my mind-set – I guess, just the same as if I went back to modifying a carby car….

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If you own – or buy – an Eighties or Nineties car you’ll invariably find it has lots of black plastic exterior bits. Bumpers are the biggest examples but often there’ll also be side protector strips and rear vision mirrors.

And nothing looks worse on these cars than when the rich, deep black turns to a friable grey.

My Peugeot 405 SRDT is one of the breed with lots of exterior black plastic trim. And, especially against the white paint, the black-that-was-now-grey looked terrible. I tried some exterior trim restorer – a good brand of stuff, quite expensive – and it didn’t fix the problem. (But on another car, with rubber strips rather than plastic, it worked well.) So I went back to the auto parts shop and looked again.

What I came home with is pictured above – Forever Black Bumper and Trim Reconditioner. The on-box blurb says: “Permanently recolors and protects all black plastic, vinyl and rubber surfaces on your car without silicone”.

And now, having applied the stuff, that description seems pretty well on the money. Because you see, this liquid is basically a dye! You clean the surface with the provided cleaner (I must say that, having just cleaned the car, I didn’t bother using the cleaner) and then apply the liquid via a foam applicator, a bit like shoe polish. The instructions suggest masking off surfaces you also don’t want black, and I did a combination of this and later using polish to remove the excess that had got past the masking and onto the paint.

Grey, faded surfaces turn to a rich black – and if they don’t, you simply put on a second coat. It’s nothing like the other ‘black surface’ restorers I have used – although over the years I’ve tried only a handful so am certainly no expert.

The rear bumper of the Peugeot clearly needed less, so perhaps it had been replaced during the life of the car. The front bumper needed two coats.

The end result makes the car look vastly better, not just in that it looks less tired, but also in that the original designers’ intentions are now much clearer – the body visually ties together better.

I saw a Euro Barina on the road the other day – perhaps along with the Ford Ka the car most in need of black plastic restorer. But what made me notice the Barina was how good it looked – someone had spent some time with some black dye…

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There is a major difference between workshops that hustle their customers well and those that take pride in the quality of their work and produce the goods.  It’s easy to lose sight of the latter when blinded by the former. 

Paradoxically, I’d be especially wary of workshops that are given much publicity – and are even revered – in modified car media. Often those workshops are widely covered because they’re doing exciting things – but do you want exciting times with a workshop or just good jobs? Excitement more than often means breakages, something which in my experience the customer – not the workshop – always ends up paying for….

By far the best way to assess workshop competence is to ask for a customer reference – to get the phone number of a former customer who has had similar work done on a similar car.  That way, you can have a chat with the person and see if they were happy with the work, the service and the price. If you’re told that customer info is confidential, provide your own contact details and ask if the customer can give you a call.

Another way of checking things out is to ask about the workshop’s involvement with competition cars.  Any workshop worth their salt will be fielding cars (or have customers with cars) in drag racing, club sprints, speedway, touring cars, hillclimbs, motorkhanas, off-road racing or the like. And that applies even to small town workshops. If they aren’t currently involved in any way with competition, and have never been involved in any competition involving cars, leave.

Finally – and it‘s by no means infallible – workshops that have been around for many years are more likely to have been doing the right thing by their customers than those just starting with a splash.

Over the years I’ve seen the best of workshops with few customers and the worse of workshops with heaps.  Just occasionally – VERY occasionally – the best workshops also have lots of customers.

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As someone who has always enjoyed buying and selling secondhand goods, the advent of eBay is to me the opening of a Pandora’s Box of wonderful stuff.

I spend probably a minimum of 30 minutes each day scanning eBay, normally looking at the technical books but occasionally also checking search results on cars I own or I would like to own. My wife and I have a feedback record of over 700, accumulated usually through the purchase and sale of small bits and pieces. (And that feedback record is 100 per cent: we’ve met only an extraordinarily small number of people with whom we’ve had any problems at all – and none where the problems couldn’t be resolved.)

But the reason I am mentioning eBay here is because of something I’ve found very useful; something many people may not have thought of. Quite often when modifying cars, I wonder if a standard part fitted to another model will perform the required role. And with their pics and model details, eBay makes a great place to find if those parts exist.

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I have never been for a ride in a stage coach but it’s something I’d very much like to do. And preferably at full speed, the team of horses at a gallop. Why? Well, primarily because I wonder how well the coaches ride.

I have a book on Cobb & Co, the best known and largest of the stagecoach companies in Australia’s history, and the map showing the routes that the coaches took is stunning. Especially in Queensland, they penetrated way into the inland – true Outback territory. The roads – always dirt and often largely unmade – were terrible and yet the point to point times were actually quite quick. (The coaches ran to timetables like buses do today.)

The coaches used long-travel (and large!) elliptical leaf springs – sometimes transverse as well as longitudinal – and had huge wheels. AFAIK, damping was provided only by the inter-leaf friction of the springs – no dampers were fitted.  In short, the suspension design was as far away from contemporary small wheel, short travel, highly damped suspensions as possible.

But I have a suspicion that these vehicles might have had a very good ride indeed. The large wheels simply wouldn’t have noticed the bumps that a modern car’s wheel would crash into; the very long suspension travel and low natural frequency (at a guess the static deflection would give a resonant frequency near to 1Hz) is close to ideal for human comfort.

A horse-drawn stage coach riding better than a current car? I wonder…

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