> I believe that most of what we call standard on automotive designs
> (independent suspension, hydraulic braking, automatic
> transmission, overhead
> cams etc...) had been put into some limited production vehicle or
> another by
> the end of the war.
Perhaps they all had been tried by then, in fact I suspect most of them were
at least tried long before that. However, none of those things became
practical and common until sometime around WWII or later. "Limited
production" is a very slippery term anyway, essentially all cars before the
Ford Model T were limited production (ie hand made). I'd also be very
interested to hear of a fully automatic transmission back then, my
understanding was that GM's Hydramatic was the first one offered on a car,
in 1938.
> Back then, or course the difference between piston and
> cyulinder diameter was not taken up with hard wings, it was a
> simple leather
> pad over the top of the piston and doused with water that did the job.
Which actually worked pretty good for the application (steam engines).
Better solutions required better materials and machining methods.
> It seems that most of the work since then has been spent making the
> same tired old design with greater and greater precision.
Well, it hasn't been for lack of trying. Remember the turbine cars ?
Wankel ? Bill Lear even tried to bring back the steam engine. Lots of
people right now spending a fortune, trying to build an electric car that is
practical and competitive. Lots and lots of "out of the box" ideas too,
"people mover" for example, sliding sidewalks, funicular tramways, etc. All
seem to have some fundamental flaws ...
> By merely adding in another 500 moving parts they
> will get another 5% efficiency out of the system.
If someone can squeeze another 5% efficiency out of the system (ie 25%
instead of the 20% or so we have now), then they definitely get my vote for
designer of the year !!! Hell, that's as much or more advance than we made
the entire last decade in terms of something that is practical today.
However, there are useful designs laying about on drawing boards, waiting
for better materials ... just like 100 years ago <g>
> Even at
> millions of cycles per second, digital is much less regular than
> the earth's
> gravity.
I won't argue that your old speed controllers might be better. But, I've
worked with people who measure the variations in the earth's gravity, it's
by no means constant. And they use digital computers running at millions of
cycles per second to measure it !
Computers are just another form of machine, albeit extremely complex ones.
If you think about it, camshafts are a form of computer, so are automatic
transmission valve bodies. And like any machine, there are good designs for
computer systems, and bad designs (IMO Windoze falls into the latter
category <g>). Your speed controllers sound to me like another example of
mis-applied technology.
Oh well, back to work. Gotta beat this computer into a plowshare <g>
Randall
/// triumphs@autox.team.net mailing list
/// To unsubscribe send a plain text message to majordomo@autox.team.net
/// with nothing in it but
///
/// unsubscribe triumphs
///
/// or try http://www.team.net/cgi-bin/majorcool
|