[HN Gopher] Howard Hughes modified a 1925 Doble steam car to rea...
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Howard Hughes modified a 1925 Doble steam car to reach 133 MPH
(2022)
Author : palmfacehn
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-03-12 07:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hemmings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hemmings.com)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| anybody have diagrams of this engine?
|
| Picture https://roarington.com/media-
| house/directories/cars/doble_e_...
|
| This video opens the hood, and shows cross sections of engine.
| And is technical focus.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtqVvS8iP9w
|
| This Jay Leno video is actually good. Has cutaway of the engine
| to show the moving parts.
|
| https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=701
| TylerE wrote:
| There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine. It's
| the firebox/burner and boiler where all the really hard and
| interesting stuff happens.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine.
|
| Beware the train spotters. I hear a hundred steam-powered
| keyboards ready to rave about the intricacies of reverser
| gears.
| TylerE wrote:
| Oh, I'm intimately aware. Just pointing my out that what
| most people call a steam "engine"... maybe only 10% of that
| is the actual engine. In something like a car especially.
| The actual engine is just a double acting cylinder and a
| few slide valves.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think the negative response to this type of post is
| because you can take any field and do a reductive
| statement "It's Just XYZ". There is a hundred years of
| steam engine design "It's Just some valves".
|
| It's just a way to either minimize someone's field, or
| way to show you only have a cursory understanding. Rarely
| does someone have a deep knowledge of a field and then
| also frame an overview of the field as "Just some bits".
|
| Nuclear Physics is Just smashing atoms.
|
| Biology is Just some Cells. Or Just looking through a
| microscope.
|
| Computer Science is Just the application of And/OR
| statements. Or Just Boolean logic.
|
| Internal Combustion Engines are just little explosion's
| in a cylinder.
|
| F1 Cars are just an engine + battery + some wings.
|
| Edit:
|
| Honestly. I'm guilty of doing this too. I've "Just
| Learned" how people take it so have learned to adapt
| phrasing things that don't insult people.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| There is some interesting engineering in a compound double
| acting engine[1], especially one like the Doble which runs on
| superheated steam. There's a large temperature gradient
| between the "hot side" and the "cold side" where the hot side
| is something like 1250degF+. IIRC they had to be careful
| about getting the correct cast iron alloys, and the bores had
| to be slightly tapered. Then there's the valve train, which
| is totally different from an IC engine but sizing and flow
| considerations are still really important for efficiency.
|
| Also, your crossheads and bottom end bearings are potentially
| an area of concern--while rotational speeds are really low by
| modern engine standards, there's a problem of figuring out
| how to remove water from the lube oil.
|
| So I'd wager there's still a whole bunch of "interesting"
| things happening in the Doble engine, and we'd probably have
| a pretty difficult time building one from scratch today given
| that reciprocating steam engines haven't been "a thing" in
| industrial living memory.
|
| [1] For one example of an interesting problem: for a given
| temperature of inlet steam and desired power output, in a
| double expansion double-acting compound engine, tell me what
| size the hot cylinder will be, what size the cold cylinder
| will be, and what the clearances, rings, etc will be to make
| it all work efficiently across the operating envelope.
| TylerE wrote:
| The Doble boiler is so much more interesting than that,
| though ;)
|
| Almost unique.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| It is very cool. I think we'd be mistaken thinking that
| any of this engineering is "trivial". This was the height
| of a technology that's largely forgotten, and
| unforgetting it would be hard work at every turn.
| mannykannot wrote:
| If plethora of designs in search of perfection is an
| indicator of something of interest, then take a look at the
| many variations in valve gear design, particularly for
| locomotives, which needed to operate reasonably efficiently
| over a wide range of speeds, gradients and loads.
|
| Even more so, consider the many attempts at making non-
| turbine rotary steam engines, wonderfully documented here:
| http://douglas-
| self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/rotaryengines/rotaryeng...
|
| My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine:
| http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/tower/tower.htm
|
| Unlike most of the designs here, this one was built and even
| put to a little practical use.
| uticus wrote:
| > My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine...
|
| when i first saw the static diagram, i thought wow that
| looks like it is much more complicated than this 2-d
| diagram lets on. then later down the page i saw the
| animation showing the 3-d complexity... mind blowing.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Well the perfection of a steam-powered car was interesting
| even though technically far too late to matter. Early steam
| cars were more like steam trains: big boilers that need to be
| fired an hour before you want to go anywhere and need regular
| stops to take on water.
|
| In a Doble there technically isn't a boiler as most people
| think of it; the modern equivalent term might be "steam
| generator".
|
| The Doble system flashes water to steam almost instantly and
| on-demand, then uses a condenser to recycle the water. The
| flame is also not burning continuously, but only when steam
| is needed. With modern insulation materials the firebox is
| very efficient with little heat loss and lasts a long time.
|
| This gives the Doble steam car a responsiveness closer to a
| gas engine, without the need to pre-heat the boiler or
| continuously refill with water. The fuel system is more
| flexible too, it can operate on almost any liquid combustible
| with some adjustment.
|
| By the time the Doble was developed it was too late; gasoline
| and diesel won.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Part of the problem I think was that each Doble car was
| basically a one-off. They were expensive, high performance
| prototypes, not production consumer products. In principle
| they could have been made more user friendly--in terms of
| performance specs they were really close to a win (15mpg,
| powerful, quiet, low water consumption, fast starting) but
| they were still finicky, high maintenance machines. Higher
| production numbers could have driven solutions, but the
| Otto cycle had the advantage there. I wonder if you ran the
| 1890-1930 experiment 10 times how differently it all might
| shake out each time.
| TylerE wrote:
| The part almost no one talks about is how there are tons
| of cars being sold as early as 1880.
|
| They were just called horseless carriages, and were
| essentially a small carriage with... an electric motor
| and batteries. Yup, the original dominant form of car was
| an EV.
| hinkley wrote:
| Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts.
|
| I knew a Microsoft millionaire who retired at 30. By 35 he was
| involuntarily committed, and nearly broke.
|
| I knew him because he threw great parties, and we got invited to
| one and my gf and he became friends. These were not rich people
| parties, they were upper middle class parties with zany themes,
| like alcoholic waffles. He was always doing something that
| surprised you. It made a certain kind of sense but it was things
| you would never think of.
|
| Over time, the surprises got less humorous and more troubling.
| Toward the end he had a manipulative girlfriend turned unrequited
| love who was sponging off of him, and his grip on reality was
| slipping. At one point he said he was trying to make himself
| insane, and I guess he succeeded. His mother got power of
| attorney when he was down to his condo and $85k in today's
| dollars.
|
| Thinking about that after, and my own family's experience with
| decline after retirement, I thought that the regulating effect of
| going to work every day was probably doing him a lot of good. I
| feel like the same thing happened with Hughes as well. He just
| holed up in his mansion and unraveled.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts.
|
| And also basically a criminal by today's standards. If a 19yo
| was caught in a Ferrari trying to break a record on a beach, or
| anywhere other than a closed race track on private land, that
| 19yo would be lucky to ever drive again. And if that 19yo hurt
| anyone, possibly a decade or more in prison.
| hinkley wrote:
| Saw a video on YouTube the other day that mentioned an early
| Hollywood movie that killed three extras filming a flood
| scene. If I have my timelines right that would have been
| approximately contemporary with Hughes.
|
| The value of a human life seemed to drop pretty low during
| the Depression, but it wasn't that great before then either.
| Unfortunately an expectation of safety is a rather recent
| development, one that Alec Baldwin is learning about right
| now.
| RobRivera wrote:
| It was Noahs Ark (1928) Not HH
| hinkley wrote:
| I think you'll find if you read what I wrote again that I
| didn't say he had anything to do with it.
|
| (I had in fact forgotten he made movies, not just
| consumed them voraciously)
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > The value of a human life seemed to drop pretty low
| during the Depression, but it wasn't that great before then
| either.
|
| Very true. Every 10 stories of building height had an
| expected death rate attached to it. Same for every extra
| 100ft span of bridge.
|
| When the Brooklyn Bridge was built and workers were being
| crippled or killed by the bends down in the caissons... the
| solution was already known from research over a decade
| before. But we're not gonna pay people to not work
| (decompression time) so they just let people get hurt.
|
| None of those things were considered very newsworthy or a
| significant problem to be prevented.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know why I am surprised to hear the BB
| foundations were deep enough to cause that issue. It's
| clearly a deep water channel.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| The armorer in that case was extraordinarily negligent,
| having a loaded weapon on set at all. After what happened
| to Brandon Lee I can't imagine any movie production
| allowing live rounds any where near the set - and he was
| killed by a blank round!
| tlb wrote:
| That feels a little unfair. Every driver in the 1920s would
| be be breaking today's laws. They were exploring a new
| technology when it wasn't clear yet what the rules should be.
| The laws at the time (inherited from horse-drawn vehicles)
| only set speed limits in specific places like cities and
| bridges. You could ride your horse as fast as you dared
| anywhere else, and the same with cars.
| greesil wrote:
| A criminal of the most terrible kind. They should have locked
| him up and threw away the key. They should have confiscated
| the car and locked that up too to keep some other potential
| daredevil from driving that murderous machine. I bet it
| didn't even have seat belts.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "my own family's experience with decline after retirement, "
|
| For three generations, everyone who has retired early in my
| family has thrived. One even retired extraordinarily late at 80
| and is still doing well.
| rjsw wrote:
| My father has just retired at 90.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| That generation has some serious scars from the Great
| Depression...
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| https://archive.is/NaCGK
| Animats wrote:
| I'm amazed that the car stayed on the ground. Both Stanley and
| Doble made steam cars that had more power than the suspension
| could handle. A speed record attempt:
|
| _" As the Steamer started its run, it was silent except for a
| low, soft whistle. This rose to a faint whine, and a jetlike
| white stream flowed from the tail of the car. Soon the head of
| the driver could hardly be seen in the blur of speed. The car
| passed the 100 m.p.h. mark and surged up to 197 m.p.h. As it was
| about to touch 200 m.p.h., however, the racer hit a slight bump
| on the beach. The light car took off like a wingless glider,
| soared for about 100 feet at a height of 10 feet, then crashed to
| the cement-hard sand in an explosion of steam and flames. The
| driver was flung clear, badly injured but not dead."_[1]
|
| [1] https://www.americanheritage.com/stanleys-and-their-steamer
| jcgrillo wrote:
| The Doble weighs about 4 times as much ;)
| uticus wrote:
| > The 1925 Doble Steam Car could out-accelerate the mighty Model
| J Duesenberg of 1930, doing 0 to 75 mph in just 5 seconds, with
| its engine turning over at less than 1,000 rpm...
|
| wha? certainly better than my hatchback
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