Arguably, man's two most important inventions or discoveries are fire and the wheel. Man's use of fire has progressed to the point that we can now travel to the moon and even explore other planets. The wheel has given us the freedom to go virtually anywhere we want, in great comfort or at great speed-and sometimes both at the same time. A select few have even driven on the moon!
Exactly when the first "motor car" was invented may be open to question, but the need to tell people how these contraptions worked-and how to fix them when they didn't-is not. Not too long after Motor's inaugural issue in July 1903, information on the care and repair of motor vehicles became Motor's stock in trade.
The automobiles of a hundred years ago, mechanical marvels of their day, evolved into the sophisticated technological vehicles that now cruise our nation's superhighways. Naturally, the tools needed to get them and keep them running would have to evolve, too.
This article looks at a few of the most common tools and pieces of equipment found in the repair shop and briefly chronicles their development. Some have undergone major transformations, others merely refinements (though useful ones). And we'll mention a couple of tools that became obsolete and disappeared from the shop altogether.
The Lowly, Majestic Wrench
Consider one of the simplest and most useful tools in a mechanic's arsenal-the wrench. It began life as a piece of forged steel open at one or both ends to accommodate a nut. Then someone decided it would be great if one wrench could be made to handle different-size nuts. Enter the adjustable wrench. One early improved model was the Cochran "Speednut" wrench. "No slow thumb screw adjustment, but a lightning grip on any square nut from 1/4 in. to 3/4 in., and any hexagon nut from 7/16 in. to 3/4 in.," proclaimed the sell line in a 1915 ad in Motor.
As mechanical devices on automobiles got more sophisticated, the wrench did, too. By the late '30s, mechanics were using wrenches that blinked at them (Blackhawk's "Torkflash" tension wrench) or beeped (Williams' S-57 "Measurrench") to tell them when they had reached the specified torque.
Some tools simply improved on the design of the open-end wrench. New Britain's "Nutmaster" was touted in a September 1959 ad as "the greatest open-end wrench design improvement of all time." The scalloped opening was designed to bear on four faces of a hex nut and three faces of a square nut, without burring the corners. It was also designed to exert a firm grip on badly worn nuts.
The advent of compressed air in the shop could be considered the final step in the wrench's evolutionary process. Where speed is important (and in a shop, time literally is money), nothing beats an air wrench, whether it's a mundane job like removing a wheel's lugnuts or ratcheting in the deep recesses of an engine bay. Today, impact wrenches of all types are available from some of the largest tool manufacturers in the country.
An Uplifting Experience
Roads being what they were back at the turn of the previous century, the things that broke most often on the earliest automobiles undoubtedly were underneath. Getting under there to fix them might have been near impossible in some cases, supremely inconvenient in others. It couldn't have been too long before someone figured out that if the car were up in the air, a mechanic could make those difficult fixes much more easily. So the automotive lift was invented.
The first lifts ran on electricity. They got the car up in the air, and not all that high, either. By the 1920s, companies like Weaver and Manley produced electric lifts that offered a number of new features. For example, the lifts could be placed either outside or inside the shop; they lifted cars by the axle, leaving the wheels to turn free; and they could be stopped at any convenient working height. Many of those lifts raised a car to 4 feet. In the early '30s, Walker Mfg. developed a lift with a top elevation of 512 feet.
Rotary Lift is credited with building the first hydraulic lift (inspired, the story goes, by a session in a barber's chair). In that one, a car was supported the way it drove on, with the wheels resting on the ramps. Later single-post "frame contact" lifts supported the vehicle at strategic points, leaving all four wheels accessible for service. This design sacrificed some undercar accessibility, however.
When twin-post lifts then came on the scene, they offered unobstructed access to the entire under-chassis area. In 1979, Benwil Industries became the first lift-maker to offer a "clear-floor" above-ground lift to shop owners. It provided better use of space while allowing a technician and his equipment to move freely underneath the vehicle.
The newest lifts incorporate electronics to control lift functions and to afford technicians the ability to perform a host of service items. They also incorporate a number of sophisticated safety features. While the earliest lifts had a 6000-pound capacity, some of today's lifts can hoist upwards of 18,000 pounds, which allows shops to take on fleet service.
Analyze This...& That & That & That!
The earliest method of analyzing an automobile's engine was to listen to it. So early engine "doctors" used a stethoscope to isolate abnormal engine sounds. "The Auto Phonendoscope cuts out the noise," proclaimed an ad in the March 1910 issue. The "noise" it cut out was the normal background noise, allowing the mechanic to isolate the abnormal noise. This product, by the way, came packed in a velvet-lined case!
In Motor's December 1929 issue, a column titled "Good Equipment" led off with an early multitester called the Motoscope. This device had a neon tube to test the spark plugs and the distributor; a cylinder balance gauge to test the coil, condenser and high-tension wires; and a vacameter to test the carburetor and compression leaks. In the early '50s, Sun Electric developed the Master Motor Tester, "the analog forerunner of today's modern computerized engine analyzers," we said in a retrospective in the November 1997 issue. In the late-'50s, Du Mont's EnginScope had Superscan, which showed the test pattern of each individual cylinder simultaneously instead of all cylinders in a single line across the screen.
When we became environmentally conscious in the '70s and '80s, a number of companies added an emissions-testing capability to their analyzers, or marketed dedicated emissions testers. Analyzers became so big, in fact-in both what they could do and the footprint they made on the shop floor, in some cases-that they were called diagnostic centers. They generally were able to test everything on a vehicle that needed testing, with such features as automatic self-calibration and color printouts of test results so the customer could see at a glance exactly what was wrong.
Technology developed to the point that new phrases-hand-held, scan tool and PDA-entered the service lexicon. Now, a technician standing over an engine has the power of many sophisticated testers-lab scope, digital multimeter, flight recorder and more-right in the palm of his hand. In engine diagnostics, it looks like we've come full circle: We went from a simple analyzer a mechanic could hold in his hand to a super-duper analyzer a mechanic could, well, hold in his hand.
A Hundred Miles of Bad Road
Front-wheel alignments have been a staple of repair shops pretty much since automobiles began traversing the rut-riddled roads of the early 20th century. An editorial item in Motor's November 1926 issue described a front-wheel aligner that measured the rims at axle height, on either side of the axle, both in front of and behind it. Tightening two sliding eccentric collars indicated and held the measurements, which were then compared. A few years later, Motor readers were told of a wheel alignment indicator that used long metal plates mounted on ball bearings, a large double-faced dial that could read toe-in and toe-out and a bell that sounded when excessive misalignment was measured.
Easier, faster and more accurate wheel alignments were made possible in the late-'40s with the so-called "beam-of-light" principle. This offered shops the additional benefit of being able to prove to customers, if you will, in a strikingly visual way, the real need for a wheel alignment. Technology has gotten higher (as it always does), and now we have alignment machines that can measure wheel alignment via infrared light or digital cameras. On some models, information can be relayed from the alignment heads to the alignment machine via radio waves, eliminating the need for pesky connecting cords.
Unplanned Obsolescence
Progress has made the tools needed for some repair tasks in the automobile's infancy obsolete. A few come to mind. For example, early issues of Motor contained many advertisem*nts for electric or gasoline-heated vulcanizers for hot-patching tire casings and inner tubes. "Tire germs will not cause you much trouble if you use a National Steam Vulcanizer," promised an ad in the March 1910 issue. As tubeless tires became the norm, a vulcanized patch could be applied to the inside of a tire. Today, most tire repairs are made by plugging the hole-a cold process.
Lubricating a car's springs was made easier with a spring leaf spreader, a viselike device that pried apart the individual leafs so a mechanic could apply the grease. In this century, leaf springs are found mostly on the rear axles of light trucks. They have a layer of some type of plastic or nylon between the leafs to quiet squeaks-there's no metal-to-metal contact. Almost all passenger cars now have coil springs or torsion bars for suspension.
One other product, from the early 'teens, is worth mentioning, although it's not strictly a repair item. It's the No-Shammy Funnel, which reportedly solved the problem of water and dirt in gasoline. Gasoline was strained through the funnel, which "is built on scientific lines [and] absolutely assures clean gas." Two sizes were offered-10 gallons or 5 gallons per minute. Today, because of refinement technologies and strict regulation, "clean gas" at the pumps is pretty much a given.
Nontech Goes High-Tech
Even some shop equipment that no one would have considered inherently technical a hundred years ago has gone high-tech. The repair manual is one example. The 1918 Edition of the American Technical Society's five-volume reference work Automobile Engineering covered "the construction, care and repair of pleasure cars, motor trucks and motorcycles." We were told that "even the most experienced veteran in the business will prize this magnificent library." Repair manuals still exist today, of course (Motor itself publishes about 20 titles a year), but they're complemented by an electronic database of repair procedures and constantly updated information. And all this information-on-a-disk or on the Web is accessible by a technician as he's peering into an engine bay.
And how much lower tech can you get than mechanics' gloves? In its January 1910 issue, Motor carried an ad for an oilskin repair glove that was waterproof and greaseproof. To be sure, there have been improvements in materials, feel and durability over the last century, but now they're designing gloves for specific applications. In fact, this month's Tools of the Trade column (page 79) describes three such offerings from GOJO Industries-HiTactile, SureGrip and MaxImpact. Now that's evolution!
Download PDF
