Dave's Automotive Technical Library

brought to you by:  Dave Williams
This page: www.bacomatic.org/~dw/library/library.htm
Main page: http://www.bacomatic.org/~dw/index.htm
Last Updated: 30 Aug 2007
Author: Dave Williams; dlwilliams=aristotle=net

Reference Material

Chassis/Suspension
  • Wheel Offsets Do you know which way is positive and which is negative? You might be surprised!
  • Various Wheel Bolt Patterns
  • Various Tire Sizes (old data)
  • Brake Fluid Recirculators
  • Active Ackermann

    General Tech
  • Engine Weights List
  • Freewheeling Engine FAQ
  • Bearing Rubbing Speeds (for stroker motors)
  • Common Engine Rod Ratios (for stroker motors)
  • Turbo Hydramatic 200 Notes (text: 200 Kb)
  • How To Clean Fuel Injectors At Home
  • Hardened Valve Seats
  • Checking out aftermarket SB Ford heads
  • Freeing stuck engines
  • GM 4T60 4WD conversion

    Service
  • Starter Replacement - Geo Metro
  • Timing Belt Replacement - CVH Ford Escort

    Tech Notes
  • Dave's Short Tech Notes

    The Vendor List
    This is a fancified version of my big (>10000 line) automotive address list. I got tired of digging through stacks of old magazines whenever I wanted to look something up.
  • Automotive Vendor List File size 260 Kb, 05/11/2003
  • Other Automotive Stuff List File size 75 Kb

    The Rec.Motorcycles FAQs
    Back in 1992 I created the first rec.motorcycles FAQ. When I lost access to netnews I passed it on to someone else, and it sort of wobbled around and vanished. Here are the last ones I did, circa 1994.
  • The abbreviated rec.motorcycles FAQ
  • The long rec.motorcycles FAQ

    AutoNotes
    For a while (1992-1994) I was writing an online automotive newsletter. Here are all 18 issues:
  • AutoNotes Issues #1-#18

    Bibliography
  • Some automotive book reviews, circa 1992
  • More book reviews, as above

    Engines of Yore
    Back in 1992 I did some technical synopses of a few old engines.
  • Rudge Ulster 4-valve
  • Ariel Square Four
  • Scott 596cc Twin
  • Buick Straight 8
  • Cadillac V16 and V12
  • commentary
  • Ford GAA DOHC Aluminum V8 From 1944
  • Barr&Stroud Sleeve Valve V-twin

    Retro Tech!
    Things so old they're new again...
  • Ex-Cell-O Mechanical Fuel Injection
  • Winfield Carburetor
  • Electric Dynamometer
  • Hydraulic Dynamometer

    Miscellaneous
  • Steam Powered Automobile Notes
  • Honda VFR800 trailer hitch


    From Others...

    Engine and General Tech
  • Mean Gringo Bob's Dark Side of Automotive Technology
  • Bruce Plecan on turbo Buicks and EFI
  • The [email protected] Archives
  • partial archive of the former Wheelbase online service, circa 1995
  • "British V8 Newsletter" archive
  • Jim McFarland's "Performance Professor" Lectures

    Suspension
  • Mark Ortiz' Chassis Newsletters
  • Bill Shope's Suspension Calculations (offsite)
  • Bill Mitchell on chassis setup
  • Brian Beckman's "Physics of Racing" series
  • AFCO Racing's chassis setup pages

    Aerodynamics
  • Simon McBeath's 'Aerobytes' columns

    Bruce Hamilton's Gasoline FAQ
    Gas FAQ /1
    Gas FAQ /2
    Gas FAQ /3
    Gas FAQ /4

    Turbochargers
  • turbo data

    Papers
  • Technical Papers from various places

    Books

    This is a collection of engineering texts that have fallen into the public domain. The copyrights have been searched at http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html.

    These books are the real deal, written for practicing engineers who might actually be called upon to design something singlehandedly instead of being a piece of a team. You'll be astonished to find that nothing much has changed in the last century; the old guys knew their stuff backward and forward. In many cases, these are the books that CF Taylor and John Heywood reference in their later, derivative textbooks. Except these books were written by engineers who had actually done it, not academics. I think you'll notice a significant difference in the type of information presented.

    Most of this stuff I scanned myself, at 300 DPI. The HTML is set to "WIDTH=800" for the display size; you can change that if you have a high resolution monitor.

    "Scavenging of Two-Stroke Cycle Diesel Engines" Paul H. Schweitzer, 1949, 270pp. == 18 Mb .PDF
    This is the definitive work on big two-stroke Diesels. This is book is a reference for the design of Diesel engines, not a generic "this is what one looks like" like so many later texts have become.

    "High-Speed Diesel Engines" P.M. Heldt, 1944, 430pp. == 77 Mb HTML

    "Valvetrain Design" Michael C. Turkish, Eaton Corp. 1946 == 13 Mb HTML
    Until quite recently this was the only single book on camshaft design for internal combustion engines. It was written by an engineer at Eaton Corporation. I found a copy in a used book store for a few dollars. It turned out the book had only a small printing and it quite rare.

    "Cam Design - A Manual for Enginees, Designers, and Draftsmen"by Clyde Moon PE, Camco, 1961 69pp. == 4.2 Mb .PDF
    General cam design reference by Commercial Cam Co. division of Emerson Electric

    "Engine Dynamics and Crankshaft Design" Glenn D. Angle, 1925 == 41 Mb HTML
    This is, as far as I can tell, the only book out there dedicated entirely to crankshaft design. I borrowed this copy from the General Motors Research Laboratory.

    "High Speed Combustion Engines" P.M. Heldt, 13th ed., 1946 == 146 Mb HTML

    "Air-Cooled Motor Engines" Julius Mackerle, 1961 == 130Mb HTML
    In many ways, reading Mackerle is like reading something from an alternate universe. Mackerle was chief engineer at Tatra, in Czechoslovakia. Through much of his working life he was isolated behind the Iron Curtain. So he wound up doing a lot of basic research and design on his own, and went down a slightly different path.

    "Development of Aviation Fuels" S.D. Heron and "Development of Aircraft Engines by Robert Schlaifer, 1949 == 173 Mb .PDF


    The books below are mostly from Google's book scanning site. Some of the PDFs have problems rendering in kpdf, but they're readable anyway.

    "The Aircraft Mechanic's Handbook" 1918 - covers Curtiss, Thomas-Morse, Gnome, Hispano-Suiza, Sturtevant, Hall-Scott, and Libery engines == 7.8 Mb .PDF

    "Audels Gas Engine Manual" 1908, covers liquid and gaseous fueled engines == 14.4 Mb .PDF

    "Dynamometers and the Measurement of Power" JJ Flather, U.Minn., 1900 == 7 Mb .PDF

    "Fuels - Solid, Liquid, and Gaseous" H.Joshua Philliosn, Great Western Railway, 1891 == 4 Mb .PDF

    "Gas, Gasoline, and Oil-Engines" Hiscox, Page, 1915 == 22.4 Mb .PDF

    "Magnetos for Automobilists - How Made and How Used" Bottone, 1907 == 2.9 Mb .PDF

    "Self-Propelled Vehicles - A Practical Treatise on the Theory, Construction, Operation, Care, and Management of All Forms of Automobiles" Homans, 1905 == 32 Mb .PDF

    Links to off-site resources

    Tony Foale Designs
    Serious motorcycle tech from one of the few successful independent chassis designers

    Sciencemadness
    This site specializes in older chemistry texts, with titles like "The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives" and "The Chemistry and Literature of Beryllium." Lots of solid information here.

    Google Books
    You've probably heard that Google has been scanning books. This is the direct link to their "book search" page. You'll have to tell it you want complete texts. Many are available as single .PDFs. Othere are only available as page images, one web page per scan, which is very awkward, but at least you can get the information.

    NACA Papers
    This is a UK mirror of the original naca.larc.nasa.gov site, which has been basically rendered useless by NASA's webgeeks. The Brits kept the old, simple main page and search index, so it doesn't take you off into the wilds of NASA- send-us-money-land whenever you try to look at something. There are papers by guys like Steinmetz and Heisenberg, engineers from Packard, Curtiss-Wright, and the US Army, almost all of it primary research reports.