That is really nice Bill, I can imagine how much fun owning that is. I know she's a head turner on the road. The Blue wheels are outstanding.
I've always wondered: how come Detroit turned out some poor 4 cylinders in my day when they made them so well in the 20s. Anyways you are doing a great job preserving her, and thanks for the picture.
In all honesty, B'cuda, antique cars from the teens and twenties are dreadful to drive, and are best appreciated as works of art or conversation pieces.
They had very low horsepower, and consequently a very poor power-to-weight ratio, so it is hard to accelerate onto the roadway fast enough to avoid getting traffic backed up behind you. I'd like to be able to drive my Dodge Brothers a few miles down to the Jiffy Mart and back on the county road, but there is a hill pretty soon after I enter the road from my driveway, and I can't get it going fast enough to climb the hill in third gear, so I have to do it in second, which is pretty low, and I really get traffic behind me when I do that. The transmission is non-synchro, so you've got to plan pretty carefully to keep your speed up high enough to climb hills in third gear because shifting down into second is pretty hard.
Also, the wheels had to be strong due to the poor road conditions back then, so they are heavy, giving the car a poor sprung-to-unsprung weight ratio. The springs had to be very strong, too, and they are totally undamped. "Snubbers" were an optional extra which few people bought. So you go down the road "boing, boing, boing" after you hit a bump.
The chassis and suspension are basically a warmed-over horse-drawn buggy design, and the steering is rather imprecise. You have to correct the steering a lot.
At a certain RPM the secondary imbalance of the long-stroke 4-cylinder engine becomes very irritating, so you have to avoid that RPM.
I think pretty much all of the cars of this era were like this. For example, at about 18 minutes into this video, Mark Clayton of the Restore Cars restoration shop describes what it's like to drive a '22 Packard. And I think that was a 6-cylinder. I think that Packard had a bad engine. It did seem to be using oil. Probably it had poor compression. Clayton says he could only get it to do 45 miles an hour, while my 4-cylinder Dodge Bros. will cruise all day at 47 and its top speed is around 55. Could go faster, but it wouldn't be prudent at all.
