Julian Vincent wrote:
>
> unless the engines used
> wooden pistons, which my dad said was a commonplace in the late '40s and
> '50s when 2nd-hand car salesmen were, as they say, unregulated)
They did indeed. remove the rod and the rocker arms to that cylinder
and leave it dead. Made the car run a little funny, but it still ran.
When I was a kid, folks also used to use the tongues out of old leather
shoes to make babbit-like bushings for the rod bearings. How times
change....
> ........ the Morgan sportscar was banned in the US for quite a period because it uses > so much wood in its body work, and this was considered to be an inferior
> material so that the car was deemed unsafe. True or False??
May have been used as a political excuse; I don't know. I do know that
Peking Mill in West Helena, Arkansas was the largest supplier of wood
parts for 'woodies', the wood parts used in the wooden sided and trimmed
US-made station wagons that were popular in the US in the late 30's and
40's. The US used a lot of wood in its cars for a long time. And folks
here still make planes out of wood. It's deemed to be quite safe in the
aviation industry, and crashworthy.
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