Quiz Archive

About Quiz #218 Gray Dort (UPDATE: cooling system)

The answer to last week's quiz wasn’t Oakland and it wasn’t Durant. And those of you that mentioned Dort were close, real close, because that’s the one our Quiz-car was based on. The very first answer we received was completely correct. Martha Younger wrote: “Those pics represent the famous Gray Dort. Well at least famous for the area I live in: Gray Bruce. This car was produced in Chatham, Ontario, which is about 20 minutes from where I live. It was produced by William Gray & Sons Company Ltd. It has a Lycoming engine.” Unfortunately we had to disqualify Martha, because she also wrote: “How do I know all this? This 1918 car was displayed at the famous Flesherton Split Rail Festival. I must confess though, I recognised the pictures because my husband Duncan Millar took them.” As a result of Martha’s honesty we had to look at the others. There were several correct answers, including those from jury members Mark Dawber and Frans Vrijaldenhoven, although not everyone had it all correct. In the end we were left with four answers that were spot-on: Ian Hayhurst, Tony Prebensen, Marc Fellman and Philippe Peters. However, as there can only be one winner, we chose Ian Hayhurst for his addition: “…the company had to disable the Motometers they installed, since being thermosyphon-cooled, owners were unduly alarmed that their cars were boiling - as they should in order to circulate.” Congratulations Ian! The T-shirt is on its way. (RB)

Update II comes from John Treloar who reports that: “Dort cars were fitted with railway wheels and used on the South Australian railway system for many years into the 1940s for track supervision, paymaster duties and so on. I recently visited a railway museum where we were told that DORT was the abbreviation for "drive on rail transport ". I assured them that I was old enough to remember the Dort on rail and that there really were Dort cars. Dort had been misrepresented to many hundreds of people which is a pity.”
Update I by Dick Trenk: “The sentence ‘…boiling - as they should in order to circulate’ is incorrect. Thermosyphon cooled cars depended upon the rise of hot water and the fall of cold water, thus bringing cold water from the bottom of the radiator into lower region of the engine while hottest water moved out of the top of the engine via a sloped pipe system. A fan was always required. Boiling was not normal but within reason it was OK as long as enough cool water kept entering the bottom of the engine. The MotoMeter on the Gray-Dort would not be disabled and the driver would see coolant temperatures in the 180-210 deg F. normally so the MotoMeter was indeed a useful gauge, particularly in winter when the driver needed to be aware of the coolant running too cool. There was however another early cooling system called the "Ebulliant" system which actually worked by circulating steam at boiling temperatures. This was tried on several early vehicles but was really too much for the early bearings, gaskets and oils of that era so the thermosyphon or mechanical coolant pump systems were used in the early years.”

Friday, 25 January 2008