Notes on the Race Car
The Steam Automobile, Vol. 27, No. 1

by Jim Crank, August, 1985 after Bob Barber's record setting runs.

1. The remaining hardware of Lear Motors Corp., some three tons of goodies, was purchased from L.M.C. just one day away from their door being locked by the sheriff; they went bankrupt.

2. The turbine was a 5½" single-stage impulse type, having 360° admission via twelve nozzles that opened sequentially. The turbine was supposed to put out 300 HP, at 1200 PSI and 1100° F, at 80,000 RPM maximum. The two stage reduction gearbox had an output speed of about 5,000 RPM.

3. The steam generator was an experimental Lear unit, and was in the form of a series of finned 321 stainless steel tubes, arranged for parallel flow in grids. Tubing sizes varied from ¼" at the water inlet to 1" at the superheater outlet. As the tubing banks went from the economizer zone to the superheater zone, tube diameter increased, while the number of tubes connected by headers in parallel decreased. The intention of this concept was to maintain constant flow velocity from water inlet to steam outlet. All tubing was finned except for the last bank, the superheater. The steam generator weighed about 900 lbs., and could continuously evaporate 5500 lbs. of water per hour.

4. I could never get the recirculating hot gas, vaporizing type Lear Motors burner to work properly or dependably, so after many trials it was removed from the car. Then I designed a more conventional air-jacketed type, tangential nozzle burner. It had four Monarch 9½ GPH, 60° solid cone nozzles, aimed in at 90°. Secondary air slots were cut in the 310 stainless 4½ cubic foot firebox halfway down, plus a row of ¼" air holes just ahead of the cooling flange area. The blower motor drew 260 amps at 24 volts and put out 8½ H.P. It pumped 1400 cu ft/min at 8" pressure, and screamed like a siren. It was a complete success.

The nozzles were designed for 100 PSI, but were operated at 150-175 PSI which gave a fuel consumption of 56 gallons per hour (or 8,500,000 B.T.U.) of JP-A aircraft kerosene. The burner showed a reluctance to light when cold, so my method was to use one nozzle as a continuously burning pilot light, cutting the other three in or out by means of the controls. We frequently had to hold a piece of sheet metal over the blower intake and slowly pull it away when lighting up. (Bob Barber installed a propane pilot when he got the car.) Fuel was supplied by a separately driven Webster two-stage pump powered by its own ¼ H.P. DC motor drawing from a 15 gallon tank.

5. The feedwater pump was a 16 GPM CAT three-cylinder pump, overspeeded about 12%. In order to match the consumption characteristics of the turbine, it was driven by a Salisbury variable speed transmission, 15 H.P., 3 to 1 ratio, working backwards. This speeded up the water pump when starting from rest, but by about 60 MPH the ratio changed back to 1 - 1. It worked perfectly. A small Hypro pump with its own DC motor was used to prime the boiler when cold. It was isolated from the 1200 PSI system pressure by a check valve in the outlet.

6. No transmission was used, only a direct drive to a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado front wheel drive differential, with a ratio of 2.73-1.

The race car at El Mirage Dry Lake (bearing its original sponsor's name) during Jim's early trials there.

Since the turbine output shaft and the differential input shaft could not be directly connected because of a space problem, the turbine was arranged to drive the pinion gear via a Reynolds 2½" silent chain. The ratio miss-match here was corrected by making the chain drive an overdrive.

7. Front end was VW with torsion bar sprung trailing arms. The Cadillac front end, used at the race car's rear was, mounted unsprung, and fitted with Corvette disc brakes.
No brakes were used on the front. Per the Bonneville rules, a 14" parachute was installed.

8. The basic body was a Fiberfab Aztec, of which only the center section was used. The chassis was special and welded up from 2" X 4" rectangular steel tubing.

9. The car ran non-condensing and carried 72 gallons of water in three tanks.

10. The control system was designed to use Action-Pak solid state control modules (made by Action Instrument Co., of San Diego, California) one for pressure feed via a variable voltage transducer, two chromel-alumal thermocouple modules for outlet and before normalizer steam temperature control, and one module for the 0-100,000 RPM tachometer. Initially the solid state modules were ordered with 24 volt DC input. But line spikes from the blower motor contractor, and the brush noise from the fuel pump and blower motor raised hell with the control system. A permanent solution for this was to exchange the 24 volt modules for 110 volt AC, and insert a converter to take the car's 24 volt DC system and convert it to 110 volt AC. This bit of isolation completely solved the problem.

It was feared at first that the finned tubing plus the large burner would result in a steam generator having no hysteresis and thus one with the need for a super sensitive control system. But in actual practice this did not materialize. The steam generator had a roughly ten to fifteen second hysteresis, so the second saturate zone normalizer was removed, and the usual superheater normalizer took over all control duties. Steam outlet temperature varied only ± 3° at 1,000° F. The poor heat transfer rate of 321 stainless steel provided the needed hysteresis. The control system, once the voltage spike problem was solved, functioned perfectly without failure or any problem whatever.

The new burner at full fire.

Jim Crank presented the details of his steam land speed record project and the 1979 record attempt to the SACA members and guests attending the Boise Meet in October, 1979. Jim's presentation was really a combination of several stories about Lear Motors, Fiberfab's corporate instability, the engineering of a complex powerplant, and Jim's own persistence. A continuing acquaintance with Fiberfab's production manager, Rick Figueroa, was the catalyst that brought these otherwise separate factors together. Rick had been pestering Jim about the possibility of building a steam LSR contender using of course, a Fiberfab car body. There was no suitable engine known then and the only possibility was the Lear Motors hardware. Bill Lear had recently folded the company when it finally became apparent to him that after the one demonstration bus, there was not going to be any follow on by the State of California.

Del Hood, the last project engineer in charge of the steam bus program, had acquired Lear Motors from Lear to pursue the development of the hot brine deep well pump  and were developing the flywheel energy storage projects that had been current when the company was shut down. The new corporation was known as the LMC Corporation. Jim had worked on Lockheed's flywheel energy storage system for vehicles as the senior test and development engineer and was able to offer some direction to Hood's project and, in doing so, cemented a good business relationship with the owner of a recently constructed steam bus, car and powerplant hardware. With Rick's needling, Jim called Del Hood to ask about borrowing some of the stuff for the project. The company didn't want the steam hardware, were glad to get rid of it and would offer it all at a very reasonable price. The actual words were: "Make me an offer, no matter what."  What was of particular interest was the Lear steam powered Indy race car, a publicity stunt that never ran one foot. As it turned out, Mrs. Lear kept the racer car and the bus was not wanted, so the remaining hardware was what was used for the land speed record car. The Indy racer could have been a good starting point, what with the side saddle steam generator and plenty of room for a big burner, substituting the bus steam turbine for the aborted and useless Deltic style steam engine. One really desired feature was the Ferguson four wheel drive system.

Then Rick talked to the new East Coast owners of Fiberfab, and arranged for the company to provide a body and chassis suitable for the car. The stock Fiberfab Aztec pictured on the cover of The Steam Automobile was clearly not the actual body or chassis used. Only the center section, the doors and roof remained, but Fiberfab was content to have their name plastered all over it. Jim designed and supplied the power plant using the Lear hardware.

The one cute problem was that Del had called Jim at Lockheed on a Wednesday morning, informing him that his offer was accepted and come get the stuff. Only adding that the sheriff was going to padlock the doors on next Monday morning as they were bankrupt, so there remained four days to get the stuff loaded and out of the Lear plant in Reno. Several MaxiVans and trailers were rounded up and the crew drove to Reno on Thurday morning. With time running out the technique was simple. Jim stood in the middle of the labs and shops and pointed, while the crew grabbed the hardware and loaded it in the vehicles. The final load was about two tons of stuff.

From Hood, Jim bought three steam generators including the complete Chevy Monte Carlo system and a bus system.  Eight steam turbines and gearboxes and many spare gear sets and boxes and boxes of other hardware were obtained.

The steam generator used in the racer was first intended for the bus. This big and powerful steam generator is rectangular with  tubes welded into headers. The extended surface tubing gives the unit its extraordinary efficiency of 92% to 96%. This data from the lab books works out well and appears accurate, although the data given the press by Lear Motors was not generally to be relied upon. This style steam generator ( SA, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 24) is very difficult to make due to the great amount of welding, and fabricating of the extended surface tubing. It also cannot be allowed to see any soot from a misadjusted or even slow lighting burner. It is, however, unsurpassed in efficiency and the flow rates and patterns are very accurate to design. The one big problem that surfaced much later was that the individual tubes were not heli-arc welded into the headers as one would expect; but furnace brazed. The basic design concept of this particular steam generator was to keep the flow velocity constant from the inlet to the outlet of the superheater. So the number of tubes varied from the economizer inlet to the single tube outlet of the superheater.

The burner supplied with the steam generator was another thing entirely. The basic design was a hot gas recirculating post mix vaporizing burner. It required preheating with a large kerosene fired space heater before starting. The burner had three heat exchangers that used the turbine's exhaust to pre-heat the air to the burner. This design as they made it was supposed to start up as an atomizing burner, then as the powerplant got hot, automatically switch over to vaporizing. It did not work. The construction was robust 1/8 inch thick Hastelloy X plate about $5000 in the burner alone. After the atomizer the air path turned 180°. This made preheating and keeping it hot imperative as the bend was a perfect fuel separator when cold. Everything sogged down to a damp stop if the space heater wasn't on going too. Unless given the still superheated steam from the turbine exhaust the burner never would heat up sufficiently to go to the vaporizing state.

On the first real trial in the chassis, the kerosene from the 180° bend had dribbled down into the chassis for a while, soaking the rags Fiberfab had left stuffed here and there in the belly pan. When the first blast of burner operation shot flames out the exhaust for seven or eight feet, the mess in the pan caught fire. Well, Lear spent over $100,000 on it and the designer swore it was okay.

With the burner obviously unsuitable and the chassis having to be cleaned up, Jim got onto the phone with Barney Becker and worked out a predictable and reliable atomising burner. The two designed the burner on Barney's kitchen table, based on pure experience; it worked just fine right from the start. From Palley's surplus yard, Jim got the largest axial flow blower which put out 1,400 cfm at 13" on 24 VDC; but drawing 400 amps and howled like a banshee. They made a 310 stainless steel inner can with secondary air slots halfway down the can so the heat wouldn't melt down the shell and also to clean up the combustion. A third set of air inlets was placed right before the mating flange to the actual steam generator to keep that as cool as possible.  The outside housing was an aluminum air  jacket. Four Monarch nozzles were rated at 13½ gph at 100 psi; but in the racer, they were running 150 psi fuel pressure. The burner was giving 8,500,000 Btu heat release. One nozzle was on it's own solenoid valve and used to start up the steam generator from cold and not put the intense blast on right way. The other three nozzles were driver operated and switched on as soon as the car was moving. The burner ran at 7" back pressure when loose from the steam generator and only 9" back pressure when bolted up. It has a very short intense cyclone flame with nothing coming out the flange to soot up the tubing. It has not given any sooting as the excess air is very high. As instructed by the Master, Barney Becker, the CO2 is set at 13%.

This flame on the high efficiency steam generator gives 5200 lb/hr of steam per hour at 1200 psi and 1100 °F. The first three layers of tubes are not finned, but the rest of the 321 stainless steel sections are finned. Barney's "hobby shop" at Besler's factory is the place where the tests were made. With the first burner's problems, the steam had to be exhausted outside as the whole place was turning into a Turkish bath with the testing and re-testing. The overhead exhaust fan was neatly shrouded with a large acrylic plastic hood, gathering the steam, smoke and exhaust. After several hard firings the plastic began to resemble fried won ton. Terrific photos were taken of all this, with Becker, Besler, Dave Sarlin, Jim and Rick Figueroa all working and visiting around the continuous Chinese fire drill. The sound movies are most illuminating and verbally explicit.

The Lear turbine used was a composite of bus and car units. The wheel and 13 nozzle sequential throttle was from the bus, while the gearbox was one of the Monte Carlo units. This gave a higher output speed than the bus gearbox, which was designed by the Barber-Nichols company to mate to a slower 6-71 GM Diesel engine. Bob Barber, the designer of the Lear turbines and gear boxes estimated that it was developing 350 hp at top speed.

Some of the other components include a CAT brand feed pump, turbine tachometer reading to 100,000 rpm, two 500 amp-hour batteries, no alternator, and no condenser and a motor driven fuel pump. The original turbine bearing lubrication system was changed to an air atomizing oil injection one, the compressor can be seen in the engine compartment photographs. Squirting a solid oil stream at a ball bearing as those speeds is like trying to get it to penetrate a piece of solid steel.

 At Bonneville, it was amusing to watch the faces of the other contestants as they inspected the cockpit. The big tachometer was right in front of the driver and very visible. They would look at the instrument board and the tach, take a few steps away, stare straight ahead and come back and really give the tach a hard look. They had noticed that it said 1-100; but in small print "X 100". Priceless!!  A note. No live steam line or fuel pressure line was allowed in the cockpit. Jim ran all the instrumentation electrically with sensors on the steam generator.

The car was initially fitted with a small marine in-out gearbox. Then with a beefed up Chrysler TorqueFlite transmission, which  the first test run on the street beside the Fiberfab plant, manage to destroy in no uncertain fashion. Early attempts to overcome a serious water shortage problem when first starting the car from rest. The eventual drive line had no transmission which introduced one nasty problem with using a steam turbine and not a reciprocating engine. Single stage impulse turbines show their greatest efficiency when the blades whizzing past the nozzles are going at half the steam spouting velocity. The ½ V ratio rules for such turbines. At the pressure used, the spouting velocity was calculated to be around 4,000 ft/sec, so the wheel speed of the 5-1/4" wheel was about 85,000 rpm at peak efficiency. So when starting up from rest, the water rate far exceeds 100 lbs/hp/hr. Dropping down to something more reasonable at about ½ speed. Indeed when testing the racer, at about 35,000 rpm, there was a most noticeable increase in acceleration with the car. At Bonneville, the steamer was pushed up to 50 mph with a truck to avoid this massive water consumption. To accommodate this inverted water consumption rate a clever automatic transmission was used, only backwards. A Salsbury variable belt transmission drove the water pump. Starting from rest, the belt drive gave a 3-1 overdrive, going down to 1-1 as speed increased, neatly matching the water consumption rate of the turbine. The water system was given a hand operated bypass valve to trim the flow rate. Steady running was adjusted to 1100°F steam temperature. The system was very stable.

We were given detailed information about the electronic control modules used in this car. Getting accurate results from thermocouples and translating the data into usable signals for solenoid valves and the like is notoriously difficult, but Jim used a DC to AC converter and ran 110 VAC control modules from Action Instruments of San Diego with no problems.

The electronic control module could have been operated on the existing 24 volt DC, but advice from Action Pac was that to avoid any problems from the big blower motor inducing possibly damaging voltage spikes as it was switched off, they were advised to use the 110 volt AC units with a tiny power converter. Dual thermocouples measured the superheater outlet, the BN temperature and steam pressure. Turbine RPM was a magnetic sensor on a gear wheel.

Just after the system was first fired off, up rolled a Peterbilt tractor pulling a large semi-trailer. The Fiberfab big wheels seemed to have strange ideas about time. After basic completion and not one bit of testing and developing they figured the thing would be ready for a run at Bonneville. Jim figured about six months of tweaking, which, even then, wasn't conservative enough. They loaded the car, tools, fuel and stuff and drove all night to Bonneville. This clearly wasn't the right way to get the car off on a good run, so Jim took the chief inspector aside and asked him to please find some reason to disqualify the car for the run due to unreadiness or whatever. He didn't have to worry, as the Fiberfab guys had forgotten to bring the ramps to unload the car anyway. The trip wasn't a total loss, though, as Reno was on the way back and Jim spent three days there with Cal Tinkham checking out the Dobles and trying out steam car ideas on one another.

After all the testing that could be done at Besler's plant, the car was taken to some long abandoned roads in the Sacramento Delta area. As Jim related, the car really was starting to behave when the tach went up to 40,000 rpm. He said it was just like someone kicking in a full race Chrysler Hemi, the steamer leaped forward and got to what they thought was something like 120 mph. before he got it stopped. The next step was to El Mirage Dry Lake for high speed testing and then go to Bonneville for the real speed runs.

Tuning up the car, then, was a real experience, and they did get to El Mirage in Southern California in the Spring. The roll bar height on the Fiberfab chassis was not high enough above Jim's head, so Jim  disqualified himself as driver. Rick just fit, but he had never even sat in the car before. Just guess who drove.

On the first run, Rick didn't manage to turn on three of the four burners, so they went 56 mph on the startup burner alone. Jim was worried, so he got in to try things out. Running around the test oval, he got up to 55 on the startup burner while holding 500 psi, then pulled the other burners on. Pressure came up in 5 seconds, so all was obviously okay.

As this steam generator was very fast acting, pressure shot up to 1200 psi instantly. With no clutch now, the only thing was to ride it out and that is what Jim had to do, without the mandatory driving suit or his helmet. According to the rather irate (at least until the situation was explained to them) officials, the car was timed at something over 156 mph. You were only supposed to use the big oval test track to tune the car under load and stay below 80 mph, please.

Then they discovered a very significant thing about El Mirage which was also true about Bonneville. You can push-start the cars. One of the Fiberfab employees had driven his super-clean white CMC pickup truck and would try to give a push start. His four wheel drive truck had a 454 engine, bored and stroked to over 500 cid and at least 500 HP. It burns all four wheels on takeoff and breathes lots of gas through 850 cfm Holleys, so you know he was proud of it and careful. Well, with all the heat and messing around, the Mark X ignition on the racer started to go bad. When the pickup had pushed the racer up to speed, really moving along, the burner misfired and a great black belch of smoke smeared itself across the pickup. If that wasn't bad enough the cloud turned to white then lit off in a great plume of flame across the truck. Poor guy, he just backed right off.

On this last run they were up to 85 mph. The ignition was completely shot by then and the biggest effect they could create was the white cloud of vaporized fuel. Now the car has more direct ignition: two Acel fire breathing coils running directly to breaker points on the blower shaft. No messing around with cooked transistors. The tanks carry 72 gallons of water which gives five minutes of operation. The fuel tank holds 15 gallons of kerosene.

The fluorinol-water mix (which, we can now tell you, was Learium) is not used. De-Learium is more like it. Since Lear Motors is no longer in existence, Jim gave a few remarks on the projects. Just as in his previous projects, Bill Lear was clearly the director and promoter rather than the engineer or inventor of these developments, although he would take credit for what his engineering staff developed. He came out to see the Monte Carlo car once it was completed and steamed up for the first time, hopped in, smashed down the throttle, and if it failed, he would ask for something new entirely. It failed to move one foor due to that massive steam consumption of the turbine emptying the steam generator. Lear went back to his office and demanded something better, so we heard.

So they went through:
1. The Deltic a six cylinder engine with three crankshafts and a rotary inlet valve. A pipedream adaptation of the Napier engine by charlatain Ken Wallis. This was intended for the Indy car.
2)  A converted IH four cylinder engine.
3) Then a Dodge Slant Six conversion.
4)  Lysholm screw-compressor based engine. Three in series.
5)  Gas Turbine
6)  Steam turbines. Designed by Barber-Nichols
7) Organic fluids.
8)  Water, at last, in turbines.

The bus turned out very well after the demonstration run in San Francisco was over and two years of development were done on it. No further word from Mrs. Lear has been heard about the Eastern museum exhibit which was to include the bus.

A coal fired bus power plant mockup was made and the developed burner still exists. This has not been publicized. Not too long ago, the Union Pacific Railroad inquired about coal fired steam turbine power for their electric locomotives. This would be a great application for coal firing, but turbines are very sensitive to back pressures from condensers, and the condensing system would have to be large to allow hard pulling without overload. Such a system was outlined in Frank McGuffin's paper and predictions (Vol. 21, No. 1).
As things worked out, the steam race car was sold to Bob Barber of the Barber-Nichols Engineering Company in Arvada, Colorado along with the remaining turbine units.

Bob set a two way run at Bonneville, Utah of 145.607 mph in 1985, timed by the Southern California Timing Association and certified by the USAC. His return run was full of drama. One door blew off, those brazed joints in the steam generator had opened up and the car caught fire. The car is now in the Harrah Collection in Reno, Nevada and the turbine wheel resides on Jim's desk as a reminder of more exciting days.

The British team acknowledged this as a goal, but still claimed 139.843 as the "world" mile record for steam in 2009 with their car. Their record was certified by the FIA, an organization now in deep disrepute due to their mishandling and dealings with the Formula One teams. The reputation of the FIA was not improved when its past-president, Max Mosley, the son of the British leader of the Nazi party during the 1930s, was exposed in a Nazi themed SM session. What is amusing is that between Fiberfab and Jim Crank, they spent $47,000.00 building and running their car. Lord Montagu spent, we hear, ten years and over 10 million pounds on that car with his nephew as the driver. All that for only a gain of a few miles per hour.

Jim Crank has been invited to join and has joined the Advisory Board of Cyclone Power Technologies and is working with Harry Schoell. He has ended all his personal steam system development in order to give Mr. Schoell his full attention.

Complete, operational 1250-1500 lb/hr steam generator. Square grid configuration, includes burner, blower, stack, and thermocouple and pressure probes. 1200-1500 psi at 1100°F. For the Chevrolet Monte Carlo project.

Complete, operational, 5500 lbs/hr plus steam bus generator. Square grid configuration, three normalizers, 56 gal/hr four nozzle pressure atomizing burner (new), approx. 8,500,000 btu/hr 1000-1800 psi at 1100°F
Complete, operational, 125 HP six nozzle steam turbine and reduction gearbox. Assembled for their Chevy Monte Carlo project. Presently dismantled for turbine spindle bearing inspection.

125 HP air cooled condenser. Full condensation at 95° air temp. Custom built for Lear Motors by Harrison Radiator (G.M.) for the Monte Carlo Chevrolet sedan conversion. Custom built condenser fan, shroud, alternator/accessory drive assembly. For Monte Carlo project.

Several boxes of spare parts for the turbine gearbox assemblies: turbine wheels, gearbox cases, reduction gear sets, bearings, seals, oil pumps, output shafts, etc. Sufficient to maintain two units for years of development testing.

Several six nozzle and two spare thirteen nozzle plates for the Monte Carlo and bus turbines. Thirteen nozzle plates have sequential poppet valve throttles. Thirteen nozzle produce 250-350 HP, six nozzle produce 100-130 HP depending on inlet conditions. Original was 1,000 psi at 1100°F.

Boxes of auxiliary development hardware: water and oil tanks, blower motors, blower wheels, solenoid valves, stainless steel barstock valves, pressure switches, thermocouples and filters. Dry sump lube oil pumps, 24V electric drive. Turbo assembly blueprints and instructions from Lear Motors.

The Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah, will be the scene of attempts with Jim's SLSR contender this summer. Booked dates: August 23 & 24, 1980.  //
 

by S. S. Miner  The writer is indebted to Jim Crank and Bob Barber for particulars of the car and race trial. Photos by Bob Barber.

Yes, it's been done at last! Fred Marriott's 127.659 mph record run of 1906 is now history, and the new record, set at Bonneville August 19 belongs to Bob Barber, an engineer from Colorado.

"Exciting beyond belief" says Barber, never before having driven anything faster than a sports car,  "the mile markers go by faster than you can count them!" For 79 years the 1906 record lay there,
unchallenged by any other steam car. Why no racing enthusiast, in all this time, thought to reach for this plum is a mystery. By 1919, an IC powered automobile driven by Ralph de Palma had surpassed the Marriott mark with a speed of 150 mph, but as a steam automobile record it remained untouched. The Stanleys themselves could have bested it easily. In 1907, when their improved Stanley racer was wrecked at Ormond Beach in an attempt to top the 1906 run, F. E. Stanley, using a hand-held stop watch, estimated that the car was  going about 150 mph. But this was only an estimate based on an approximation, and it was the last time the Stanleys ever fielded a racer. After Marriott's accident they decided racing was too dangerous.

Doble could have done it—but wide-ranging as his experiments in automotive steam were, they do not seem to have branched out in the direction of racing. However, SACA member Howard Langdon of Canada may have done it unofficially. His Great Green Monster (now dismantled) powered with a Doble Series F engine and a Harry Peterson boiler (and streamlined somewhat like a country schoolhouse) has pushed the speedometer needle over 130 on the back roads of Quebec, according to his tell. Those who have ever ridden with Howard believe him. What could the Monster have done with more svelte lines, and a little more of Howard's tinkering? Perhaps the Williams brothers of Pennsylvania could have done it. They were no strangers to racing, having had a little dirt track experience in their early years. And one of their larger powerplants (certainly among the best automotive steam systems ever built) suitably ensconced in a racing chassis could very well have taken the plum. There are others, too, who might have taken a shot at it--but no one did, until recently.

Heart of the car's power plant is this 81 blade, 5.4" diameter, axial flow, impulse type turbine wheel, held here by one of the project staff.

The story of how this came about actually starts some time before Bob Barber's successful exploit, with the California Steam Bus project of 1969 and William E. Lear, entrepreneur extraordinaire. Lear, one of three successful bidders on this project, based his first steam system on a radical swash-plate engine. Then, when this was unsuccessful, he switched to a turbine as the expander. For the turbine design, he turned to Bob Barber of Barber-Nichols Engineering, of Arvada, Colorado, designers and builders of a variety of turbines and their appurtenant systems. Barber-Nichols did the entire cycle analysis of the system Lear used, and also built the turbine itself. The system was based on an organic medium (which Lear puckishly called Learium) but this was later changed by him to water. Various problems The complete turbine, disassembled. plagued the bus project (recounted elsewhere) which finally wound up in 1972. Then, after Lear's death, when the remnants of his bus project were auctioned off, SACA member Jim Crank, of Redwood City, California, bought them. Jim saw in the turbine's 300+ HP potential a chance to assault one of the oldest records in automotive history, the 1906 mark of Fred Marriott.

Jim took the Barber-Nichols turbine (actually a spare turbine Lear had), a test-rig steam generator Lear's engineers had built (a cubical, all stainless, multiple-pass unit weighing nearly 1000 lbs.) the burner, and other elements of the Lear bus, and installed all this apparatus on a hybrid chassis, part VW, part Cadillac, finally cloaking the whole outfit in a sleek sports body supplied by Fiberfab.

Jim designed his own control system. A long trial period followed but the completed car refused to run satisfactorily. The trouble centered mainly on flame impingement on the tube bank by the Lear burner. Jim and his group finally abandoned this burner, replacing it with an inspired lunch-table design which featured tangential firing. It worked perfectly, and after successful shakedown trials it was at last possible to roll the car out on the salt at Bonneville for an actual run. But again the project was hexed with difficulties, and Jim, in final frustration, gave up and sold the car to Bob Barber in 1981.

Determined to salvage the reputation of his turbine, Bob set to work. He made numerous changes, none perhaps large in itself, but in total adding up to the difference between running and not running. He replaced the dragster type rear tires with standard racing tires capable of 175 mph, beefed-up the VW front end, added a dragster centrifugal clutch between the turbine and the El Dorado rear end, altered the control system, installed lighter weight batteries, added skirts to the wheel wells, and made certain plumbing changes including a new filter system. Jim Crank's burner worked fine, Bob said, and he kept it unchanged. The finished car weighed 4500 lbs.

Most of these alterations were done in 1982, and that year he tried the car at El Mirage Dry Lake in California, getting it up to 111 mph. In 1982, '83, and '84 Bonneville was flooded so trials were impossible there, but in one test run in 1984, Bob coaxed the car up to 120. This year, luckily, the flats were dry, and after final changes and adjustments, Bob at last had the opportunity to make a serious try at breaking the 1906 record.

The front cover montage displays the official results of his four year campaign. After the final two-way run establishing the 145.607 average, Bob was sure he could break 150 mph, or more, as he was certain he had far exceeded this speed during portions of his runs. So he tried again, but lost a door at 140 mph, and fuel dripping into the belly pan somehow caught fire. The damage caused by these two mishaps was not repairable at the site and the trials had to be halted.

The car has now earned its place in steam history, Bob feels, and he is looking for a suitable museum where it can be housed permanently, possibly the Harrah Museum in Reno, while he turns his energies back to solar-fired turbine systems, geothermal and space vehicle applications, and military work. But the speed bug, once it bites, doesn't let go easily. Bob now talks musingly of 1200º F and 1200 psi, 80,000 rpm. 350 HP, and 200 mph. Perhaps he feels the steam record deserves to be a little more decisive—a not unreasonable point of view. When one considers that today many a family car can step off 100 miles in an hour, and with a little hop-up might beat the legendary 127 mph, a 145 mph record is not exactly earth-shaking. The world's race tracks are teeming with cars that will do well over 200 mph. In the land speed record class, IC powered cars (both piston and turbine type) have reached speeds a little over 400 mph, while a rocket propelled vehicle holds the top land speed record of 630.513 mph.
Nevertheless, to steam enthusiasts it is exhiliarating to have seen a little action on the steam front. No doubt Bob Barber's accomplishment will trigger many a daydream of what might be done, given the best of modern steam technology and a large stack of money. So dream on, steam fans--maybe there's life in the old girl yet.

Schematic of the propulsion system.
The turbine mounted in its 2-stage reduction gear box.
 

Please contact karlp at firedragon.com for more information.