Gus Wilson's huge fists spun the
steering wheel and the Model Garage service car, homeward bound, swung
around in the loose sand at the foot of Steppe's Hill and started the long
grind to the top.
"What makes these birds always break down
in such out-of-the-way place?" Gus grumbled. "They might at least pick
some place better than these deserted hills!" Joe Clark, his partner in the
operation of the Model Garage, merely grunted and pulled his cap lower over
his grease-stained face.
"The next call we get from out here," Gus
rumbled on, "I'm going to - " The rest of his remark was drowned in a
rasping cough from the service-car motor, followed by a bucking that ended
in a stall.
Gus slammed on the emergency brake and
leaned back with a grin on his face as he puffed out his pipe and started to
fill it.
"Well! What's the matter now?" snapped
Joe, "Dinner is waiting and I'm hungry. Let's get at the trouble."
"There's nothing to get at," Gus
chuckled. "We're just out of gas! I forgot to take a look before we
started out. Nearest gas station is about three miles down the road. If
you want to 'get at' something, try bending a bit of leather in that
direction. Danged if I will. I'd rather wait here for a car. Jack Sisson
goes by here every day on his way home from work. He ought to be along any
minute now."
"That's like you, Gus," Joe smiled
sheepishly. "Taking the blame when you know it's my job to see that this
bus has gas in it. All right, if Jack doesn't show up in the next five
minutes I'll start."
However, Joe was saved the trouble, for
Sisson came along a few minutes late.
"Now," said Gus after the gas had been
transferred, "Joe, you take the service car and beat it straight home before
your missus gets out the rolling pin. Jack'll give me a lift as far as the
garage."
"Glad to do that, Gus," Sisson offered at
once. "And maybe you can spot which valve stem is making the infernal
squeak I've been hearing."
Gus listened intently as Sisson started
the car and drove it at various speeds. No noise was apparent at high
speed, but when the car was running slowly, there was a pronounced squeak
that seemed to keep time with the revolutions of the motor.
"It's going to be a cinch to fix that,"
Gus grunted, as they pulled in at the Model Garage. He lifted the hood,
wiped a bit of grease from the steering gear burning and touched it to the V
surface of the fan belt. The squeak stopped almost instantly.
"A brand new, bone-dry belt will
sometimes do that, "Gus explained, "It depends on the condition of the
pulley surfaces."
"Gosh!" exclaimed Sisson. "As easy as
that, eh? I wish it was as simple as spot the cause of other noises. You
know, I'm a bug on trying to get rid of 'em."
"Lots of fellows are like that, these
days," Gus agreed. "If you want to get rid of noises in your car, the main
things ;you need are a whale of a lot of patience and a nice long screw
driver."
Sisson laughed. "Sure, you need patience
- but what's the screw driver for? To tighten everything so it can't
squeak?"
"There'll be times when you'll use it
that way, but the principal use will be as a sort of doctor's stethoscope to
help you locate just where the noises are coming from. Trouble is, so many
noises sound like they are something else. Like this squeaking belt. You
thought it was a valve stem binding. If you had held the end of the screw
driver against the cylinder casting at different points near the valves,
with the handle end cupped in your fist against your ear, you'd not have
heard the squeak at all - which would have been pretty good proof that it
wasn't a valve.
"Take a loose plate in the muffler," Gus
went on, "That often rattles in such a way that it sounds just like a loose
connecting rod. If you listened around with a screw driver a while, you'd
hardly hear any trace of a clink from any part of the motor, but as soon as
you started on the exhaust pipe you'd hear it - and I don't mean maybe!"
"I've heard of that screw-driver before,"
Sisson observed, "but I never could make much out of it. I've tried it
several times and all I hear is a jumble of noises loud enough to break your
eardrum."
"That's because you don't hold the screw
driver right," Gus asserted. "When you poke the end of a screw driver
against any metal or wood part of the car, the vibrations that are
traveling through the material about right up the screw-driver blade, and
you'll hear them loudest if the handle and is pressed as close to your
eardrum as possible. If the noises you hear sound like bottom let loose,
naturally you won't be able to pick out any one sound, so the answer is to
slide the screw-driver handle down in your clenched fist like this," Gus
demonstrated, "squeezing tighter to close the air passage from the end of
the screw-driver handle to your ear till the sound is just strong enough."
"Sort of a one-fist control, eh? I
should have thought of that," Sisson commented, as he tried the stunt with
the screw-driver in his own hand.
"That's the idea," said Gus, "But knowing how to use the screw
driver is only a part of the job. The rest is where the patience come in.
The whole trouble with finding these darned noises is that most of the time
they don't sound like what they are, and they always seem to come from where
they aren't. That's because any noise is the result of a vibration and you
can't hear it till the vibration has been put on the air so it can get to
your ears. Now, the actual vibration nearly always starts inside somewhere,
and the direction it takes in coming out through the metal parts depends on
how easily they vibrate. That's where the screw driver helps, because it
picks the vibration right out of the metal and carries it directly to your
ear."
"Sounds all right, but how does it work
out?" Sisson asked.
"I'll show you," said Gus, reaching for
the screw-driver. "Did you notice that funny little bumping noise that
seemed to come from the door latch?"
"Notice it!" exclaimed Sisson. "I've
spent hours trying to get that latch to stop thumping like that. I've put
it on tight now you can hardly get the door open."
The bumping that Gus had noticed
occurred irregularly when the car was in motion, and also while it was
standing still at certain motor speeds. Simon worked the throttle up and
down while Gus listened with the screw-driver, first all around the latch,
then at different points on the door, and finally at a number of points near
its upper edge above the hinge.
"Must be right in here," Gus muttered,
swinging the door open. "Yes, here it is. See that shiny spot on the door
frame, and this bright spot on the door right where it closes on it? The
latch buffers were set a little too tight in the first place, so the door
was sprung over just enough to cause a metal-to –metal bumping right there.
Tightening the latch buffers just made things worse."
"Well, it's a relief to find it at last,
even if you do prove I'm dumb," grinned Sisson. "Now let me listen to see
if I've got the hang of it."
"Go to it," Gus suggested, handing over the screw-driver again.
"You'll hear the thump at any point on the door, of course, and quite loud
too, but it'll be plenty louder right near where it's bumping."
"It certainly is," agreed Sisson, as he
reached that spot with the end of the screw-driver.
"If that had been a loose body bolt or a
bad rubber mounting," Gus explained, "it might have seemed to be coming from
the door, or even the roof of the car, or any other place at any distance
from the actual source of the noise' but when you got the screw driver on
the job, you can soon get the trouble pretty well localized and then it's
just a matter of investigating everything in that area to find out what is
wrong. After all, finding exactly where the noise starts is the hardest
part of the job. Fixing is the easy part.
"Of course," Gus went on, as he worked on
the door, "there's lots of queer noises you may get in a car that a screw
driver won't help you locate except to tell you where they aren't. Take a
loose manifold bolt that lets gas escape is a sort of grunting squeak - it
sometimes sounds mighty like what you'd hear if a piston ring was broken and
jamming a little. Touching the cylinder wall just below the edge of the
water-jacketed part with the end of the screw driver would bring such a
piston-ring noise in your car good and loud. If you didn't hear it on any
cylinder, that would be finding where it wasn't. Then it would be a case of
spotting the leaky gasket by sight, or actually feeling the blast of gas as
it escaped from the manifold.
"Sometimes, a spark plug cracks or develops a gas leak in such a
way that it makes a hissing noise like the hiss you get when you idle the
motor slowly and the rings on one piston are broken. That's another case
where the screw driver would tell you it couldn't be broken rings."
"In other words, the screw driver is no
divining rod," laughed Sisson. "It's just a sort of extension ear."
"That's it, exactly, " Gus went on,
"You've got to use your eyes and plenty of common sense, as well as your
ears and patience in finding car noises. And some aren't worth fixing when
you do find 'em. Fellows come in here yelling that there's a squeak in the
generator bearings. They don't know that a generator commutator and brushes
can cause an unholy squeak that sounds just like a dry bearing. The best
thing to do about a commutator squeak is to forget it; it's most likely to
go away in a little while, anyhow.
"Another fellow came barging in here the
other day and wanted to buy enough rubber hose to renew the windshield wiper
line because he said the wiper wouldn't work and he could hear the hiss of a
leak in the pipe.
It hissed all right, but when I pulled
all the hose at the windshield wiper and held my thumb on the end of it, the
hissing stopped, proving that it couldn't be the hose. The real trouble was
in the wiper itself."
"That might have fooled me too," Sisson
admitted. "Well, some day I suppose they'll get around to the point where
they can make really silent cars."
"Humph!" snorted Gus, disgustedly. "You want a silent car, eh?
By golly, there's no satisfying you youngsters! If the modern car wasn't so
darn near completely quiet you'd never even hear any of the little mouse
squeaks and trifling rattles that get your goat now. You'd appreciate how
quiet the modern car really is if you had driven one of the threshing
machines they sold for cars in the old days. Believe me, it had to be a
man-size rattle or squeak to be heard above the general rumble and roar of
those old-timers. But, even in those days, noises didn't always mean what
they sounded like.
"I remember taking a ride one night with
a fellow who'd had some trouble with the front wheel bearings going dry and
squeaking - they were plain buggy wheels bearings, not ball bearings - and
as we rounded a bend in the road his ears caught the shrill squeal that
meant a dry front wheel bearing to him. He slammed on the brakes and we
came to a stop, but the squeal went right on. It was combined concert from
the crickets, katydids, and frogs in the batch of woods that bordered the
road and if there's anything that sounds more like a squeaking bearing, I
don't know what it is!"
