LEATHER FETISH PART1: FROM LEATHER TO DSG

SHAMSUL YUNOS cbt@nst. com. my

TODAY most cars use fabric for upholstery and moulded plastics in various forms for their dashboard and interior trim but before we developed this rather comprehensive technology for choking mother earth, we had to do things the hard way with leather, wood, steel and glass.

Obviously the old ways are better and if you don’t believe me, then why do you have an old car in the garage?

So now that we have chased away all those who believe that more tech is better we can talk freely about how our lives would be just splendid if we stuck to old world craftsmanship and cars that last longer than granite.

So that brings us to Karl. Karl is German and sports a very large and dramatic handlebar moustache which later had a role to play in the creation of the modern highway service station. Trust me.

When Karl made his Benz threewheeler most people thought that he named it Benz after his own family name but actually Benz was a truncation of benzene, the fancy European term for fuel that would burn in a Benz.

Are you dizzy yet? No? well you should be because I just took you on a high-speed nonsensical circular argument.

Actually Karl called his threewheeler the Benz Patent Motorwagen, perhaps he thought the whole world would prefer three wheels to four.

These Germans and their curious ideas.

The reason I told you that made up story is to tell you this real story about the clutch on the original Benz Three-Wheeler.

A clutch system is about giving two mechanical systems variable degrees of freedom from each other, allowing one to move at different speeds to the other.

In modern cars the clutch comes in many flavours but mostly they consist of plates of friction material that are pressed hard against another friction surface.

Some of these are wet, some are dry, many cars use single plate clutch systems while more powerful engines may need multiple plates to feed torque and power to the wheels.

These days there are transmission systems that use dual clutch systems that operate on two different output shafts at the same time.

A torque converter is also a type of clutch that relies on the unique property of fluid viscosity to transfer force from one impeller to another.

When Karl Benz was just starting out Robert Bosch wasn’t a conglomerate yet, in fact he never was, he was just a really good engineer but he wasn’t producing dry plate clutches just yet, seeing as how the motorcar was not yet invented.

So Karl had to invent his own clutch and, like all good engineers he rummaged through the workshop to see what he could find and he settled on a metal drum, some leather straps and a lever of some fashion.

He then took this startling collection of items and created a variable friction device and turned it into a clutch.

When I say invent, I mean that he used an established method for clutching that was already used in steam and watermill powered factories and just transferred it to a car.

To be honest, it was kind of a lazy solution but it worked well enough for the time being.

The leather strap was wrapped around the drum which was attached to the engine, and the other end was wrapped around the drive axle while the lever was used to stretch the leather strap over the two.

The three-wheeler had a horizontal flywheel that looked like a wagonwheel and because it was too big, the gearing would have been unworkable which required the smaller rotating drum for the clutch system.

When the leather is stretched enough it would generate sufficient friction to drive the axle and it had a gradual enough control properties to allow the relatively high-speed engine to be engaged without sputtering.

It’s a relatively easy system to operate, in fact Karl’s wife Bertha figured out how to use it after a particularly difficult dispute about his moustache or something or other and drove the world’s first car back to her mother’s.

A rather appropriate start to women in motoring, don’t you think.

Actually there are various versions about this episode but since my wife always complains if my rather meek conventional moustache is unkempt, I believe that she was just using all the other stuff as an excuse to get into an argument with him about facial hair.

Women always complain about men’s facial hair. I think they are secretly jealous they can’t grow a beard and run away with the circus. But I digress.

Back to the story.

She stopped several times at apothecaries or pharmacies along the way to buy the alcohol mix for fuel, giving birth to the idea of motorway service stations as well. Told you his moustache had something to do with it.

It’s not quite Richard Hammond’s Engineering Connection but there is a possible link.

She deserves recognition for this and we should start a campaign of some sort to establish BBA, Bertha Best Award for highway rest areas and petrol stations.

I’m not sure how long this type of clutch system lasted because I cannot be really bothered to research it but by the time Mercedes Benz made the W124, it was definitely not in use anymore. If you really want to know, write in and I’m sure I can come up with a 5,000-word dissertation on it in the coming weeks. Just make sure you really want it.

Thanks to the current practice of using frictional plates made of highly durable materials we no longer have to worry about having to sacrifice our belts to fix worn out clutches.

In the past we used asbestos as the friction material but because asbestos kills babies and grandmothers and everyone in between, the current crop of clutches use organic compound materials and other gritty stuff to generate friction.

Double clutch systems work on magic. Not really. But explaining it would make it seem less fantastic so we won’t do that just yet.

Next week in leather fetish part 2 we look at how you can use leather to whip a car’s chassis into shape.