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Chapter 19 A Homey Stockholders' Meeting Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
19 A HOMEY STOCKHOLDERS' MEETING
THE APPROACHING first annual stockholders meeting by no means presented a crisis, as things in general were going smoothly, but it did create a problem which would have solved itself with a little more time.
At least one car had to be ready to show the stockholders, one reasonable facsimile of the car being readied for production. The engine was no longer a problem, because the Aircooled plant had all the necessary equipment and technical experts to finish the job. But the transmission was still lacking.
Tucker had offered $5,000 cash for an automatic transmission that would be an improvement over Buick's Dynaflow, and comparable in performance to the Hydramatic. A young en-gineer, Warren A. Rice, soon claimed the reward and was paid the $5,000 as soon as Tucker was satisfied that his design would work.
While waiting for a working model, which promised to take some time, they decided on a four-speed manual shift to bridge the gap until they had time to shake all the bugs out of the automatic. Efforts to have a manual job developed outside had ended about the same way as the engine—a contract with one company was canceled, and all the proposals reached astronomical figures, with delivery dates months ahead.
Tucker didn't have months to spare, so he followed his new policy of making decisions himself. Again he drafted Offutt and Leabu and sent them to his Ypsilanti plant, which was given a contract to develop the manual job.
Offutt went to work immediately on the design and Leabu went scouring the country for Cord transmissions, to be adapted for the Tucker until the Y-1 (“Y” standing for Ypsilanti) was ready. They chose Cord because it had front drive, with the engine placed backwards as in the Tucker.
Leabu scavenged junk yards and used car lots from Detroit to Miami and finally rounded up (anonymously) twenty-two Cord transmissions. Some were good and others had a few usable parts. Altogether eighteen were installed in Tucker cars to get them on the road, and as the new Y-1's were finished, all but four had the Cord transmissions removed and the Y-1's put in.
For the new manual job they designed a pre-selector electric-type shift; a short lever on the steering column selected the gear, and the transmission shifted when the clutch was depressed. Actual shifting was done by vacuum, somewhat similar to Chevrolet in the late 40's, but with the valves actuated by electromagnets.
SEC's experts later reported triumphantly that the Cord transmission “through later tests proved to be utterly inadequate.” This was no secret to Tucker or the men working on it. They knew it was too light for the more powerful Tucker engine before making the first installation, but it would serve the immediate purpose, and Tucker knew that the new automatic would perform with anything on the road.
The Y-1 project went pretty much like the engine, but took longer because of the difficulty of getting gears cut to order. Leabu said except for a few bolts, washers and miscellaneous items, no parts in the Cord were interchangeable with the Y-1, including the electric-and-vacuum control assemblies. It was a completely new transmission.
The Y-1 wasn't entirely satisfactory. Some said the gear angle was wrong and others said the gears were cut from soft iron. Most of this work was done in Detroit, where there were persistent reports that Tucker jobs were being sabotaged. Whatever the reason, it wasn't overly important, because all the Y-1's were due to be replaced later by the automatic. The whole job took less than three months, and a demonstrator was ready for the stockholders well ahead of time.
As reported by the Chicago papers, the meeting was a gala event. Tucker himself drove the car in a demonstration run, receiving wild applause when he showed it could back up. Many in the audience had been worrying about this privately, and had come for the sole purpose of finding out for themselves if the reports were true.
The Chicago Daily News, under the head, “TUCKER CO. HAS HOMEY STOCKHOLDERS MEETING,” said nearly 1,700 turned out in the big meeting hall at the Tucker plant. “They streamed down the corridors, men and women with children, some bobby-soxers, city firemen in uniform, a very large mass of humanity in a single place,” the News reported.
“This demonstration,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “was the climax of one of the most unusual stockholder meetings in Chicago history. The large number of shareholders, assembled in a room bedecked with flags and bunting and entertained with musical recordings, asked not a single question about production, dividends, or other corporate matters. The harmonious group, whose meeting was opened with a prayer, were told only that cars were coming in the not too distant future.”
With the stockholders out of his hair for another year, Tucker concentrated on getting the new automatic transmission into production. A test model of the R-1 ( the “R” standing for Rice) was built in the shop at the plant and installed in a chassis; others were installed later in some of the cars. From the first there was no possible doubt about its performance. Inside the plant grounds a car with a Rice transmission was placed beside a Buick Dynaflow in loose rock. Mechanics said the Tucker walked out easily, while the Buick stalled and refused to move.
The reason was simple. In most automatic transmissions of the time there was a period, while the car started to get under motion, in which the fluid coupling or torque converter had to reach a certain speed before it “took hold.” This could be felt as a sort of whirring sensation, while speed of the engine was still above the car's speed.
In the Rice design the transmission was in positive gear as soon as the engine got above idling speed, and it started pulling immediately. It was demonstrated that the car would push start at ten miles an hour, while a speed of twenty or higher was needed for other automatic jobs. A favorite story at the time concerned a man who was stalled and a woman who offered to give him a push.
“This is an automatic transmission,” the man said, “and you'll have to get up to thirty-five miles an hour to get me started.”
While the man waited he happened to glance up at his rear-view mirror. He saw the woman barreling down the road toward his car. She was going 35 miles an hour.
As soon as the first automatic transmission was installed and tested in a chassis, Tucker took it and two other cars to Detroit to challenge the enemy on his home grounds. Police permission was obtained to hold the demonstration in Rouge Park on Detroit's west side, and the cars were left overnight in a lot to be ready for the next day. Early the following morning there was a minor traffic jam at Evergreen and Joy Road as hundreds of drivers stopped to look at the Tuckers, peer under them, shake the bodies up and down and kick the tires.
Detroit automotive writers are a skeptical lot, but enthusiasm for the new transmission was unanimous. Leo Donovan, writing in his automotive column in the Detroit Free Press, was thrilled.
“Remember your first ride in a roller-coaster?” he wrote. “The slow ascent, the gradual turn high in the air—then the awful plunge into space?
“We had our first ride in the rear-engine Tucker Torpedo in Rouge Park Wednesday. The sensation was not unlike that first roller-coaster ride.
“The Tucker Torpedo demonstration on Spinoza Drive was conducted on an open chassis driven by Warren Rice, a Tucker Corp. engineer who is directing the Chicago company's transmission development program.
“We went up a 7 per cent grade, creeping. Rice made a slow U-turn and then stepped on the accelerator.
“We plunged down the dinky incline so fast it seemed the grade was twice as sharp. The speedometer fluctuated between 60 and 70 miles an hour.
“Later, from a standing start, the chassis achieved about 60 miles an hour by the speedometer in about 10 seconds.
“At a luncheon meet preceding the demonstration, Rice sought to explain the technical operation of the new automatic transmission. A few heads nodded knowingly at his references, but representatives of the press confided still later that his explanation was only a confusion.
“But the transmission worked. And good.”
In the Detroit Times, Siler Freeman said the transmission is something “that may be revolutionary, if it can be made on the production line. It gives a quick surge of power smoothly and accelerates at a terrific pace, we noted riding up front with Warren Rice, who helped develop it.”
Ralph R. Watts of the Detroit News was more impressed with learning that the car would go backwards at close to 50 miles an hour. Due to a peculiarity of design the transmission would drive the car much faster than standard transmissions in reverse; it wasn't planned that way and was no particular advantage.
There were only three positions on the selector dial: drive, neutral and reverse. Rice explained that the design provided all the torque needed under all conditions without the additional “low” position for emergency power which other transmissions had. In other words there was no need for a “low” because the engine started pulling immediately in low gear.
There also was no heat exchanger, or separate provision for cooling oil in the fluid couplings, because they didn't heat up. At 100 miles an hour the tachometer showed 3300 rpm, compared to 5100 and 5300 for two other stock cars of the same year. There was no clutch, only the brake and accelerator pedals on the floor.
It was strictly the truth when Tucker told the press conference that the transmission had only twenty-eight basic moving parts, compared to hundreds of parts in comparable automatic designs. It had a no-creep provision, which is still a problem in some transmissions, and would have been far cheaper to manufacture in production than any other design then in use.
While Tucker ultimately lost the war, he won the transmission battle hands down, and in planning entire production with automatic transmissions, he showed vision that has since been vindicated.
The spring of 1948 had been reasonably calm by Tucker standards, with no more than the normal number of crises, which meant one every few weeks. For Tucker, the greatest personal loss was the death of Jimmy Sakuyama.
Jimmy had come to Chicago and was living in his trailer inside the plant area, near the hospital where he could get quick attention when he fell sick. He still worked almost every day at his drawing board in the engineering department, wearing two pairs of thick glasses one over the other and drawing lines so fine they might have been etched. But he could no longer put in 24 to 36 hours without stopping, as he used to do in New Orleans and Ypsilanti when there was some job that couldn't wait. Even his bouts with the bottle were far between, and seemed to be more for carrying on a tradition than any actual need. Jimmy was sick.
During his last illness he had given Tucker a name and address in Japan and asked him to send word there after his death. Tucker sent the cable and received an immediate reply: someone would come for the ashes. Jimmy had asked to be cremated. At the funeral there were only Tucker and his wife, Tucker's mother and two other friends, Gene Haustein, who had known Jimmy in New Orleans and Ypsilanti, and Harold Tellock, in the engineering department, who met him first in Chicago and respected his ability.
Two days after Tucker sent the cable two Japanese men came to the plant. People in the office said they looked like twins, dressed exactly alike in black suits, black shoes, and black hats. One of them carried a green vase about eighteen inches high with a matching cover. They thought it was jade, probably a funeral urn.
Jimmy had said many times he had disgraced his noble family and would never return. But in death Jimmy went back to Japan, to join his honorable ancestors.