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Chapter 29 Was The Tucker Any Good? Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
29 WAS THE TUCKER ANY GOOD?
IN DECEMBER, 1956, when Tucker was in the hospital at Ypsilanti, a letter came to him from Bill Hamlin of Ontario, California. The letter started:
Dear Sir:
Car #14 has nearly 120,000 miles on it and, since such an automobile isn't available yet (tho this one is nearly eight years old) I hope you will be able to assist me in obtaining a pair of headgaskets, for I expect to thoroughly overhaul it some time this next year. I prefer the steel-insert type over copper, due to the aluminum blocks and heads.
I do not expect undue trouble in obtaining other parts—unless you know of an "over-haul kit" available—the gaskets will take care of the problem. The engine hasn't been apart—not even a valve job yet.
The car is performing beautifully and attracts so much attention, I take much pride in maintaining it so. It consumes three quarts of oil per thousand miles, and has a valve lifter that “sounds off” now and then, so I wish to eliminate these conditions.
I have never owned so thrilling an automobile. After all these years—it still possesses more of what I expect in a family vehicle than any car on the market today, regardless of price. Though it has a few things I wish were different, it has the “mostest that I like the bestest.”
I certainly wish that the Corporation had had the chance that Kaiser enjoyed—(and thoroughly muffed-up)!
Can you give an old “Tucker Pilot” any hope for a new Tucker some of these days? Certainly hope there is a chance for an American-built, Air-cooled, rear-engine job in the books!
Another letter from Hamlin told of taking his Tucker to a quarter-mile drag strip at Pomona in 1954 when, he said, the stock car record was held by an Olds “88” doing 78.8 through a standing start. One paragraph said:
Our Tucker (1948 and “tired” by Tucker's standards) went thru repeatedly at 82 m.p.h. (Starting in 2nd gear, as I had been warned that 1st gear was too severe with the rear-wheel traction of no slip, which might shear an axle.) Anyhow—it convinced everyone there that the Tucker had it over any Stock Car up to 1955.
There are still Tucker drivers who can give firsthand testimony to the car's performance and one of the best qualified is Nick Jenin of Fort Lauderdale, who with ten Tuckers has the largest collection in the country. Jenin tells of driving one back to Florida in 1954 after buying it from a dealer in Chicago for $6,500.
“This car was in storage seventeen months and it was its first trip when I got it,” Jenin said. “I didn't check the ignition or the plugs, nobody knew how the valves were set up. I just bought it and drove it out; put air in the tires and checked the oil, and hoped the car would make it. I had my wife follow me in a brand new Cadillac Fleetwood so if the damn thing broke down we could leave it.
“We stopped for gas every 200 miles or so, put fourteen or fifteen gallons in the Cadillac and eight or nine in the Tucker. We drove the same route and had the same mileage and we stayed together on the road, about half a mile apart.
“It was a red car and attracted a lot of attention, and north of Atlanta some kids in a '54 Buick Roadmaster needled me for about ten miles. When we hit that straight stretch about thirty-five miles long, I stepped on it. The speedometer showed 110. The kids finally caught up when I stopped at a gas station, and they said they were doing 105 when I left them.”
Jenin said this is his favorite Tucker and he has driven it to Chicago and back five times; that it now registers 63,400 miles and still has the original engine, and nothing has ever been done to it.
“You don't need power steering and you don't weave,” he said. “Before power steering came in a lot of my friends who drove the Tucker complained that the steering didn't feel right. After they got used to power steering they never complained about the Tucker again.
“The timing has to be right for fuel economy, but when it's right I would say that it does twenty-four miles to the gallon without any trouble. It will take off and go in sand without slipping. Take a Cadillac or a Buick and the rear end will lift. The engine has tremendous torque and you have to be careful starting.
“If you know how to drive a Tucker properly it will run forever. If you goose it, you're gone.”
Going more than 100,000 miles without new rings or a valve job was no great surprise to Tucker, and it was no surprise whatever to John L. Burns, chief experimental engineer of Aircooled Motors, who headed the job of getting the engine ready for mass production in the Chicago plant.
The main reason for the Tucker engine's almost unbelievable performance was that it was originally laid out with the possibility in mind that it would be used in an automobile, Burns said, and with its high torque at low engine speed, it felt as if it were coasting all the time.
“Basically it was the same Army-approved airplane and helicopter engine that was good for 1,500 hours without an overhaul. That is the equivalent of 150,000 miles in an automobile, and that engine could be run wide open all day.”
While the Syracuse plant was working on the last order, engineers worked the engine over again to make it air-cooled, retaining various features Tucker had added including the flywheel, bell housing and other parts needed for automobile use. They called the new job “the ultimate Tucker engine.”
“We took the original engine and added a blower and a shroud for cooling,” Burns said. “It had the same bore and stroke (335 cubic inches) and there was a rubber-mounted Sirocco type fan turning with the crankshaft. It was fourteen inches in diameter with sixty-four blades, and it pushed enough air to cross the desert in the daytime. It was test run up to 110 degrees and still operating perfectly.”
The engine weighed 525 pounds with all the accessories, and had pulled more than 200 horsepower on the dynamometer. Test work was completed and the engine was on a stand, ready for installation in a green Tucker, when the trustees moved in and stopped all Tucker operations.
But no matter how well the 50 Tuckers performed, if they were no more than hand-built cars as SEC claimed, they might have challenged Maseratis and Ferraris and it still wouldn't have meant anything.
Could the Tucker have been built in mass production, and still had the same performance as the first pilot models?
At Tucker's request the Syracuse plant made an exhaustive analysis to supplement the corporation's own figures, going through the entire automobile part by part with cost figures for everything that went into it. Their figures, Burns said, showed the Tucker could have been built and sold profitably in the same price range as the Buick Roadmaster: about $2,700 stripped, or around $3,000 fully equipped. With 200 horsepower it should have run rings around the Buick, so competition shouldn't have been any problem.
Some changes were planned to lower manufacturing cost, and insure reliability. Springing was to be changed until rubber companies had the suspensions perfected, and the manual shift transmission was to be simplified until the automatic was ready.
Total weight was about 3,600 pounds, and it actually had more horsepower per pound of weight than any stock car in America.
While Lester Velie, in the Collier's story, was quoting SEC and the trustees that Tucker couldn't build an automobile, the trustees were still waiting for an independent report from a Chicago engineering firm, Stevenson, Jordan & Harrison, which was dated July 25, about a month after the Collier's story ran.
Their findings largely confirmed both the corporation's and Aircooled's cost analyses, setting retail price at $3,289 and the selling price to distributors at $2,302. This pricing, said the report, “contemplates the car as it is now designed. The cost could be reduced by simplifying the construction in several ways.”
Cost estimates were based on use of the air-cooled engine which, the report said, would cost approximately $25 less to build and would be about 100 pounds lighter.
The California Tucker owner who so ardently hoped for an American-built, air-cooled, rear-engine automobile should welcome Chevrolet's new “Corvair,” which may be as close to an air-cooled Tucker as he will ever come.
And critics, both in and out of government, who derided the Tucker as impractical and a “monstrosity” will find a tougher target in General Motors, because Corvair specifications list many design features which are close to identical. The differential is integral with the engine and transmission, as in the Tucker, and-like the Tucker-drives independently sprung rear wheels through “U” joints.
People who didn't like the location of the Tucker's gas tank can make the same complaint with the Corvair, which has the filler cap in the crown of the left front fender, and the spare tire is likewise stowed in the front luggage compartment.
While the engines are far from identical, the Corvair's is similar to the Tucker's in that it is a flat opposed six, largely aluminum, lists carburetors instead of fuel injection, and is designed to burn regular gasoline.
Devotees of the “straight stick” may complain of the Corvair's three-speed manual transmission (the Tucker had four speeds), but with the trend increasingly toward automatics, the complaints probably will be few and minor.
About the only similarity in the automatic transmission is that both use planetary gears. Chevrolet's probably will have better getaway, with its torque converter where the first Tucker jobs used a fluid coupling, but the Tucker automatic may still surpass it in economy, because of the design feature which put it in positive gear immediately above idling speed.
Chevrolet's new entry in the rear-engine field will unquestionably be superior to the first Tuckers mechanically, with the time spent in development and GM's tremendous resources for research and testing. Whether it can outperform the Tucker may be open to argument until someone (and this is bound to happen) puts them together in a race or timed runs.
In weight-to-horsepower ratio the Tucker was ahead. The Corvair's 140-cubic-inch engine is rated at 80 hp, which figures 30 pounds per horsepower, with its overall weight of 2,415 pounds. The Tucker-with its air-cooled engine rated at 200 hp and overall weight 3,600 pounds-would have had 18 pounds per horsepower.
Corvair's promised “power kit” and new four-speed transmission should narrow the gap substantially in weight-to-horse-power ratio, and make it the nearest to a true sports car in its entire field. While the power kit officially boosts horsepower from 80 to 95, it probably will be well over 100, with Chevrolet's traditional reputation for understatement.
Beyond increased horsepower, the four-speed transmission isn't likely to raise top speed appreciably, if at all. But in the hands of drivers who have a feel for automobiles it should have satisfying flexibility and terrific getaway, with a unique appeal for people who have learned to understand and appreciate sports car performance.
Except for the Corvair's narrower tread (54 inches) and six-cylinder engine, it is close mechanically to the car Tucker was working on the second round. He planned an air-cooled opposed four with 130 horsepower, and a standard tread for a combination sports car and utility vehicle.
Tucker was never a bigot judging the design and performance of automobiles, and there can be no possible question that he would have given the Corvair his enthusiastic approval without even seeing it, on the strength of its specifications alone.
For anybody who may still think the Tucker was something of a freak, it was a six-passenger four-door sedan that was longer, lower and more powerful than any standard American automobile yet on the road at that time. And if there is still any question about its performance, there are enough Tuckers around the country to find out. In addition to Jenin's ten in Florida and Hamlin's No. 14 in California, there were (at last report three more in California in top shape. There are some in museums around the country; several around Chicago, some in Minnesota, Michigan and New York. There was one—rusting, shabby and neglected—on a used car lot in Miami with a $6,500 price tag.
If you can talk a present Tucker owner into letting you try one out, or at least giving you a ride, you can check their speed, getaway, fuel economy and ride.
The Tucker you try may have a sagging suspension arm, if it has some of the early ones that weren't made right and haven't been replaced. The engine may be rough at idling speed, if it has the orginal high-lift camshaft, or the carburetion isn't right. If it has a manual gear shift—and only two or three were built with automatics—it may shift hard, if the switches are corroded or there are leaks in the vacuum lines.
But if the Tucker you try is in any kind of shape at all, it will still give whatever you're driving now one hell of an argument on the open highway.