"gotta a liquid mercury roll bar in the trunk"

A guy in OKC has a hard loaded '63 Ford Galaxie for sale. I don't need it but it's cheap so I called the number. As the guy rattled off the options he threw out, "it's gotta liquid mercury roll bar in the trunk".....

I've messed with old cars for about twenty-five years and have dug through the trunk of many a Galaxie and have never seen (or heard of) one. Anyone ever know of such a thing or was the guy trying to sell me muffler bearing grease?

 

I think it was something about the weight transfer of the heavy mercury to the inside of the turn to counter the lifting of the car body. How it worked, I do not know.

 

I know they were used for weight transfer, but I thought it was more for drag strip purposes than roundy-round.

 

What is a "hard loaded" '63 Ford Galaxie? What does that mean? I'm serious.

 

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Mercury filled roll bars were a product of the 60s.
They are heavy and if mounted properly, they help lower the center of gravity of the vehicle.
The liquid filled rollbar was used to help transfer weight, sorta similar to 1/4 mile cars where they mount the battery in the trunk which in turn puts more weight to the rear wheels to help control wheelspin at the track.
Very similar to ballast in a ship/ocean liner. If you put 50 lbs of mercury filled rollbar hard mounted in between the frame rails, it will transfer/apply 100 pounds by relieving 50 lbs from one side.
-If you relieve 50 lbs from one side, and load the other side with 50lbs, you have in effect transferred 100 pounds



.

 

I know of two guys around here that had mercury in their roundy round car. it was done for weight. As the car banks the corners the Mercury stays in the lowest point now mater what. So I'm told.

 

I learn something everyday I'm here

 

Oh man... i haven't heard of these in years. My dad was an old farm machinery trader and one time at a an auction, they had a new 'Liquid Mercury Roll Bar' for sale still in the box. My dad and his buddy started talking about how they always heard of these 'magical' attachments and decided to pay whatever it took to get it. They paid the princely sum of $30 in 1975 for this thing, which they immediately took to the nearest work bench and disassembled.

Good laugh.... an old cast iron window weight in between two stretched coil springs inside of a metal tube.

Junk... pure hokus pokus. I wish my dad had kept it. He let his buddy take it home and he hung it on the wall in his office for 30 more years before he passed away and it was lost.

Honest Injun... hand to my heart... just another traveling salesman's gas money making tool.

Now you know what i know.

 

hard loaded means it has all, or most, available options

 

Now I've learned two things in this thread.

 

One of my running buddies in McGregor, Tx had one of those in his car in the early 70's and swore by it. He was still swapping it to the next car every time he changed cars when I moved back up here in the mid 70's.

 

In stock cars, the mercury would be stowed in the lower left frame rail. I did see a rule book years back saying it was prohibited. Very toxic stuff and would like to know how they'd get such a large amount of it.

Bob

 

Yep, that's what it is for, weight transfer, tried in both drag cars and circle cars.....I'd take it out and go properly dispose of it.

 

Well you gotta love the questions and answers you get on the HAMB

1940 Willys Coupe

 

It has to be said... regardless of the history here this car is an EPA toxic nightmare now. I'd be very careful about purchasing something with that much heavy metal in it that will need to be removed and disposed of properly. I broke a thermometer at college one day and it set off alarms on campus and with the city water works. Try that X a zillion. If that much mercury is removed and improperly disopose of, it will be a serious spill, and who ever does it deserves nads removed and possibly sterilization of their children. That guy needs to be thinned from the herd. Gary

 

a guy at the Newport Hill Climb car show showed me a supposedly gyroscope controlled bar-looking device in the trunk of his AMX. He said it was a factory option and that it helped control weight transfer during hard cornering. Not exactly pertinent to the question but I felt it kind of fit into this discussion.

 

Very cool -- I had never heard of this before

 

May be out of touch with the current price of mercury, but in years past I have seen mercury sell for $10-20 a pound. May be worth more. People in the gold business use it.

 

The goverment stored many barrels of mercury at a depot in my town until recently.
There was an uproar when the citizens found out. It took years for the receiving depot out west to allow the stuff to be moved there.
There had to be test trucks sent on the route to make sure nothing would happen during the move.
My wife and I noticed three helicopters hovering over the depot, at night, for years.
We suspect that more than mercury was stored in the depot.
I have not heard that the transfer was completed.
I guess I could go to a town meeting and embarrass the counsel by asking questions!
Mercury is dangerous stuff.

I just checked google. Our Congressman toured the site and the mercury is all gone now!
Funny that the pictures were taken at night!

 

I just got one of those "Transfer" boxes this winter and we poped it apart and it was a huge cast iron weight inside with springs on each side. I donated it to the local Hot Rod Museum run by Sid at www.droppedaxles.com

 

And a Congressman would never lie

 

ditto, I would not be handing over my money for a car full of liquid mercury, or even one that use to be. Would be like buying a toxic waste dump.

 

Two observations:

1) When I first started reading car magazines around 1951, there was an aftermarket product advertised called a "Gyro Skid Stabilizer" that claimed to provide useful lateral weight transfer for cornering. It consisted of an iron weight located by coil springs inside a tube, just as two people have described here. I have never, until now, heard of the liquid mercury device.

A number of years ago, I looked at a '48 Merc that was for sale, and there was considerable evidence to support its being the car that Troy Ruttman ran in the Carrera Panamericana (Mexican Road Race). It was equipped with one of these "stabilizers", so apparently some racers believed in it.

2) When I was in college circa 1958, I naively stole a jug of mercury from the school's physics lab. It was a small brown masonry crock, 6" or 8" tall, with a cork in the top. I took it, and kept it for several years, because it was unbelievably heavy (several pounds, at least) for its size and was a great paperweight for craft projects. Totally unaware of mercury's toxicity, I occasionally poured the stuff out and played with it: plated coins, watched it run around in a dish, stuff like that. The actual volume of mercury in the jug was quite small, probably 2 fluid ounces or less.

I have no idea what became of that jug -- haven't seen it in probably 40 years. I don't seem to have suffered any ill effects from my carelessness; I hope the same is true for anybody who possessed it after me.

 

I'm still trying to get my head round how it would work! In my mind, under hard cornering the force would send the liquid (or sprung-loaded cast iron) to the outside of the turn, unloading the inside tyres even more?

 

You know those round tube bumpers with end caps that unscrew which they used on gassers....

 

Yea know what you mean. I played with that stuff on my desk in science class. We also had to pass thrift the basement to get to art class and every guy who cold reach the heat pipe hi it to make the white powder fly

 

I saw one of these gyroscope bar things back in the late 60's. It was put in the rear seat area of a Corvair and taken to the Symrna airport, if I remember right, for demonstration by guys trying to sell these things I think.
They took the Corvair out on open tarmac and tried to turn the car over at speed.
Tom S.

 

i seem to recall that Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle invested in a idea to have the major manufacturers buy this "anti rollover" idea. I don't recall exactly what the premise was, but it was marketed as shifting the weight from one side to the other, thus preventing a roll over. I believe he lost all his investment on this one. He (Mickey) had a string of bad investments which some say led to his health and addiction problems.

 

Exactly. I can't see any advantage in it. You want to move the weight the other way.

Years ago draughtsmen used electric erasers that switched on when one held them with the rubber bit down, and switched off when one put them down the other way up. Apparently those things had switches that used mercury as a conductor.

 

We used to roll mercury around in our hands in science class during the late 60's. I don't think they knew back then what some of the health risks of the stuff were. I never suffered any effects from it that I'm aware of, although this old car sickness I have could be related.....