Amazing historical information. I knew a bit of it, but not the whole thing. Also shows the So Cal area wasn't just LA. San Diego really had and has some amazing talent.
Until today I never knew what made a Crowerglide so different from other clutches of the era. Thanks for the education after all these years.
Great video. Those guys were true pioneers in Drag Racing. Unfortunately we lost a lot of drivers throughout those early development years.
Pro Stock pulling tractors and 2wd trucks/cars use the modern version of the Crower glide, yes I asked!. . I was at a pull Saturday and was interesting to watch the pulling process, watch the clutch/throttle actuation. I think I read some where that 1928 Fords had a dual disc clutch.
Really interesting, thanks. I was amazed a few years ago when I saw one of these for the first time, it’s the multi-plate centrifugal clamping clutch from a 1920s Bugatti. Works just like a Crower-Glide but only two fingers.
All done in the day with NO CAD/CAM. Maybe they had some NC equipment by the late 1960's. Unless you worked in aerospace, everything was drawn by pencil and paper. These guys did revolutionary work with nothing compared to what is readily available today.
It's not the tools, it's the workman. There are some amazing things being done out there, this little corner is in a self-imposed backwards facing mindset. A little sneaks through now and then. Remember the CNC metal shaping machine? Anything you can think up can be designed on a computer, optimized and files sent to be cut out of material or built up from raw material. Also as mentioned, the boundaries crossed came at a high human price. I appreciate the pioneering efforts of the people back then. Considering it was the same time frame as road racing active aero, huge leaps in tires, which are still getting better today, the surge from Brit and American motorcycles to the upstarts from Japan, it was an age of great advancement. The issue today is that the efforts to go faster have reached the level where the human inside is often the limiting factor.
Bruce Crower was a genius!. He bought a Brown & Sharpe 57 station machine that used the old IBM Punch cards. When he did an Indy car, the body was done with hydro-forming. My ad agency had the Crower account for years. And time spent with Bruce was a real learning experience.
We used the old IBM punch cards in school when I was taking an AD/APT programming course. It was a feat to get a program to go through all the required steps and the lab was busy at all hours with us trying to de-bug programs. Old paper readouts... guard them with your life. Lousy students would pirate them from the trash and try to make them work. At work, payroll used an IBM writer which was similar to the ones at school. And they had the blank cards. So we could work programs without going to school. https://twobithistory.org/2018/06/23/ibm-029-card-punch.html Then we also used the Friden Flex-O-Writer to make paper punch tapes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter
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