Wrong on all counts George,
The auto industry at that time was using 40 year old designs and technology:
ladder frame, front engine, rear drive, separate body / chassis, etc. The
majority of the annual retooling was new body panel stamping dies. Part of the
reason that was necessary has to do with the quantity of panels that can be
produced before the die must be replaced. Furthermore, sheet metal sells cars.
I
wouldn't call new skin a major retooling.
If you look at the films of Corvair roll over tests with an open mind, you will
see that nearly any car would flip under those same conditions. Nader's team was
very unprofessional and unscientific. Like statistics, photographs, both still
and moving can be very misleading. I know very little about the Corvair rear
suspension, or that of the Triumph Spitfire. My MGA has reinforced rubber straps
to limit the downward travel of the rear axle. If this motion was a problem on
swing axle cars, I wonder why designers did not employ motion limiting straps on
those cars. They are cheap and effective. Nader's myth ranks right up there with
other great scams (i.e. the JFK assassination, Coke Classic, and most recently,
Y2K)
FYI here is a partial list of engines on which one can do a ring job without
piston removal: VW boxer, Ferrari Boxer, Porsche boxer, BMW boxer twins (H-D
V-twins and most other air cooled motorcycle engines), most air cooled internal
combustion light aircraft engines, and the most common of them all, the
ubiquitous lawn mower engine. Now we know of more, don't we?
Jim
Gonaj@aol.com wrote:
> Common James, that doesn't make sense. They don't need to trash a car to get
> rid of it any more than the tooling lasts forever. The auto industry was
> into major retooling an an annual basis back in those days anyway.
> BTW that is the only engine I know of that you could do a ring job on w/o
> removing the pistons.
>
> George
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