Hello all. This may be one for the older gents here.

Before the advent of the electric self-starter one would have to use a hand crank in the front of the vehicle to start the car. I'm not old enough to remember these by any means, but I understand how it worked. The crank was simply a manual, though tedious, means to get the crankshaft turning so the engine would start, (and I understand sometimes in the wrong direction, causing bodily injury to the person doing the cranking).

Anyway, when I was young, a neighbor's father had this hand cranked generator with two wires coming out if it. He told me that it was out of an old hand-crank automobile. (I remember this well because he told me to hold on to the 2 wires and he gave it a crank. I got the shock of a lifetime). Anyway, after this I was under the assumption that, before the battery operated self-starter, there was an electric starter motor that relied on these hand crank generators to operate, much easier than hand cranking the engine.

During a recent conversation with a colleague this topic came up and he told me that he had never heard of such a thing, that the first self-starters were all battery powered. Well I took to the internet to find out if my long standing assumption was correct but I can't find anything.

Did these hand-crank electric starters for automobiles exist, or not?

There may be some confusion. Even when cars had battery-powered starter motors they had hand cranking as an option.This was true of luxury cars, not just ordinary ones.(For example, a Bentley that my father had, c 1952, had that arrangement).A starter motor took quite a drain on the battery and it wasn't too difficult to flatten the battery on a cold day, when the oil was particularly thick and the engine that much harder to turn.

All starter motors were 'battery powered' and I've never heard of, nor encountered, any other.The starting handle was to avoid the battery and start the vehicle without a starter motor.

Right on cue: the Antiques Roadshow has just shown an old Renault.The owner started it with the starting handle.When asked why, she said that it was easier and better than using the electric starter and putting a strain on the battery.She went on to mention starting when everything is cold.When the engine is hot and the battery fully charged there's no problem.

The thing you called a hand cranked starter with the two wires coming out of it, in all likelihood was a magneto. If the problem in starting the car was the result of a defective ignition coil, rather than being unable to crank the engine over for whatever reason, an outside source of sparking voltage could be supplied by a magneto. The distributor, presumably able to turn, along with the crankshaft, camshaft, etc. could then deliver sparks to the various cylinders, and the car started with a magneto as the source of voltage high enough for ignition.

As Fred says the hand crank was most often used, even after the self starters came along, because the battery, for whatever reason was weak or almost dead. The self starter draws so much current that it also aggravates the weakened battery and makes the ignition weaker.
Post WWII there was a shortage of cars available and I briefly owned a 1929 Whippet. Without a hand crank, I would never have been able to travel from Cleveland to Montreal in the dead of winter.

Thanks guys.

Magneto

So none of these automotive magnetos were hand cranked?

I find this topic interesting, though I have nothing substantive to add. Kendor, your Wikipedia link didn't work, so here's a replacement: magneto.

quote:

The crank was simply a manual, though tedious, means to get the crankshaft turning so the engine would start, (and I understand sometimes in the wrong direction, causing bodily injury to the person doing the cranking).

I've heard it was a ratchet mechanism designed to positively engage the crankshaft when turned one way (clockwise?) such that once the engine started and rpm's exceeded the hand cranking, the crank was effectively disengaged by the ratchet & you could safely let go. If the engine backfired, however, retrograde engine rotation would be transmitted directly to the crank and could easily break man's arm.

If I understand what frankvan is saying, it would take 2 people to start the car -- one to crank the engine and one to crank the magneto?

I'm not a pilot but I once took some Cessna lessons. The aircraft had dual magnetos (is this now obsolete?) typical of redundant aircraft systems. At some point between starting the engine and taking off, you temporarily disconnect and reconnect each of the magnetos, and you can discern a modest drop in engine performance on one versus two. I think the cylinders also had redundant dual spark plugs, though I'm not sure whether they were on separate magnetos with separate distributors, etc. I should think that sufficient voltage to generate a spark would be an all-or-none proposition -- does additional spark plug current improve combustion?

In the late 1990s I used riding lawnmowers extensively (we had about 12 acres of former dairy pasture in the southeast US, so I went through one cheap mower per year ). The electric starter on its Briggs & Stratton engine was powered by a small motorcycle battery. The starter's pinion gear was coupled to the engine gear through a cleverly designed nylon ratchet mechanism (or whatever you call one-way-only torque transmission) spring loaded such that when the engine fired up it disengaged and dropped away -- no solenoid necessary.

As I remember it, the mower's spark plug was fed by a frame-mounted coil that pulsed high voltage when a mating coil (or coils?) on the engine flew by. Otherwise no visible electronics.

In my grade school science class the teacher had a hand-cranked DC generator of some kind. The whole class formed a giant circle holding hands, and he'd crank the generator (not a magneto, I guess, if the voltage stays low) and everybody would feel the electricity. Ooh! Is that still practiced in classrooms today -- or do liability and lawyers interfere?

quote:

Originally posted by Kendor:
Thanks guys.

Magneto

So none of these automotive magnetos were hand cranked?

I don't know of any reason for hand cranked magnetos for automotive use. But hand cranked magnetos were used for ringing the old fashioned telephones which you may have seen in vintage movies. A magneto is a very simple device for producing an A.C voltage by rotating a coil of wire in a magnetic field supplied by permanent magnets. As far as self starting of automobiles goes, I had a friend who collected vintage autos and I know of one at least that had an air tank which delivered air under pressure to the cylinmders to crank the engine. When the car was running a compressor driven by the engine re-filled the tank with air for the next self start. That was a 1912 model as I recall. This same car had carbide gas (acetylene) headlights, and windows that were raised by leather belts.

What I meant, professor, is that in the event the car couldn't start because of a defective set of points or ignition coil, a source of high ebough voltage to fire the plugs (6-10KV?)could be supplied to the distributor and run the car. I see no reason why a magneto turned by hand couldn't accomplish that. I also think that motorcyles often used (use?) magnetos for ignition.