 |
When Brickyard Ponies Went to Sea |
|
The Real Mr. Goodwrench was Mr. Zumbach |
The Real Mr. Goodwrench was Mr. Zumbach
commentary by David Speer
|
Traveling the unlimited circuit has benefits aside from racing. I search out used-book stores after hours or between stops. The hope is to uncover a treasure, a book that unravels a mystery.
Charles Zumbach built the so-called Zumbach-Miller engine that won a Gold Cup for Zammy Simmons before WWII and another for Guy Lombardo, who ran My Sin as Tempo VI after the war.
According to E.K. Muller's exploration into the subject (When Brickyard Ponies Went to Sea, Unlimited NewsJournal, December 1982), "the eccentric craftsman took a quartet of Olys, over-bored, and assembled them on the old crankcase to make up a 'new' V-16. Only the case, shaft, and conn rods were left from the original. The Z-M displaced 726 cubic inches . . . delivered at least 550 horsepower."
The venerable engine later found its way into Aljo and, in Mel Crook's fine words, "disgorged a lap-full of connecting rods." That was that. But who was Zumbach?
My perusings in a musty Milwaukee book barn uncovered the facts that, in the 1930s, Zumbach Motor Repair Co. was the only repair shop in Manhattan to which one could trust his Bugatti or Bentley or long-tailed Brooklands Riley. It was small, dim, greasy, rather a dump at 134-136 West 54th Street. However, Zumbach's was a temple of automobilism.
Zumbach's high priests were Charles Zumbach, Jacques Schaerley, and Werner Maeder. Schaerley ran the establishment. Maeder was chief mechanic and Merlin of' carburetion. Zumbach did the fancy machine work upstairs. All three gentlemen were Swiss.
Peculiar owners spent a mint of money continually to have Zumbach's rebuild and improve their mouth-watering vehicles, though automobiles were not the only aberrant machines the shop became involved with.
"The people who hovered outside Zumbach's to feast their eyes on unusual automobiles were shaken one day to see a thumping mahogany racing motorboat being backed in on a trailer," writes automobile historian Ralph Stein. "This boat, so high and wide that it just barely squeezed into the doorway, was the property of Zalmon G. Simmons, the mattress king. It had an engine ailment-dropped valves-the cause of which was most mysterious."
Stein got it wrong, next describing the Miller as having 32 cylinders, but he got it right that Charlie Zumbach made new camshafts to stretch across each bank. Maeder and his helpers fussed with the engine, adjusting valve timing to a hairsbreadth, then the boat was towed to water. "Poor un-nautical Maeder went flying off at 80 knots plus until the valves went kerblooey again."
Some genius in the shop discovered that the long, thin camshafts were twisted torsionally: that while one end of a camshaft was, say, closing a valve, the far end might be opening one just as a piston was rising to collide with it. Thicker camshafts were the answer.
Guy Lombardo once told me that Mr. Zumbach committed suicide, and things were never the same without Charlie. But it's not hard to understand why car-crazed types loved to hang about Zumbach's. What could be more lovely than watching a mechanic expose the intimate parts of a 16-cylinder engine-especially one with a hyphenated name?
(Reprinted from the Unlimtied NewsJournal, July 1993, p.2)
Hydroplane
History Home Page
This
page was last revised Saturday, July 12, 2008
.
Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. Email us at leslie@lesliefield.com
© Leslie Field, 2000