Antique & Classic Cars Blog

There may be people who visit this site interested in the cars and talk but not quite up to speed on some of the jargon that gets thrown around. An exhaustive dictionary would be exhaust-ing, so let’s start small . . . with a few common terms.

This is a reference we can add to as we go along and maybe, if it gains some momentum, even put a link to it somewhere on the page for new visitors.

As always, I invite readers to throw out any terms you don’t see here that you think are core to the hobby and worth noting. Or, since this is an open discussion, terms you find unusual, improbable or that confused you for a while until you got the gist:

carburetor: hunk of metal that bolts to the intake manifold and within which fuel and air are mixed. Cars don’t burn straight gasoline; they burn gas mixed with a lot of air (oxygen).

choke: device that, as the name suggests, reduces the amount of air drawn into the carburetor and mixed with gas when the engine is cold. Cold air is more oxygen rich than warm air so less is required for an optimum air/fuel mix.

distributor: takes high-voltage current from the coil and distributes it to each spark plug at appropriate time so that fuel/air charge ignited by spark plug pushes the piston down (rather than resists its rise, which damages the engine).

exhaust manifold:  part that takes exhaust (gases left after combustion) after it exits the exhaust valves and routes it to exhaust system.

head or cylinder head: part that bolts over a bank of cylinders and seals the combustion chamber. Inline engines have one head; vee engines have two. Flathead designs are just that–flat pieces of metal–while overhead valve and overhead cam engines have thicker heads to accommodate those parts. (A flathead’s valves are in the block.)

intake manifold: part to which the carburetor bolts (or carburetors bolt) that contains passages routing air/fuel mix to the intake valves.

valve (intake or exhaust): opens and closes to let air/fuel mix in (intake valve) and exhaust out (exhaust valve).

There are hundreds of additional relevant terms. . . . This just gets the crank turning.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.