MYSTERY ENGINE

Jay Leno may have a mystery on his hands.

The host of “The Tonight Show” has a sideline called Jay Leno’s Garage, a Web site where he mixes his passion for collecting historic machinery with his talent as an entertainer, and sometimes gives a little patriotic boost for products made in the United States.

But the mystery isn’t about something American. It’s British, an 1832 steam engine highlighted in one of the videos on the site, www.jaylenosgarage.com.

In the eight-minute clip, Leno says the engine once ran a dye factory in England. “Don’t have a lot of history on it,” he says. “Henry Ford bought it in the mid-’20s ... It got sold off and went to a number of owners. I got it; we restored it, and it’s running for probably the first time in, I would guess, 70 or 80 years, anyway.”

The “we” isn’t an affectation. Leno has a team of people who help maintain and restore his collection, which ranges from steam engines to cars, trucks, and motorcycles.

The 1832 model is the oldest engine in his collection, he says, and adds,  “We don’t know who built it.” There’s no manufacturer’s name on it.

The video, which can be found at the site under “Fixed Engines,” was the subject of an e-mail written by Dick Pawliger, an ASME Life Fellow active on the ASME History and Heritage Committee. Given the vast collective knowledge of ASME’s members, Pawliger wondered if one of them could identify the engine. Pawliger’s e-mail was forwarded to Mechanical Engineering by another ASME Fellow, Bob Woods, a frequent contributor to the magazine who wrote the appreciation of James Rumsey and John Fitch that appears on page 44 of this issue.

Who made it? Jay Leno knows that his 1832 steam engine ran a
factory in England, but isn’t sure who made it.

The video shows the mystery engine in operation, highlights structural details such as wedge fasteners, and recaps how Leno’s head mechanic, Bernard Juchli, reverse engineered a replacement part. There are also 37 still photos of the engine on the site.

When we spoke with Leno, he said that he has a guess about who made the engine, but hasn’t checked the records of the Henry Ford Museum to see if he can confirm it.

The videos on Leno’s Web site are well worth browsing. A two-part video, for instance, shows Leno climbing under a 1906 Stanley Steamer racecar to light the pilot before he takes it for a drive—it appears that he takes all the vehicles for a spin. The second part of that Stanley Steamer video includes a quick shot of flames engulfing the car in the garage.

Leno has other mechanical sidelines. He writes a column for Popular Mechanics, for instance, but not for the money. After all, a guy who can buy a fleet of Duesenbergs probably doesn’t need it. Instead he has an arrangement with the magazine to support scholarships to McPherson College. The school, in McPherson, Kansas, may be unique in the U.S. in that it offers a four-year program in automotive restoration.

Leno sponsors a scholarship to McPherson in the name of Fred Duesenberg, one of the brothers who founded Duesenberg Automobile & Motors Co. The Web site for the Restoration Technology Department at McPherson is www.mcpherson.edu/technology. Leno plugs McPherson when he can and one of his Garage videos is an interview with the college’s former director of Automotive Restoration Development, Jonathan Klinger.

Jay Leno’s Garage also has a feature called “Under the Hood” devoted to techniques, parts, tools, and the like for the care of machines.

Leno said he is particularly interested in promoting products made in the United States. Several segments are devoted to Airgas welding products. Another segment demonstrates a powder coating system designed for home use from a company called Eastwood.

Nature’s Broom, made by a company in Mississippi, gets a segment. It is a powder with the consistency of sawdust that you pour on an oil spill to wipe it away in one pass.

Lightweight brakes and rotors made by Weightless Products were featured in another segment. They’re made of metal matrix composites and cut several pounds off the front of a motorcycle, a company executive, John Arbeen, says on camera.

Leno said that he operates the Garage Web site free of charge.