Yet another…

At the risk of further trying everyone’s patience while waiting for new content, I am pained to announce yet further tinkering with the Privacy Policy to better reflect the current range of embedded content. The reason I keep making these announcements is that the policy as written called for me to announce “material” changes (not counting my fussing with minor details like fixing typographical mistakes). To reduce the amount of policy-related posts, I have added a new Policy Update Minder to the right sidebar, which will show the effective dates of the current versions of the policies so you can review any changes at your convenience. I will now do this instead of taking up a lot of real estate with posts about it (although I may still announce something that constitutes a really big change).

For various reasons, there has been a dearth of new content in recent months, although I spent a while making a lot of housekeeping changes to older articles, fixing factual errors, and the like, and I am still working on the update of the Dynaflow/later Hydra-Matic article that will likely be the next major article. (As with the first part of the Hydra-Matic article, I have been going through a lot of technical documents and patent literature to get the workings of these things straight, which is complicated by there being so many different transmissions.)

I realize that it is frustrating for regular readers, but I recognize that I get a lot of “long-tail” traffic of people coming to articles months or years after the fact, and I’ve had the unhappy experience before of seeing other people innocently repeat factual errors I’ve made, which is part of why I get caught up in trying to get it right. I know this flies in the face of the “hit post and move on” philosophy of most web content, however, so I appreciate your patience, however strained!

4 Comments

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  1. Great to know there will be more articles.

    Keep up the good work!

  2. I think that it’s wonderful that your priorities lie with the production of high quality content over high quantity content. Thank you for all of this important historical work that you do for all of us automotive enthusiasts.

  3. Dear Aaron, I would very much appreciate a like history of the Torqueflite and Cruise-O-Matic of the similar volume as the amazing hydramatic articles. In case you did not know, the Russians built a direct copy of the Cruise-O-Matic for their Chaika limousines. I made a very brief edit on the wikipedia article, but have quite a bit of material that I can forward for your analysis and will assist with translation, should that be necessary. Best of Regards!

    1. Alex,

      I did talk about the origins of the Simpson gearset used in TorqueFlite and Cruise-O-Matic (inter alia) in an article I did on the Imperial a while back, although I didn’t get into the workings of TorqueFlite in any detail, so that might be TBD.

      At present, I’m still neck deep in the revamp of the second part of the Hydra-Matic article (which I hope will be done in the not-too-distant future), so to be perfectly honest I’m not sure I’ll have the fortitude to do another transmission article any time very soon. Part 2 of the Hydra-Matic piece covers 11 different transmissions in several distinct families — plus an explanation of the operating principles of a torque converter that has come close to breaking my brain — so I’ve spent a terrifying amount of time wading through technical manuals and patent literature. This isn’t to say I won’t do similar pieces in the future, since no one has ever accused me of easily learning my lesson, but it might be nice to not be staring at schematics for a while.

      If I do cover Ford automatics, I would probably want to start with the earlier Ford-o-Matic series before moving into Cruise-O-Matic. Likewise, for Chrysler, it would make sense to cover PowerFlite and, if I’m really feeling like a glutton for punishment, the earlier semiautomatic transmissions before getting into TorqueFlite. So, either would be a big project. The only potential saving grace is that I would probably understand them better now than I would have this time last year.

      I had no idea the Soviets had cloned Cruise-O-Matic. That is fascinating.

      Thanks for the suggestion!

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