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Jay Leno is a giant fan of Duesenbergs. This automotive might look like yet one more addition to the sequence of Duesenbergs featured on “Jay Leno’s Storage” through the years, however that is not fairly the case.
This 1920 ReVere-Duesenberg 4 Passenger is a product of the long-defunct ReVere model. But it surely has an engine designed by brothers Fred and August Duesenberg earlier than launching their eponymous automotive firm, which bought its first automotive in 1921.
Badged as a Rochester Duesenberg, the 5.5-liter inline-4 had an uncommon “strolling beam” design that Leno describes as “an affordable different to twin overhead cams.” As an alternative of transferring the cams up within the engine to straight actuate the overhead valves, the Duesenberg brothers designed rods to attach the cams and valves. Their back-and-forth movement gave the strolling beam engine its identify.
1920 ReVere-Duesenberg 4 Passenger on Jay Leno’s Storage
That wasn’t the one uncommon function of this engine. It was forged in a single piece with no heads, so the valves stick out of the edges of the block. This eradicated head gaskets—and thus a possible level of failure—but in addition made accessing the engine’s internals trickier than a traditional engine design.
The engine proved dependable in racing, and because the Duesenberg brothers weren’t making their very own automobiles but, they used that on-track efficiency to market the engine to different automakers. ReVere was one of many firms that got here calling. Slightly than design its personal automobiles from the bottom up, ReVere assembled them from parts sourced from exterior suppliers—a typical follow within the 1910s and early Nineteen Twenties auto trade.
Whereas the pinnacle of ReVere appeared to have arrange the corporate as a inventory rip-off, it did produce a couple of examples of a remarkably good automotive. The Duesenberg engine is a “torque monster” that made the ReVere fairly quick for its time, in line with Leno, and the automotive’s aluminum doorways and an an aluminum radiator shell have been pretty novel options. It nonetheless needed to make due with solely rear-wheel brakes, nonetheless.
Leno estimates that solely 4 or 5 ReVere automobiles are left at this time out of about 200 constructed, making later automobiles from the Duesenberg model appear frequent by comparability. These automobiles featured a extra subtle twin-cam straight-8 engine, and are nonetheless regarded by specialists as a few of the biggest American automobiles ever made. And the ReVere-Duesenberg was their prequel.
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