Letter to Donald Session & Company Ltd. regarding the failure and unsuitability of car jacks and handles.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 26\3\ Scan127 | |
| Date | 9th February 1932 | |
| 83117. HS {Lord Ernest Hives - Chair} /Lid. {A. J. Lidsey} 6/MA February 9th 1932. Donald Session & Company Ltd., 906 Harrow Road Willesden London, N.W.10. Dear Sirs, We beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter of the 8th inst and note that you are despatching another 9:1 ratio jack handle. When we return to you the 9:1 handle we shall also include the 6:1 which has been used on the car with two jacks under the front axle; when you receive it you will notice that the square telescopic tube has split at one corner. We are sorry to say that the jacks in their present form are not any use and we should not like to think that any of our customers have them fitted to their cars. Our reason for making this rather sweeping statement is that it is impossible to jack up the car from a "flat tyre" height, which is the one thing that a jack is expected to do. In this position the jack is scarcely opened out from its closed position before it is required to do some real work; the position of the links of the jack is such that the leverage available is small and it is impossible to lift the car at all using either the 9:1 or the 6:1 handle; it was while trying to lift one side of the front of the car with the 6:1 handle that the handle failed. Perhaps you will like to satisfy yourself that the above is correct either by paying us a visit, when we shall be pleased to demonstrate this to you, or by trying it on one of the Rolls Royce cars you have fitted out at your works or at a coachbuilders. One other point, the jack fitted to the centre of the front axle on our car is operated from the Near side. When the rear side front tyre is flat it is not possible to | ||
From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).