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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).
Letter from a customer detailing an overheating issue experienced with their car on the Continent and proposing solutions.

Identifier  ExFiles\Box 24\4\  Scan075
Date  31th July 1923 guessed
  
COPY.

"Moreton"
Holly Place,
HAMPSTEAD,
N.W.3.

Dear Mr. Northey,

Thank you so much for your most kind letter, which I much appreciate. Yes by all means use any portion of my letter you desire as I am only too pleased to shew my appreciation of your car which I believe to be the World's best Car and to help in any way I can Messrs. Rolls-Royce from whom I have always received the greatest kindness and help in any matter upon which I have required their advice.
Please understand that I am completely satisfied with my Car as it is and that what follows is not written in any critical or complaining spirit but merely to help to give data to your technical experts by means of which they may find a way of overcoming the defect of overheating on long severe gradients which as you will at once realise is not at all a good advertisement for your Cars on the Continent. To arrive at an Hotel with most of the water gone and one side of the bonnet open and flapping about and to draw up behind a car with a heavy Limousine Body which though it has cost its owner half the price of the Rolls has done the same journey quicker and yet without the loss of a drop of water - is I think you will agree with me a very bad advertisement for Rolls-Royce. And this sort of thing believe me is constantly happening today not in my own case for I always nurse my car and climb very slowly on 2nd gear and shut the bonnet just before I arrive at my destination - but others don't do either things and as things are be they experts or otherwise it is a physical and mechanical impossibility to use the full power or anything approaching it which the engine will give on these gradients without in any way over driving it or forcing it. The fact is in order that to get maximum thermal efficiency out of the engine under conditions such as one finds in England the safety margin has been cut down too low with the result that whenever one meets with anything abnormal in the way of gradients say a rise of 1 in 15.3 miles long - Continental temperature - up goes the temperature of the water to 95/almost at once. It is not merely a question of Swiss Pass work but of any severe gradient of more than 3 miles length.
As to ways and means of overcoming the difficulty I hesitate to offer my amateur opinion in the face of your technical staff who are far more capable of diagnosing the case than I am, but this much I must say.
The right solution seems to me to provide a bigger radiator and shutters; by bigger I mean not taller but deeper in order not to spoil the beautiful lines of your chassis.
The matter of over heating is really serious in Continental work. Would it not be possible to provide a bigger radiator which normally in England would be blocked off by plates and to issue instructions to owners and drivers that these plates should be taken off only when the car is used upon the Continent.

P.T.O.
  
  


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