The adventure of starting up
03/22/2014
Modern motorists have long forgotten what it used to be like, the adventure of starting the engine. Nowadays, you sit down at the steering wheel, press the key into the hole or a button - a real key is hardly ever turned any more - and the engine runs as if it had just had a break the length of a red light phase, regardless of whether it last turned over an hour or three days ago. Put it in gear and drive off, the engine pulls away perfectly and doesn't let you feel whether it's warm or cold.
Of course, that was completely different 30 or so years ago. First of all, the engine had to be motivated to start at all. You regulated the mixture with the choke and then you let the starter motor turn, not once, but perhaps five, ten or even twenty seconds. The fuel also needed a certain amount of time to move from the tank to the engine. The carburetors needed to be filled. After a few attempts, you started to feel guilty and wondered whether the battery would provide enough power for long enough. When the engine actually started, you sat back, relaxed and happy. However, the drive unit was not yet running smoothly, it "sputtered" and revealed its displeasure that the operating temperature had not yet been reached. Perhaps it even stopped working once or twice more. But at some point you could drive off, carefully, because the engine still demanded affection. Don't accelerate too much, don't demand too much from the still cold little machine, maybe a misfire from time to time. It was only after many hundreds of meters that it showed its true talent and ran as one had hoped.
Yes, that's how it was, the adventure of starting the engine. Not everything was perfect in the past, but it was definitely different.
