Hello all
What a beauty.
Ian, do you know what those things are that are sticking up on top of the head in the second picture? They could easily mistaken for glow plugs.
Cheers Scott
Scott,
I will make a wild guess and suggest they might be a separate set of plugs for a hand cranked starting magneto. These were common on early aircraft engines - Darracq also built aircraft engines in the early days. To use them you primed the cylinders, then set a piston just past TDC on the firing stroke. You then wound the handle of the starter magneto, which produced a "shower of sparks", which hopefully would cause the cylinder primed and set near TDC to fire and turn the engine over - no electric self starters in 1906 remember. I think later ones worked through the distributor on whichever one of the normal magnetos was used for starting or a separate distributor, so the sparks were only delivered to the cylinder which had been set for starting.
Some later cars used a battery and trembler coil to give the same effect. There is a good video on Utube (whose location I have lost) which shows starting a large engined pre 1910 racing car using this method.
Frank.
