WFC 422-1DA — On-Road Computer Diagnostic Analyzer

Memo WFC 422-1DA: On-Road Computer Diagnostic Analyzer

Four photographs from the binder, taken by the archive. The binder is held; the memo is not, and what is here is three of its drawing sheets and the label on the cover. The pages are squared on their own printed rules and marked; the colour cast, the shadows and the handwriting are as photographed.

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The cover carries the company’s own filing label — WATER FUEL CELL, DOCUMENT OF RECORDS — and the Broadway address and telephone number that date it to the working lab:


The drawings

All three are from chapter four and all three are parts to be turned from Delrin — the acetal Meyer bought in large-diameter rod because, as the man who sold it to him remembered, "he liked the acetal over nylon because it didn’t expand like the nylon when exposed to water" (Bruce Lippiatt). Sheet 4-16 is not held.

  

Fourteen of them

The quantities are pencilled on the sheets rather than printed, and they agree: fourteen primary bobbins, fourteen secondary bobbins, twenty-eight terminal end blocks at two per assembly. That is a parts list for fourteen complete assemblies, not for a prototype — somebody was costing or ordering a production run of the coil assembly.

The secondary bobbin is the interesting one. Its three spools — resonant coils bifilar, secondary, and a bifilar resonant feedback winding — sit on one former alongside the separate primary bobbin of 4-14, which is the voltage intensifier circuit as a thing to be machined rather than as a schematic. The dimensions here are of the bobbins, not of the windings: how many turns went on each spool is not on these sheets.

What it is a record of

The subject is registered. On 17 October 1995 Meyer deposited "WFC hydrogen gas management system on-road computer diagnostic analyzer: application of design" with the Copyright Office, registered as TX 4-086-227 — one of the late burst of registrations covering the gas management system, the injection system and the 486 computer’s EPROM logic. The memo and the registration are the same subject a few months apart.

It sits under WFC 422DA, which the archive shelves as the WFC Hydrogen Gas Management System. The registration joins them in one breath: TX 4-086-227 is "WFC hydrogen gas management system on-road computer diagnostic analyzer: application of design" — the parent system and this analyser, filed as a single deposit. The series numbers memos beneath others elsewhere on the same pattern; Meyer’s own list has "WFC 427 - Voltage Wave Guides", "WFC 427 DA - Steam Resonator Manual" and "WFC 427 2DA - Industrial Steam/ Heat Resonator" as three documents. What is not established is whether the chapter-four numbering here continues 422DA’s, which runs at least to figure 3-46, or starts again in a document of its own. Somebody with both binders in hand can settle that.