The Ricketts Automobile Works: a unit power plant and a crankshaft cut from solid steel

1909 — 1910

The record, at the size the trade press left it: The Ricketts Automobile Works of South Bend enters the written record in the trade press of February 1909, and the entry the magazine gave it is a serious one. The Automobile reported the works "manufacturing three models on a standard chassis" — a baby tonneau, a five-passenger touring car and a three-passenger roadster — and set out the chassis' engineering in detail. Its prominent features were a unit power plant with three-point suspension; a six-cylinder, water-cooled, valves-in-the-head motor; a multiple-disk clutch; a selective gearset; and a propeller shaft with one universal joint enclosed in a torsion tube, giving a straight-line drive to a floating-type rear axle. The cylinders were cast in pairs; all the valves were operated from one camshaft contained within the crankcase; the flywheel stood in front of the motor and the gearbox was bolted to the rear of the crankcase. The patented crankshaft was the works' pride: cut from a solid billet of hammer-forged, oil-tempered Vanadium steel, with hollow disks between the crank pins in place of ordinary crank arms.

What the record does not hold: No founder's name for the Ricketts works, and no founding or closing date for the company as a company, was found in the record reached; the gap is named rather than filled. What the standard references do fix is the succession: the marque runs in the trade press of 1909, and by 1910 the Diamond — the subject of the next entry — had taken its place, on Georgano's account as its direct continuation. The name invites one confusion worth killing in print: the Ricketts of South Bend is not the Rickenbacker of Detroit, Eddie Rickenbacker's company of 1921–1927, a different name, a different man and a different city.

Sources:

1. The Automobile, 4 February 1909, p. 225, the magazine's CRL scan read first-hand — the three models on the standard chassis and the chassis specification entire: unit power plant, three-point suspension, the valves-in-the-head six, the multiple-disk clutch, the torsion-tube drive, the billet Vanadium-steel crankshaft.
2. Georgano, The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars, the Diamond entry as carried in the prewarcar marque register — the Diamond as "a continuation of the Ricketts," which fixes the succession and the Ricketts' end at about 1910.