The 1929 Sterns-Knight automobile featured in this article is one of the unique American automobiles from the 1920’s. Stearns-Kinight competed against Rolls Royce, Mercedes and Duesenberg for a piece of the luxury car market.
F.B. Stearns Company
Manufactured in Cleveland, Ohio, the Stearns-Knight was a product of the F.B. Stearns Company and was one of the fastest American automobiles of it’s time. This was a car that weighed over 5,000 lbs but could attain a top speed of 110 MPH. The F.B. Stearns Company was started in 1898 in an old barn that was converted into a machine shop. The company built automobiles from 1898 until 1929.
Frank Ballou Stearns decided to retire in 1919 and sold the company to J.N. Willys in 1925. Willys operated the company as a completely separate affiliate of Willys-Overland until 1929 when the company was liquidated.
The car featured here is among the last Stearns-Knight built. It’s a very rare automobile.
Sleeve-Valve Engines
In 1911 the F.B. Stearns Company came out with a sleeve-valve engine. The sleeve-valve was developed by Charles Yale Knight which explains the hyphenated name of the automobile. In fact, any automaker that contracted with Knight for his sleeve-valve mechanism was obligated to add his name to the automobile nameplate. There was the Willys-Knight, the Daimler-Knight and the Sterling -Knight to mention just a few of the Knight engine automobiles.
The sleeve valve was a mechanism Knight worked on that replaced the poppet valves with sleeve valves. The problem was engine heat warping the. The sleeve mechanism went up and down on a film of oil and on the sleeves were holes that matched ports in the intake and exhaust manifolds. Each cylinder had two iron sleeves with one inside the other. The result of Knight’s mechanism was that the engine heat was controlled and the engine ran smoother and with less noise.
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