Lancia Owner's, Service Manuals and Wiring Diagrams

LANCIA Car
A story of technological innovation in the car industry.
The volunteers of theSTAFproject (theFIATHistory of Automobile Technology),launched in 2009 to select the technical drawings that best show the technical evolution ofFIATcars, also found many Lancia designs held in a special sec-tion of theFIATarchive: the material had been moved there in 1984, when the Tech-nical Department ofFIATAuto – the part of the company responsible for designing FIAT, Lancia and Autobianchi cars – was brought together in a single building in the Mirafiori area. When this ensemble of designs was rediscovered, the members of the project decided to follow the same methodology as used in presenting the mate-rial inFIAT, a story of technological innovations in the car industryto prepare a similar book on Lancia cars. This second book – based on technical designs, archive mate-rial and surviving cars – shows the evolution of Lancia cars and their innovations,which frequently included completely original aspects. Locating the material, how-ever, has proved more difficult than it had been forFIATcars, especially in the case of the older models, because the Lancia design archive had been organised without a logical structure, making it difficult to tell apart the various functional groups from aspects of pure detail.

Before the Aurelia, designs were exclusively classified by means of an increasing serial number, with no reference to the contents. Occasionally there was a second identification number preceded by the letter C (standing for complessivo – ‘assembly drawing’) when the design showed assembled items, such as motors, gears, shafts,transmission, electric machines, etc. but without any link to the model to which the design was referring. Knowing this rule did not simplify the work much, because in the same collection of files there were also truck, military vehicle and airplane engine assemblies. Also, many of the complex designs which were felt to be indispensable were not present, while there was an abundance of many others which proved to be of little use in tracing the development of the product, and greatly added to the mass of material to be checked. The overall drawings of the bodywork for nearly all the cars which preceded the Aurelia have also not been found. This is a predictable omission for early examples of bodywork with wooden structures, which were almost certainly made by copying models and patterns, but is disappointing for the monocoques which were already used for the Lambda in 1922. An explanation for this absence could be that the office in charge of planning only turned out detailed drawings of the vari-ous elements used, starting from 3-D handmade models, thus leaving the production factory the job of creating the drawings needed for fabrication and assembly. These drawings must have been drawn up to design the tools used in assembly and the nec-essary control gauges: indeed, the advanced technological level in the production of the Lancia was reflected in a wide range of technical articles published in “American Machinist” in 1928 and 1929, which show how the innovative technological solutions were garnering international interest. It thus seems reasonable to assume that the general arrangement drawings were not held by the same personnel who were in charge of the official technical designs.

Close observation of the models that have survived, contemporary technical arti-cles and photographic documentation have all been useful in reconstructing the characteristics of these cars. And, despite the difficulties, around 600 drawings have been gathered together and examined in detail. Nearly all the cars that were produced have been included in the book, with the exception of the most recent ones – where the numerous variations have not been considered, so as to fit into this publication’s space limits. lancia zagato for sale,lancia rally car for sale,lancia for sale, lancia cars, Lancia AutoMobile.

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Given the fact that Lancia was run practically as if it were a family, it was felt use-ful to add, alongside the descriptions of the cars and their technical details, some biographical notes on the people who made a personal contribution to developing them. The narrative, which begins at the company’s foundation in 1907, ends at around the 1970s in this case too. Obviously this does not mean that the innovative impulse ends at that point, but that the most visible part of the product, which is linked to the mechanical drawing, was no longer the subject of important innovations, and that the efforts of the technicians were focused on more specialist areas, such as the way the various components were designed, and the introduction of electronic controls.

Finally, it was felt that a chapter showing the contribution of Pininfarina to the development of the style and technology of Lancia bodywork should be added: this decision was justified by the special relationship between the two companies, which often saw the famous designer take on an innovative role in the development of the Lancia style with the introduction – in very beautiful one-offs – of design lines which later appeared in production models.

LANCIA CARS AND THE LANCIA BRAND
All the Lancia cars which will be considered in this book have their own char-acter, given to them by Vincenzo Lancia’s choices for his products, and which were subsequently applied by his successors. This character can be recog-nized in the sobriety and elegance of their exteriors, in their target market – of discreet luxury – in the interior design, which is full of innovations and is always driven by the quest to make using a car as pleasant as possible to both driver and passengers.And it is this last issue which perhaps best characterizes Lancia production: from the Theta 35 HP in 1913, right up to the Beta in 1972 – the last character in our story – every car saw the application of new technologies.

Since automobile innovation, seen through Lancia’s products, is the central theme of this narrative, the decision has been taken not to miss out any of the cars produced, at least in the base version, since – even when they were produced in limited numbers –,all incorporated elements which were at the cutting edge of contemporary technology.

Some of these technical solutions were subsequently adopted by other manufactur-ers, and have become part of worldwide technological know-how: from independent suspension, introduced in the Lambda, to the unitised body and chassis, introduced in the Lambda and perfected in the Augusta, and up to the use of front-wheel drive in mid-size cars, introduced in the 1960 Flavia and later refined in the 1972 Beta. In other cases Lancia choices were not widely followed as less expensive and equally effective options leading to the same results were later discovered: this was the case of the narrow-V engines, which were brought in because of the need to reduce the bulkiness of the front section, and were replaced by V-configuration engines – which,it is worth remembering, were first introduced in a six-cylinder version by the Lancia Aurelia – or by four-cylinder transverse engines.

Other innovations which were incorporated, just to deal with particular issues,were abandoned by Lancia itself when the problems which had necessitated their introduction were solved in other ways; examples include the motor lubricant dis-tributor in the Alfa 12HP, the central lubricator of the chassis parts of the Artena or the Astura, or the oil feed for the Aprilia’s front suspension and of the other cars which followed it.

We will try to describe and to understand the reasoning behind all of these special elements, regardless of whether they continued to be used in later models, both to bear witness to the continual effort made by Lancia to improve product performance and also to illustrate the challenges that early automobile manufacturers had to address. Vincenzo Lancia’s choice of brand name for his cars is one of many cases when the name of the founder is used, as occurred for example in the case of Daimler, Benz, Peugeot, Panhard, Renault, Ford and several others. Lancia’s choice was prob-ably made easier by the meaning of his name in Italian (“una lancia” is “a lance”), a weapon which has associations with the concept of speed. On the subject of names,it is interesting to note that a Michele Lanza (another spelling for “Lancia” in Pied-montese), in 1895, was the first car manufacturer in Italy, even though none of his seven prototypes was ever put into industrial production. The logo chosen by Lancia initially consisted in his name written out on the radia-tor (fig. 2.1, above). It could be that the drawing of the flywheel fan, one of the charac-teristics of the first Lancias, was considered as an alternative. It appears, for example,in the text of the drawing in figure 1.4.