1959 merc,vac wipers,& smoking engine

does anyone here know about these wiper systems,I dont know eng size but can find out,I googeled for hours and came up empty.

this disscusion came up at work,and seems the guy pulled the heads to check for wear(dont know why)?



when he had the oil pan down he discovered a vac pump hooked to the oil pump).



my question is how and why does this system

work?



#2why run it off the oil pump? (and does it have a diaphragm,that fails allowing oil into the engine.



and he found a check valve that failed,allowing oil into the engine,hence the blue smoke.



thanks!

I’ve got an old Motors repair manual. It says that vacume wipers were used in 58 but in 59 went to electric. The oil vacume pump was still used evidently but but just not tapped into. Yes a puncture can cause oil to be sucked in to the intake. Motors said when rebuilding the oil pump, just do the oil pump up to the vacume pump and leave the rest for 59.

Vacume wipers were common in the old days before electric wiper motors. Some were fed vacume right from the manifold. These had a distinc advantage when you stepped on the gas and would stop due to low vacume levels. When you got up the hill or off the gas, they would start again. We had these with our 1960 Falcon. To overcome this, a separate booster pump was used in some cars so that there always would be a good supply of vacume. It made since to do it off of the oil pump since it was a driven mechanism already. My diesel Olds had the pump mounted where the distributor would have gone and driven off of the cam shaft. You have to have a rotating shaft for the pump.

thanks for the knowledge,and great answer.

have a great day!

i did find some info on my searh,and they stated in 1959,they were replacing vac motors with the electric models due to complaints.(but thats all I found.)

I learn something every day from these posts. I remember cars equipped with vacuum wipers having a vacuum booster section on the fuel pump. I never realized that some cars had the vacuum booster attached to the oil pump.

What I have never understood is why it was less expensive to have a vacuum booster pump included on either the oil or fuel pump than to have just equipped cars with electric wipers in the first place. My Dad had a 1940 Chrysler that had electric wipers. The later lower trim line Dodges that he owned had vacuum wipers and a booster section on the fuel pump. The upper trim line Dodges of that period had electric wipers. The same was true of the Ramblers. I had a lower trim line Rambler in 1965 that had vacuum wipers and the booster section on the fuel pump. The more deluxe Ramblers had electric wipers. Now I can unstand how a vacuum wiper system would be less expensive if the wiper motor were connected directly to the intake manifold as it was on my 1950 Chevrolet pick-up. However, it seems to me that an additional vacuum pump would have made the cost higher than an electric motor.

Maybe someone can explain the electric wiper issue but I don’t think it was necessarily a cost issue but they just hadn’t come up with an electric system that worked is what I think. Another issue was that may or may not have anything to do with it but it wasn’t until maybe 56 or 57 when they went to 12 volts. Before that it was all six volts so maybe just didn’t have the power to run wipers, radio, heater, etc. on 6 volts.

I would buy this explanation except that many Chrysler products had electric wipers and had 6 volt electrical systems. After the low end Dodges of the l940’s, my Dad bought a 1947 DeSoto. It had electric wipers and these worked very well. Years later, I owned a 1968 AMC Javelin and it had a 12 volt system and vacuum wipers.