Ford Aircraft.

[Cuyper]

Holden built plenty of stuff during the war too, including aircraft. You can see some amazing things in the national archives if you look around enough

[Cuyper]

Originally Posted by XR6 Martin

Merlins were run on a test stand at full revs until something broke, then they replaced with whatever broke with something stronger. They did this until they were sure nothing was left to break.

They were about as reliable as you could get.

Although in saying that the Wright radial engine in the B17 was pretty tough too, they came back to base still running with cylinders blown off from bullets/shrapnel

I visited fishermans bend in the 80s and that's exactly how they used to run in the family II engine for the Camira. Full revs as soon as they got off the assembly, 7 or 8 thousand maybe? it's was peaking in anycase. They had a table with broken flywheels and cranks on it from that day. I always wondered how many left the line with cracks. Given that cars long term reliability issues I guess a lot

[ebxr8240]

Yep cannot compare to todays vehicles..
Things do improve over time..

[9triton]

Originally Posted by 2011G6E

Manufacturing tolerances? In wartime?

"Just good enough to throw them out the door in big numbers" was fairly common until Ford (and others of course) got in on the act and improved things somewhat.

.

in the context of the rolls royce merlin

what ford meant , was that that in mass production of engines you needed tight tolerances so you could take a conrod from batch A ,another from batch B and another from batch C and they would all be in manufacturering tolerance when fitted to a merlin crank ,-which all had been machined to the correct tolerances ,

pistons all same manufactureing tolerance etc.

that way you could assemble QUICKLY to mass produce the engines .

as ford had been doing with car engines in britain -and the world

what rolls royce had been doing is essentially hand fitting the parts to each engine - ie if crank journals were too large and not to a tight manufactureing tolernace -they would just , for example, machine the bearings a bit larger to fit

whch made for slow engine manufacture.

its not the actual clearances between moving parts they were refering to.

remember these were aero engines - so at the current cutting edge of technology in ww2-so you would expect extra care in assembly .

failure not desired....

[Squalo]

Interesting topic. What gets me about wartime aircraft production is the sheer scale of it, specifically the number of parts that had to be produced. A good example is pistons... if you look at just one fairly common WW2 motor, the Wright R-3350 18-cylinder radial engine - how many pistons were made for them? They were used in many aircraft, but to keep it simple we only need to look at the B-29... 3970 B-29s were built and at four engines apiece that is (18 x 4) x 3970 = 285,840 individual pistons - not including spares!!!

And then there’s all the other aircraft that the R-3350 went into – dozens of different makes and models other than the B-29 – and for every piston there’s a conrod, rings, bearings... it’s insane when you think about it.

[Bill M]

There is some Ford radial engine spares still around...

Ford Motor company Pratt & Whitney