24 cylinders in an H pattern, sleeve valved, supercharged and all in an aircraft that nobody expected to last more than a few days in combat.
A fantastic engineering concept let down by poor execution. Napier made a beautifully engineered product but they weren't suited to mass production. Early Sabres seized with alarming frequency. A friend worked on Tempests in Egypt in his National Service and told me the later marques were much more reliable but he thought that was because they could spend more time fettling them.
I know there's one or two Sea Furies knocking about but does anyone know if any Typhoons or Tempests are still around?
The story was that a squadron of the early Typhoons had had the engine management tinkered with, so they were being run at full boost and full coarse pitch at sea level, so the engines blew up.
Napier never had any chance of making large numbers of the Sabre, so the government had English Electric take them over. The Air Ministry was keen on encouraging new ideas, especially as jets were on the horizon. EE had dabbled with flying boats at Freckleton on the River Ribble, so they had some aviation experience.
It put the wind up Rolls Royce, whose lobbying power made them a bit complacent. The Merlin was developed so readily because it was largely craftsman built. Like the Spitfire it was very poorly designed for mass production. Packard did a lot of good work in productionising the Merlin in the US as the V-1650. But the best input came from Ford at Trafford Park, who built a lot of Merlins and knocked a lot of the awkward edges off the process of making them.
Having an abandoned factory in Trafford Park, Ford of Britain was approached about the possibility of converting it into an aircraft engine production unit by Herbert Austin, who was in charge of the shadow factory plan. Building work on a new factory was started in May 1940 on a 118-acre (48 ha) site, while Ford engineers went on a fact finding mission to Derby. Their chief engineer commented to Sir Stanley Hooker that the tolerances used were far too wide for them, and so the 20,000 drawings would need to be redrawn to Ford tolerance levels, which took over a year.[63] Ford's factory was built with two distinct sections to minimise potential bomb damage, it was completed in May 1941 and bombed in the same month. At first, the factory had difficulty in attracting suitable labour, and large numbers of women, youths and untrained men had to be taken on. Despite this, the first Merlin engine came off the production line one month later[64] and it was building the engine at a rate of 200 per week by 1943, at which point the joint factories were producing 18,000 Merlins per year.[25] Ford’s investment in machinery and the redesign resulted in the 10,000 man-hours needed to produce a Merlin dropping to 2,727 in three years, while unit cost fell from £6,540 in June 1941 to £1,180 by the war’s end. In his autobiography Not much of an Engineer, Sir Stanley Hooker states: "... once the great Ford factory at Manchester started production, Merlins came out like shelling peas. The percentage of engines rejected by the Air Ministry was zero. Not one engine of the 30,400 produced was rejected ...".[65] Some 17,316 people worked at the Trafford Park plant, including 7,260 women and two resident doctors and nurses.[64] Merlin production started to run down in August 1945, and finally ceased on 23 March 1946
Rolls-Royce Merlin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia