
Packard Merlin: How Detroit Mass-Produced Britain’s Hand-Built Powerhouse (2015) - curtis
https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-detroit-mass-produced-britains-hand-built-powerhouse/
======
phasetransition
The story of the Merlin V12 is really the story of E.J. Houdry, a Frenchman
who came to the US in 1930 and, with plenty of help at Standard oil, perfected
fluid catalytic cracking of hydrocarbons.

FCC gave the US AVgas with octane as high as 150 by the end of the war. This
allowed much higher engine manifold pressures than the Germans before
detonation, who had mostly 87 octane fuel throughout the war. Engine power is
roughly proportional to manifold pressure.

Source: a long rabbit trail of trying to understand why the Daimler Benz DB
605, while seemingly far more advanced on paper, was never better than parity
with the smaller Merlin during WW2. Houdry being in occupied France at the
wars' start would make an interesting alternate history.

~~~
sdfx
Can you point me to any books on this subject? Sounds like a fascinating story
to dive into in more detail.

~~~
phasetransition
Not specifically about this topic, but "Oil & War: How the Deadly Struggle for
Fuel in WWII Meant Victory or Defeat" is the most definitive account of the
overall fuel supply factors that I am aware of.

~~~
Steve44
That book probably covers the operation to get fuel across the Channel for the
D Day invasions. I'm fairly sure Brenzett Aeronautical Museum had a section
about it along with some pipe and equipment when I went a few years ago.

There were so many astonishing developments in the background to support the
front end fighting which are so easily overlooked.

Thanks for the book info, I've flagged that to get at some point.

~~~
phasetransition
Many, many, many inventions: -Babbitt bearing alloys with indium -AL7075
-Quartz oscillators -Magnetrons -Vocoding, PCM, and FSK
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY))

------
WalterBright
What other engine would have a book written entitled "Sigh For A Merlin"?

[https://www.amazon.com/Sigh-Merlin-Spitfire-Alex-
Henshaw/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Sigh-Merlin-Spitfire-Alex-
Henshaw/dp/0947554831/)

The Boeing Museum of Flight once offered rides in a Merlin-powered P-51. I was
first in line that day, and was smiling for a week afterwards.

From the book:

"One day I happened to be chatting near my home with an RAF Wing Commander
(retired) now dressed in dark grey slacks and Norfolk jacket. Suddenly out of
the blue and on its way to Coningsby was a fighter of the Battle of Britain
Flight right over our heads.

We both stopped talking and looked up--the crisp steady note of the old Merlin
as joyous a sound as ever it was all those years ago. The ex-Wing Commander
said absolutely nothing-- then he sighed. It was such a poignant sigh. I felt
it must have invoked so many memories of the days when the Wing Commander was
young, daring and vigorous and like a Knight of the Crusade had leapt onto the
Spitfire and its Merlin to ride into the pages of history.

The silence was still uninterrupted. Thoughts and memories began to flicker
through my mind. I remembered crashing badly and the terrifying sound of
things being torn apart; closing my eyes as the ruptured earth flung pieces of
metal over my crouching head; the peculiar smell of oil, petrol and glycol and
damp earth hanging in my nostrils. Then the panic as I struggled out of
parachute, harness and shattered cockpit--and then the silence. An almost
deathly silence. As I prayed a word of thanks over the crumpled wreckage and
the large black mass buried in the soft ground--once a powerful, gleaming
engine--I heard this sigh. It may have been a pressure-relief valve, or
glycol, or oil on hot metal, but in the emotion of the moment it became a
sound I shall always remember. What better epitaph to a wonderful machine and
a magnificent engine than to call my book Sigh for a Merlin?"

~~~
arethuza
I agree that Merlin powered planes do sound lovely, but there is also
something about the Vulcan howl that is impressive (and a bit disturbing).

Mind you - in both cases recordings really don't do them justice.

~~~
WalterBright
I agree. Recordings not only don't do them justice, they don't have any
similarity at all to how they sound. I recall standing in a field and a P-51
went by overhead, at minimum altitude and full throttle. If one hasn't heard
that, one can never understand :-)

~~~
arethuza
I must admit that I'd rather like to hear a BRM V16 as well...

------
iguy
This is part of a long and interesting story I don't have time to find the
right links for...

In the UK compared to the US, say 1850-1950, the premium commanded by skilled
labour over unskilled was always much smaller. Or another way to say that is
that they had a very large pool of skilled people. This was part of what
allowed them to do many interesting things first (like railways), but also as
time went on discouraged automation. For example lots of first world war UK
munitions factories imported the latest American machines, suddenly needing to
modernise once their skilled men were conscripted. This is, I believe, part of
why Rolls-Royce were doing things described in the article -- call it a first-
mover disadvantage relative to Detroit.

There is lots of interesting data about all these things. If you want to think
about robots taking jobs and all that, then understanding (for example) the
cotton industry circa 1900 is actually a great place to start. If some
factories employ 1/4 the workers of others, that sounds a lot like having 3
robots... transistors are not involved, but certainly dollars (and unions, and
taxes, and shipping) are.

~~~
jernfrost
Thanks that is extremely interesting info. I have noticed when talking to
Americans and reading about American manufacturing, I get the sense that
workers are not expected to be particularly skilled and that production is
designed with that in mind.

I am from a Nordic country and we tend to follow the German style system of
vocational training where you go in an apprenticeship and get a certificate. I
have tried to understand the American model but it seems less formalized to
me. It seems to be more company specific. You get trained to do a particular
job at a particular company.

~~~
maxerickson
It's increasing expected that entry level skilled jobs need an associates
degree, which is 2 years at a small college.

A random example:

[https://www.mesacc.edu/programs/manufacturing](https://www.mesacc.edu/programs/manufacturing)

(The only reason that stuff couldn't be available in most high school programs
is that we are a bunch of dicks over here)

~~~
walshemj
Those are presumably higher level apprenticeships ie the ones you did after a
classical craft one.

Having said that today the pool of 15 /16 year olds (usualy working class kids
) good enough to become apprentices now do full degree courses.

------
arethuza
If you like this then I can recommend _" The Ministry of Ungentlemanly
Warfare: Churchill's Mavericks"_ by Giles Milton - it starts with British
inventors creating an important new weapon (the limpet mine) from sweets,
condoms and bowls from Woolworths in a shed (of course)...

The boffin/craftsman side of things seemed particularly important to the UK
effort in WW2.

~~~
iguy
In this vein, R V Jones "Most Secret War" is great if you haven't read it --
about the cat & mouse game of radar development, from a guy deeply involved:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0033806QY/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0033806QY/)

~~~
gargravarr
Reading around, the stuff R V Jones got up to during that period makes for
some entertaining stories!

E.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams)

------
dsfyu404ed
Here's some info about the guy that played an important role in figuring out
the fuel mixture that made these power outputs possible. It's an equally
interesting read.

[http://www.enginehistory.org/Biography/FrankWalkerWeb1.pdf](http://www.enginehistory.org/Biography/FrankWalkerWeb1.pdf)

~~~
mannykannot
And let's not forget Beatrice Shilling's contribution to the performance and
combat-safety of the Merlin:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice)

------
osullivj
Wonderful piece for those interested in early WWII aviation. There are lessons
for software development in there. Brad Cox's classic Planning the Software
Industrial Revolution [1] highlights the importance of gauges to Eli Whitney's
project to built firearms with interchangeable parts, and asserts we need a
similar technology in software to enable construction from reusable
components. In Most Dangerous Enemy [2], Stephen Bungay points out that it
took 2.5 times more man hours to build a Spitfire than an Me109. German
production engineering was far better than British. This piece illustrates
that perfectly. Rolls Merlin engine was a great piece of design engineering,
but it was inefficient in terms of production engineering. What is intriguing
about this article is the detail on the effort needed for Packard to port the
Merlin design to their production engineering standards, and then for Rolls
and Merlin to share design changes. Effectively sending each other pull
requests!

[1]
[http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/papers/cox/C...](http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/papers/cox/CoxPSIR.html)
[2] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Most-Dangerous-Enemy-History-
Britai...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Most-Dangerous-Enemy-History-
Britain/dp/1845134818)

~~~
jernfrost
Interesting, given that I've read that Americans were far better at mass
production than the Germans. My impression is that Germans engineered their
hardware better than Americans but they were not as good at mass producing it
fast.

So if I understand correctly, the British was exceptionally slow at
manufacturing compared to the Americans then.

~~~
WalterBright
I read years ago that the Spitfire required twice as many labor hours to
produce than the Me-109. The Germans were pretty good at simplifying the
design so it could be mass-produced.

------
msisk6
Tangentially related to this article is Simon Winchester's latest book "The
perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World".

One of the chapters in this book is about the differences between the hand-
built cars of Rolls Royce (and their origin story which I never knew) and
Henry Ford's production line that required interchangeable precision parts.

~~~
Theodores
During a childhood visit to a car factory I noticed how the panels for the
small, mass-market, fairly horrid hatchback went together perfectly whilst the
panels for the luxury low-volume saloon needed lots of men with actual hammers
to bash into shape.

The tooling used to make the hatchback had cost a fortune and was the finest
German stuff. The tooling used for the luxury saloon was a lot older and
therefore worn. There were no backup dies in the worn tooling so over time the
panel fit only got worse with once fine details no longer sharp.

The executives driving their luxury saloons would probably have been horrified
if they had known that it was the cheap cars that went together properly in an
exact manner with their cars being the ones needing to be bashed to 'look
right'. They would also have been horrified to see the same facility used for
making panels with everything being 'just being a bit of tin' to the staff
rather than their pride and joy.

Having had the reality of luxury exposed as it being hand made, bashed into
shape at such a formative age I have always wanted the robot built products,
e.g. the mass market car rather than the bashed into shape expensive version.

The deluxe cars of today are still very much 'bashed into shape' in ways that
they always have been. The BMW car brand 'Rolls Royce' very much hand-craft
cars as they always have, they are not doing it wrong by not re-designing
their products to make it so a rival can churn out millions of identical
clones.

The original aerospace 'Rolls Royce' was in the same position, making a modest
amount of engines and not in 'total war' mode. Their less than precise
drawings were fine for what they were doing, they had people to bash stuff
into shape, 'luxury auto style', with that making economic sense. The war
changed everything though.

------
csours
> That the Merlin outperformed the Allison at high altitude is hardly a
> condemnation of the American-designed engine. In its element (up to about
> 15,000 feet), the V-1710 was robust and reliable – utilizing fewer than half
> the number of parts found in a Merlin. It was also extremely adaptable to
> different configurations of gearing, rotation direction, accessories, etc.
> The Allison engine is a showpiece of modular design.

\---

Engineering is finding the best compromise for a particular set of
requirements.

------
olivermarks
Reno air races coming up in September!
[https://airrace.org](https://airrace.org) great opportunity to see and hear
maxed out merlins pylon racing
[https://youtu.be/X6ClBodW_lc](https://youtu.be/X6ClBodW_lc)
[https://youtu.be/Xn805LoN6mw](https://youtu.be/Xn805LoN6mw)

~~~
jacquesm
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyWUTXuXjr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyWUTXuXjr0)
pretty disturbing end of a P51.

~~~
jabl
If you don't have a fear of flying and want to acquire it, reading NTSB
reports of aviation accidents is a good start. In this case,
[https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...](https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAB1201.pdf)

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emmelaich
How about a 5 litre v-twin motorcycle cut off a Merlin engine?

[http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/08/19/4296075.htm](http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/08/19/4296075.htm)

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TomMasz
As a kid I remember reading an article in a hot rod magazine about a drag
racer powered by a Merlin engine. It was quick, as you'd imagine, but easily
overpowered the tires of the time so not as quick as it could have been. I
wonder what happened to it.

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baybal2
An interesting fact is that former Packard engineers were fathers of
archetypal "American V8s." Some solutions they saw on Merlins were replicated
1-to-1 in their own works like cylinder head designs.

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Knacker_Hughes
Because Detroit built the Merlin engine in World War II - today, we don't have
to say "Vorsprung Durch Technik"

~~~
lovemenot
>> we don't have to say "Vorsprung Durch Technik"

And yet apparently, some actually _do_ have to regurgitate 1980's-era copy
from a German automobile makers' successful advertising campaign in (at least)
the British market. As though doing so were some kind of victory. _Leave_ s me
so sad.

~~~
arethuza
Doesn't Audi still use _Vorsprung Durch Technik_ in their UK advertising?

