In article , Peter Stickney
writes
In article ,
(RON) writes:
Reading a book,Wheels for the World by Douglas Brinkley, Henry Ford, his
company. In it he states that the British government approached Bill
Knudsen with "a dire order for production of the Rolls-Royce Merlin
engine" in 1940.
The Ford Motor Company had previouslr accepted a contract to build
Rolls-Royce engines for French warplanes. The contract never came to
fruition due to the fall of France in June 1940. Henry Ford refused to
buld the engine,"we are not doing business with the British government
or any other government".
Alvin Macauley,president of Packard Motor Company, agreed with Knudsens
request to build the engine.
I always thought that Packard was chosen because of their expertise in
building fine engines. Evidently not?

The story's a little on the complicated side.
Let's not forget that there were Ford affiliates in France and Britain
before the War. In late 1939, the French Ford affiliate was
approached by the French Government to undertake prosuction of Merlin
Engines. The U.S. Ford headquarters dispatched an engineering team to
France to assist with evaluating the production potential. Due to a
number of factors (Production Engineering and design difficulties in
the basic Merlin, and the inability, for a variety of reasons for
French Industry in general to get off the dime) they weren't able to
produce any engines. At about the same time, The Air Ministry
approached British Ford to second-source Merlins. This, in fact, was
done, after much grunting and swearing. (Rolls really didn't know much
about mass production, and the Merlin required a lot of work to build
on a high volume basis.)

I seem to remember the part of the story that, after studying the design
for the Merlin, Ford UK came back to Rolls Royce and said that they
could not build the engine in the stipulated manner.

'Tolerances too fine for you?' asked Hives (RR chief exec)

'No, far too loose,' came the reply, 'we'll have to make it to our own
specification.'

Which they did, and I think they produced about three times (?) more
engines than RR did over the war period.

SNIP of fascinating US-side history

Rolls, in fact,
ended up learning wuite a bit about production line design, and
production engineering from Packard, and a number of Merlin
improvements (2-piece engine blocks, improved supercharger drives,
improved bearing technologies, and injection carburetors were Packard
improvements.

I heard that the 2-piece block made the Merlin less prone to seizing -
any truth in that?

A good source, if you can find it, is "The Merlin at War", by the
Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust.

Thanks for the reference...

Cheers,

Dave

--
Dave Eadsforth