casting intricate finned heads

On Jan 14, 2:57*pm, bildan wrote:

I presume you've had a close look at R4360 cylinders.
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I've rubbed my belly on them a time or two.

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*The art of
finning *reached its pinnacle at the end of WWII. *To cool these
monsters, the fins had to be extremely fine - as fine as radiator
fins. *The only way to make them was machining with thin saw blades.
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Roger that. Then we chopped them up and melted them down and sold
them as ingots of aluminum for a few pennies per pound.

But you've left out what is perhaps the most interesting part. In
machining those thin slots they had to come up with a kind of profiler
-- a motorized pantograph. Not only did the blade, she spin 'round
and around, for each cut they had a CAM which caused the spinning
cutter to rise and to fall, producing this beautifully machined slot
in the fantastic FORGED aluminum... and made it so that even Rosy the
Riveter could swap-out the cams and torque-down the clamps and hit the
GO lever with her knee and keep right on gossiping at the top of her
voice with the girl at the next machine who was doing exactly the same
thing.

Meanwhile, back in Chermany, the Minister of Disinformation was
telling everyone that things were jus' hunky dory; that there was no
need for German wives & mothers to step up to the assembly line (we've
got lots of slaves for that), and 1943 came along and then the Germans
were so far behind the 8-ball you couldn't even SEE them.... (Little
black dots out there on the horizon [Great looking uniforms!] unaware
that the war was ALREADY OVER... because we had enough beans, bullets
and black oil to have kept the Russians supplied for something like
EIGHTEEN YEARS.)

Too bad we failed to learn that particular lesson... because now it's
being used against us.

-R.S.Hoover
I'd bet that it could be done far more easily today with CNC
machines. *For that reason, I'd machine heads from aluminum billet.