If you could go back to WW-2 with the knowledge you have now in engine design...what would you improve? No jets...

wuzak said:

Did Ford build complete engines? Or did they subcontract some sections, like reduction gear or supercharger?

I wonder if it was considered to have a company making cylinder barrels, another making heads, another making crankcases, etc. With one company overseeing the whole project and assembling the engines.

Would that have been less efficient?

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There was certainly some level of sub-contracting, but certainly far less than today. One was that GE had a near-monopoly on supercharger production.

XBe02Drvr said:

Great idea, as long as you have the Nazi Party in charge of quality control. At GE we "wasted" lots of time reworking subcontractor supplied Vulcan and Minigun parts that were off by a ten thousandth or so here or there, or in some cases threw them away and made a new "prototype" part to send to the vendor with the following admonition. "Build this. Build exactly this. Build only this, if you want to get paid and stay out of court!"
We even got a set of raw castings (at several $K each) that were mirror image of the original part. Oops!
So subcontractor supply chain is a great concept - when you finally get the bugs worked out of it.
When you're trying to get low tech subs up to speed with advanced materials and fabrication techniques, it can be buggy and slow, not to mention expensive.
Besides the problem of selling an expensive monster engine to a peashooter air force In the middle of a Depression, there's the problem (in addition to fuel mentioned by SR6), the problem of heat dissipation in that corncob engine. The cylinders they had the technology to build in the '30s couldn't effectively radiate that much heat. Pratt spent years calculating and experimenting and evolving through a series of engines to get to the 4360. It wasn't going to happen in a quantum leap.
Cheers,
Wes

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There had to be some level of compatibility between engine factories, since spares were made and surely would be expected to fit on an engine of the same spec, whether it be from factory A or factory B.

In the situation I was contemplating, the precision parts would be done by companies with extensive expertise in those ares - such as Ford, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Buick, etc.

PS I don't think the Nazi party was terribly good at quality control.

wuzak said:

PS I don't think the Nazi party was terribly good at quality control.

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True story ! - Although some of that can be blamed on situations over which few governments would have been able to exert proper control.

Late in the war it was estimated (by the Germans) that most of the performance on the 109 from increased boost was (in reality) being lost by
incredibly bad panel fits, and that engine life was about 50hours.

Ford built most of the R-2800 in house. However that does not mean that basic castings/forgings were not subcontracted.
Ford sent some engineers to P & W Hartford to look at the factory layout and they basically duplicated it. So I assume, whatever P & W was doing as far as subcontracting went Ford was planning on a similar operation (trying to add an aluminium foundry inside an existing factory layout doesn't seem like it would work well).

To hit that 2400 engine per month mark (and they only did it once) required expanding the original Ford factory (purpose built in 1940-41) to just about 3 time is original floor space. The Original contract for the factory was for 800 engines per month.

As mentioned by X XBe02Drvr , one of the key points to increasing the power of aircooled engines was the great increase in the area of the cooling fins on each cylinder and for most of the 30s and 40s it was a case of HOW do they increase the number/size of the fins, NOT if they should increase them. It required new casting and forging techniques in addition to new machining techniques. You can hand them a set of drawings for a cylinder with massive finning but if they don't know how to make it in quantity it doesn't do them much good, they already know they need more fin area than what they are making.

A great resource for this discussion is : https://www.enginehistory.org/References/WWIIEngProduction.pdf

I would note that P & W was rather free with granting licences, but apparently was not disappointed by licensee quality. P & W at one point was charging a licence fee of $1.00 per engine and at least point in the war waived even that. Wright on the other hand was much more reluctant to grant licences and relied more heavily on subcontractors with final assembly by Wright.

wuzak said:

There had to be some level of compatibility between engine factories, since spares were made and surely would be expected to fit on an engine of the same spec, whether it be from factory A or factory B.

In the situation I was contemplating, the precision parts would be done by companies with extensive expertise in those ares - such as Ford, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Buick, etc.

PS I don't think the Nazi party was terribly good at quality control.

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Their slave laborers were very interested in sabotage. It happened subtly with aircraft manufactured in France, where things like rivet holes would be deliberately mis-sized, and with the slave laborers from Eastern Europe, who would be even more subtle, by doing things like urinating into V-2 control systems. Of course, the nazis never quite got the idea that slaves have very little incentive to do good work or that even conquered people could still have pride and patriotism.

wuzak said:

In the situation I was contemplating, the precision parts would be done by companies with extensive expertise in those ares - such as Ford, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Buick, etc.

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"Vees for Victory" has a short section of what the differences were between aircraft manufacture and car manufacture in which the number of machining operations and inspections along the way are compared for the Allison connecting rod and the Cadillac connecting rod, Cadillac dong a lot of subcontracting for Allison and Cadillac having a reputation as a high quality car of the time. There were a lot more operations and LOT more inspections of the Allison rod.

wuzak said:

PS I don't think the Nazi party was terribly good at quality control.

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No, but they were pretty good at making people toe the line.