Merlins > Packard vs RR

[Bullockracing]

Just like to point out that changing fuel settings, along with other things will not neccessarily affect the output of a motor, unless you change valve timing events, boost/compression, and flow characteristics. Given an engine tested in Canada at one elevation, and the installed in a Lancaster in Britian, unless your mechanics tuned it to achieve the stoichometric burn rate for the exact fuel it will use on a mission, it will be out of tune, and not produce the correct power.

Annealing or heat-treating requires a hypereutectic temperature to be achieved over time (specific to each metal/alloy), and does not require a cure time, however, cooling of various metals varies just as well.

Stress-relieving of engine parts is either done by use (preferrably not in the plane I would have to fly into combat in) or by attaching it to a shaker platform.

I would have to bet on the RR Merlins anyway. Just compare workmanship associated with both companies...

 

[Twitch]

American auto manufacturers mass produced every aero engine in addition to the parent companies, ie., Allison, Curtis Wright, P&W during the war. In contrast RR was a quaint buggy shop in comparison to massive assembly lines that existed in the US and their industrial tools. This is by no means meant to be negative to the RR Merlin developers and engineers.

To fight a war you simply can't have hand manufactured and assembled engines with the inconsistent quality control that existed in RR at the onset of hostilities. American auto tooling and productions lines were able to consistently manufacture and assemble a quality product (any product) that was reliable to the point that RR could never achieve until they took lessons and improved quality control and manufacture techniques from their American cousins.

Allisons were manufactured by Cadillac. Were they lesser quality? We live in a world, in an age when automobiles (world cars) are easily produced to conform to specifications under reliable quality control networks from parts ans sub-assemblies from several countries or origin. That concept was born in WW 2.

American auto companies mass produced a myriad of machines, vehicles, equipment and weapons of war that met quality standards and were reliable. When Detroit went to war they did so with victory in mind and drew upon their vast world-leading experiance of quality mass production.

 

[Bullockracing]

Roger that, Twitch!

 

[FLYBOYJ]

During the war years the basic Quality Assurance systems universally adopted by all military manufacturing companies were adopted. Mil-I-45208 and Mil-Q-9858 provided the basic elements in a manufacturing system where if you were making bullets, bombs or B-17s each company had the same system in place to ensure quality. These standards remained in place for many years until replaced by ISO 9000 and ISO 9001/2000...

 

[syscom3]

The reason the allies won............ American production was unstoppable.

I bet the Brits and Axis powers would have loved to be in a situation where damaged planes and eqmt were sometimes just discarded because it was easier to get a brand new one from the factory than to repair it!

I like this quote "quantity has a quality all by its own"

 

[Hop]

American auto manufacturers mass produced every aero engine in addition to the parent companies, ie., Allison, Curtis Wright, P&W during the war. In contrast RR was a quaint buggy shop in comparison to massive assembly lines that existed in the US and their industrial tools. This is by no means meant to be negative to the RR Merlin developers and engineers.

Rolls Royce pre war made small numbers of engines, as the RAF was rather small. For example, in 1930 they produced just 132 aero engines. Their best selling model by far was the Kestrel, which sold a grand total of 4778 in 10 years, spread over 27 different marks for different aircraft types (and customers). That sort of volume and model complexity isn't really suited to mass production.

However, with the increase in orders with British rearmament in the late 30s, Ernest Hives oversaw a radical restructuring of Rolls Royce manufacturing, including expanding the Derby plant and setting up two new factories at Crewe and Glasgow. They did rather well, too, RR Glasgow produced 23,647 Merlins, RR Crewe 26,065, RR Derby 32,377. Ford in Manchester produced 30,428. Packard produced 55,523 in the US.

RR production: 82,809
UK production: 112,517
Packard, US production: 55,523

American auto tooling and productions lines were able to consistently manufacture and assemble a quality product (any product) that was reliable to the point that RR could never achieve until they took lessons and improved quality control and manufacture techniques from their American cousins.

There's a tendency in America to compare early British weapons to later US models. For example, the Mustang I is frequently compared to the Spitfire V (despite being a contemporary of the Spitfire IX), the P-47 the same. In this case, Packard's late production Merlins are compared to British early production Merlins.

For example, Packard had built a grand total of 45 Merlin engines by the end of 1941. Britain had been producing about 500 Hurricanes and Spitfires a month (with Merlin engines) since the summer of 1940, long before production had started at Packard. Never seen any compalints about the quality of these Merlins. Comparing Packard's 1942 production to Rolls Royce pre war problems gearing up for Merlin production is not a valid comparison.

 

[Twitch]

I'm talking about mass production quality control which American auto manufacturers led the world in. Nowhere else in the world did any vehicle industry produce the number of units with the attendantly stable quality as in the US.

RR was a superstar in aero engines for the times before and at the commencement of WW 2 . Packard built the Liberty V-12s during 1917 in WW I and were well versed on aero engines too. They developed a diesel-fueled aero engine in 1928 in the 1st aircraft to fly on diesel. Their autos began using V-12 in 1932Along the way during Merlin production Packard introduced 23 upgrades or design evolutions each more powerful than the last.

Known in the indusrty as "The Master Motor Builder," Packard's VP of Engineering Jesse Vincent held 206 patents for innovations from spiral bevel drive gears to the worlds 1st auto air conditioning. He took a clean sheet of paper and designed the 1,500HP aluminum V-12s that powered the US Navy's PT boats.

The Merlin used the less-than-reliable evaporative cooling system. Ethylene glycol-based antifreeze from the US became available and this proved them to finally be reliably cool running. The simple widespread availability of 100 octane aviation fuel from the US gave the Merlin increased power. This fuel permitted higher boost pressures and temperatures without detonation, and allowed the use of +12 lbs. boost rather than the previous limit of +6 lbs.

RR quality control was primitive by American standards. Merlin engineers randomly selected an engine and ran it on a test stand until something broke. The engine was torn down and the broken part was redesigned. This a painfully slow process to improve quality and reliability for a nation under siege.

Vincent set up specialized assembly line tooling and their draftsmen re-drew the Merlin blueprints with far greater precision that RR's. Packard developed a light measuring tool that allowed Merlin component tolerances to be checked to 1 millionth of an inch! Packard employed the practice of freezing critical parts to set tolerances with no ambient heat to make the part expand and throw off calculations. They performed 70,000 inspections on each of the Merlin's 14,000 parts including magnafluxing- X-raying -parts for consistantcy and to see any stress-related micro-cracking.

They used 80,000 gallons of av gas daily just to test engines. Each engine was test run then fully disassembled after and rebuilt for shipment. These were some of the ways Packard built a better Merlin. They did this in 1941 as soon as they were chosen to build the Merlins. To say that late-war Packards were on par to the Merlin of 1940 is uninformed at best. Packard didn't just fall off the turnip truck and get chosen to built V-12s.

In a similar quest for more power and quality Cadillac improved the Allisons it built, Nash improved the Wright Cyclones they produced and Studebaker made improvements to the P W Wasp. American auto plants mass produced everything from artillery fuses to the artillery that fired them. They improved quality control over previous original manufacturers in every instance.

Like the BASF commercial "Packard didn't make the Merlin, it made it better."

 

[Bullockracing]

Excellent information, Twitch. Where can I find more information on the actual production information from these manufacturers?

 

[Twitch]

That is the correct Merlin production output listed by Hop. As far as all the other items, equipment, vehicles and weapons manufactured by American auto companies, I don't think there is a single source that lists it all. When I was researching info for an article a long while ago I found duece and a half truck production at "over 800,000 with GMC assembling 562,750. Federal, International, and Studebaker built the remainder with Studebaker constructing the Lend-Lease vehicles."

But things like how many Oerlikon 20 mm cannon did Hudson build, how many artillery shells and cannon did Oldsmobile make? Chrysler did make litterly billions of bullets. There was just so much it is very difficult to find all the production figures one may want on certain areas of items.

 

[helmitsmit]

RR quality control was primitive by American standards. Merlin engineers randomly selected an engine and ran it on a test stand until something broke. The engine was torn down and the broken part was redesigned. This a painfully slow process to improve quality and reliability for a nation under siege."

Arr but it worked didn't it? Rolls Royce then got a reputation for being very reliable.

 

[R988]

This is one of the most interesting threads I've read in a while, good stuff guys

 

[Twitch]

Waiting for a part to break in R D is fine in peacetime but the number of steps to quality and reliability take too long when the Germans are are at the door. RR learned effective quaility control from Packard and took it home to work at the RR facilities.

 

[Hop]

Twitch, what is your contention? That the Merlin wasn't mass produced until Packard came onboard? Or that the Merlin wasn't reliable until Packard came on board?

Neither is true, of course. The Merlin was designed in the mid 30s, when production was expected to be a few hundred engines in total. But from 1937 Rolls Royce changed both the company and the engine in the light of expected increases in demand. They set up a shadow factory at Crewe, then 2 new factories at Galsgow and Manchester which were designed from the start to mass produce engines with unskilled labour. All this before they first talked to Packard.

As to reliability, the Merlin was considered unreliable in it's very early days in the Hurricane in the late 30s. By the advent of war it was considered a very reliable engine. The same cannot be said of early Packard production. The first 6,000 engines delivered by Packard to Britain required remedial work by Rolls Royce.

The Merlin used the less-than-reliable evaporative cooling system.

Only in the first two prototypes in 1934 and 1935. Pure glycol cooling was chosen, but abandoned just before the war for a high pressure water/glycol system.

Ethylene glycol-based antifreeze from the US became available and this proved them to finally be reliably cool running.

Ethylene glycol was synthesised in the 19th century by a French chemist. It was used experimentally in WW1 as a coolant.

The simple widespread availability of 100 octane aviation fuel from the US gave the Merlin increased power.

100 octane fuel was developed by a Shell subsidiary in the US by blending iso-octane and paraffin. Iso-octane was developed by the Anglo Iranian oil company in the UK in 1935.

However, Anglo Iranian had been working since 1936 on an alternative, which they made by blending Venezualen oil with iso-octane. The iso-octane was produced in A-I refineries in Abadan (Iran), it was blended at 3 Esso refineries in the US and Caribbean, by A-I in Abadan and by Anglo-Dutch Shell in Borneo. Just under half the British supply came from the US, the rest from Anglo Iranian and Shell.

This fuel permitted higher boost pressures and temperatures without detonation, and allowed the use of +12 lbs. boost rather than the previous limit of +6 lbs.

RR quality control was primitive by American standards. Merlin engineers randomly selected an engine and ran it on a test stand until something broke.

The fact that in 1940 RAF fighter command switched over to 100 octane, upped the boost level on Merlins that were designed to run at 6.25 lbs to 12 lbs, and increased the power output by about 30%, without suffering any major problems, points to just how reliable RR had made the Merlin.

 

[helmitsmit]

good stuff I totally agree.

 

[Twitch]

My point is simply that Packard improved the Merlin at a time when it was technically beyond RR and introduced mass production and quality control concsistancy that was beyond RR as well. High octane and glycol weren't new, of course, but when the US shipped MASSIVE amounts of Lend-Lease fuel to GB it made a huge difference. There was never a question whether Merlins could run on 100-115 octane fuel. Getting all you want for free was pretty damned good deal when compared to the relative trickle GB imported before the war.

The American auto industry more than excelled in war material production. That is primary fact whether anyone wishes to believe it or not. Auto companies were set up for large production and were well aquainted with what quality control and product longevity was for complicated mechanisms. They didn't need to get up to speed in producing heavy industry output. They were already there. Outside the US auto manufacture quantity was miniscule in comparison plagued with inconsistant quality and though they were less sophisticated in technology by and large. Of course premuim producers of basically hand built vehicles like Mercedes, Bugatti, Hispano- Suiza and such were another story. Though innovative, none had the ability to produce quantities like the US manufacturers did. Only Mercedes emerged to some extent with quality war products.

US auto companies like Ford and GM were quite accustomed to producing hundreds of thousands of autos and engines that were reliable, dependable and consistant in quality that no one offshore could duplicte. RR never built 250,000 V-type engines in a year when Ford did that and more annually for a decade before the war as did many other manufacturers!

Simply installing machine tools to give capacity for numbers does not guarantee consistancy or quality for your new-found quantity output ability. That was the problem RR had. They never manufactured 50,000+ annual units of anything ever before! They had absolutely no experience in large quantity production of complex engines and the attendant quality control consistancy needed to ensure that the 1st engine off the line was as reliable as the last in a given annual prodution run.

There was no way RR could go from a couple hundred engines a year to 200,000 as they did without immense changes to their philosophy of quality control. Simply building factories that could put out quantity didn't mean that modern quality control was automatically apparent. The Merlin's success was partly due to the influence of Packard's modern techniques of quality, mass production consistancy an innovation. RR adopted many of the successful modern production techniques pioneered at Packard and duplicated by most american auto manufacturers.

Ford and Chevrolet alone each produced over 1 million cars in 1941 before our entry into the war. No one on the planet produced vehicles or engines of those numbers with consistantly reliable reputations, no one.

So did Rolls Royce benefit from Packard's industrial quality techniques? Of course. There is no denying it.

 

[Hop]

My point is simply that Packard improved the Merlin at a time when it was technically beyond RR and introduced mass production and quality control concsistancy that was beyond RR as well.

So which are you claiming, that the Merlin wasn't reliable in 1941, or that is wasn't being mass produced?

The answer is that it was relaible and in mass production, so the argument that it was Packards input that made that possible falls down.

Getting all you want for free was pretty damned good deal when compared to the relative trickle GB imported before the war.

Certainly the extra fuel came in handy, especially with the enormous size of the strategic bomber offensive in 1944 and 1945, but pre war supplies were hardly a "trickle". As of mid 1941, imports from non-US sources of 100 octane were 500,000 tons a year. In November 1940, just after the BoB, stocks of 100 octane in the UK amounted to 500,000 tons, and the air ministry was justifying the large amount of fuel purchased by saying it would have commercial use after the war, and was a "capital asset that will not depreciate".

To put those figures in perspective, Fighter Command consumed about 25,000 tons of 100 octane during the BoB, and the 500,000 tons in Nov 1940 was, according to the report, enough for 80 weeks consumption.

These figures were dwarfed by the expansion later in the war, of course, but hardly represent a trickle, especially by the standards of the much smaller forces in the early war years.

The American auto industry more than excelled in war material production.

There's no doubt of that. But it's a huge stretch to go from that to claiming that Packard was required to productionise the Merlin, and to improve it's reliability, when both had been done long before Packard became involved. The myth of Rolls Royce craftsmen hand building, and hand fitting, Merlins until Packard came along is just that, a myth.

It's also true that the British motor industry carried out the same functions. For example, it was largely the car inductry that mass produced the Bristol Hercules, turning out close to 60,000 of them before the end of the war. Morris cars created the Castle Bromwich Spitfire plant, that produced more than 15,000 Spitfires during the war.

Don't forget, Britain, with just over half the population of Germany, produced more aircraft, and far more in terms of weight, and far more aero engines, whilst employing less workers in the aircraft industry than Germany.

Simply installing machine tools to give capacity for numbers does not guarantee consistancy or quality for your new-found quantity output ability. That was the problem RR had.

So you are claiming quality problems for Merlins before Packard became involved? Could you provide some evidence of that (apart from the early models in 1937 and 1938, when the design was still being developed)

Because the RAF seemed very happy with the quality and reliability of the Merlin once it was properly in service during the war.

They had absolutely no experience in large quantity production of complex engines and the attendant quality control consistancy needed to ensure that the 1st engine off the line was as reliable as the last in a given annual prodution run.

Which is probably why they also drew experience from the motor industry.

There was no way RR could go from a couple hundred engines a year to 200,000 as they did without immense changes to their philosophy of quality control.

I don't think they ever went to 200,000 units a year.

Simply building factories that could put out quantity didn't mean that modern quality control was automatically apparent. The Merlin's success was partly due to the influence of Packard's modern techniques of quality, mass production consistancy an innovation.

So you are saying that until 1941 the Merlin wasn't reliable? Again, this isn't borne out by the facts. The fact is, long before Packard became involved, the Merlin was being mass produced with excellent quality. Now certainly Packard mass produced a lot of Merlins, and their contribution made sure even more Merlins could be produced, but the Merlin was already in mass production, and already reliable, before Packard became involed. And again, it was the Packard engines that had more of a reputation for problems than the British built engines.

Ford and Chevrolet alone each produced over 1 million cars in 1941 before our entry into the war. No one on the planet produced vehicles or engines of those numbers with consistantly reliable reputations, no one.

Of course not, America was a much larger country, with far more people, and far more cars. But it's a huge, and unwarranted, jump to go from saying America produced more cars than anyone else to saying only America could mass produce with quality. The historical record is that in the late 30s Rolls Royce developed the Merlin for mass production and sorted out the quality.

If you want to claim Packard was responsible for this, you have to show that the Merlin was either unreliable before Packard became involved (ie in 1940 and 1941) or not being mass produced. Neither is true.

 

[Twitch]

Dude, whatever you say man. Most people who have delved into the subject of mass production and quality control know that American industry won the war. The Merlin was a great powerplant. Packard helped make it better. Think what you want. I don't care.

 

[Bullockracing]

Twithch, do you have a source for where I can find more info on how the Packard engines were made and tested, etc.? I have books that mention the production figures and outputs and the normal statistics, but not anything about how the motors were assembled/tested. Actually, does anyone have information on other engines as well, i.e. Jumo, Allison, BMW, etc?

 

[helmitsmit]

Twithch, do you have a source for where I can find more info on how the Packard engines were made and tested, etc.? I have books that mention the production figures and outputs and the normal statistics, but not anything about how the motors were assembled/tested. Actually, does anyone have information on other engines as well, i.e. Jumo, Allison, BMW, etc?

I think it is true that Packard helped RR a lot in the later years in terms of producing the merlins in huge quantities. However, it is more likely that, due to the more engines produced, the less reliable the merlin became. This because it is impossible to check every engine you produce you've just got to try and get the measurement consitant.

Is there any info about a certain rpm which made the Parcard merlins run rough? I heard this from a Spitfire mk XVI pilot.

 

[pasoleati]

This Twitch fellow is unfortunately a typical American, i.e. a brainwashed idiot. First, by comparing American war production to the pre-war production, it was no better than that of the UK or Germany. That is according to a recent study published by University Press of Kansas. Second, Packard intruduced NO improvements on the Merlin, not a single one. Third, Packard had to change the blueprints for their workforce was composed of typical Amis as described above whereas RR had SKILLED workforce who could think with their own brains.