Napier Sabre WW2 overview.

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NeilStirling

Airman
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Oct 6, 2006
Reciprocating aero engines: design and development AVIA 46/160.
First page is missing.

Neil
 

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It appears to be the same document that had snippets posted here, images 3, 4 & 5.

It contains some rather good information on dates of the different marks of Sabre. Thanks for sharing it.
 
The doc says that between December 1941 and May 1942 the Sabres averaged 340 hours between failures. That is much better than what the DB 605A ever achieved in Finnish service.
 
That was before Bristol kindly volunteered to provide Napier with the material and machining information to make sleeves to the required tolerance.

Finding MTBF information after Spring 1943 would be interesting, to see the extent of the improvement.
 
That was before Bristol kindly volunteered to provide Napier with the material and machining information to make sleeves to the required tolerance.

Finding MTBF information after Spring 1943 would be interesting, to see the extent of the improvement.
It would indeed, since after that time, Pratt & Whitney had to give up their allocation of Precision Rotary Grinders to Napier, for improving their manufacture of (I don't recall which) cylinders or sleeves, delaying production of the R2800 C series engines by about 6 months.
 
First engine out of KC was in Dec 1943.
The cost was in 1944 when they built 2,744 engine and production went from 9 in Jan to 475 in Dec with the learning curve/training and so on.
Even a 6 week delay was worth several hundred engines in 1944.
I would love to see a picture of the grinders.
My father worked on a gun factory where one large Broach was delayed about 1 month, which delayed everything one month. It was the largest machine in the factory and had to go in before most of the other machines could be installed, otherwise they would have to take out already installed machines, move them to one side, tear out part of wall, move the broach in, install it, fix the wall and move the other machines back and reinstall them.
 
The Queen Mary voyages in 1943 are listed here: Queen Mary - Record of Wartime Cruises - 1943
My geography isn't the best, but it appears that the first trip from the US to Europe in 1943 was on June 1 1943, which is too late to have been used to transport the grinders.
In 1942, the last trip US to Europe was on December 8. I'd guess that the grinders had to be on this voyage.
Can anyone shed more light on the timing of the grinders, i.e. when they were shipped from Sundstrand and when they were installed at Napiers?
 
The book "Building Engines for War: Air-Cooled Radial Aircraft Engine Production in Britain and America in World War II" p.240 talking of the Kansas City R-2800-C plant, states:

"The plant was operational by February 1943, and the construction companies completed work on the entire factory complex on July 3, 1943."

It references this document, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/habshaer/mo/mo1900/mo1991/data/mo1991data.pdf which on page 7 states:

"By February 18, 1943, the plant was fully operational, cranking out the famous Double Wasp engine."

From SR's post above, the first engine was finished in Dec 1943.

I'm impressed that the photo I posted above of the factory dated 28 Jan 1943 shows it is quite a way from completion, and yet it was in operation on 18 Feb 1943.

I suspect project manager magic, "in operation" vs "fully operational" and loose definitions of mechanical completion might go some way to explain these dates.
 
Reciprocating aero engines: design and development AVIA 46/160.
First page is missing.

Neil


The quoted Merlin hours "between failure" are very strange. In fact, they appear to be a fantasy. The basis of these figures seems to be unstated.

Eng
 

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