The First Spitfire: S.6B

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I've seen your other works on your website and here's another beautiful artwork. Not sure if it's correct to call the S6.B the first Spitfire though. The Spitfire was based on it, but they were two different aircraft.
 
From what I've read the Spit had nothing at all in common with the S6B, the Rolls Royce R-type engine was detuned to produce the Merlin and that's about it. Alfred Price is very particular about making this point.

nice pic though
 
Beautiful image, I congratulate you on that.

But please be aware that the S.6B only evolved into the Spitfire, and to use imalko's phrase, the Spitfire was only based on it insofar as we are talking about the Supermarine 224 Spitfire. This was the fighter that Mitchell tried to evolve from his racing seaplane. Even then when he was finished there was very little of the S.6 left. By the time he came to the type 300 in the form in which it flew there was absolutely nothing left either from the S.6 or the 224, 'our' Spitfire was completely new in every respect.
 
vanir said:
From what I've read the Spit had nothing at all in common with the S6B, the Rolls Royce R-type engine was detuned to produce the Merlin and that's about it. Alfred Price is very particular about making this point.

nice pic though
Click to expand...

The Rolls Royce R wasnt detuned to produce the Merlin. The R was a race engine developed from the Rolls Royce Buzzard which was similar to the Kestrel just 60% bigger.

The R was 36.7 litres the same size as the later Griffon the Merlin was 26.7 litres. However Rolls Royce learnt a lot about squeezing high performance out of engines with the R that was used in the development of the PV12 which became the Merlin.
 
cheers, was just quoting Alfred Price there and haven't looked up the R-type or Merlin development (don't really know anything about the R-type at all). Thanks for the extra info, interesting stuff.
 
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