"The Secret Horsepower Race" - Available to pre-order

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Just got my copy. Briefly paged through it and it loooks awesome!! Looking forward to quality time reading it over the holidays.

Thanks Calum, I've barely cracked it, and it's already an awesome Christmas Present.
 
Snowygrouch said:
Good to hear, did you order from Mortons or Amazon ?
Click to expand...
It's an odd, but unusually nice story actually.

I'm in US, so I ordered it from Amazon months ago and it was supposed to become available on Dec 9th. That day, I got an email saying the item was delayed (IIRC, to January), so I contacted Amazon and only then found the book was already listed with several other Amazon sellers. As I new it was a brand new title, and didn't want to place yet another order for a 'not yet in stock' situation, I looked into each seller to check inventory. One of them actually had a phone number listed, so I called and luckily reached an immensely helpful young lady who told me that they had some in stock, but they were all reserved for a particular customer, however she was willing to pull a copy from the reserved pile for me if I ordered now. So I did. And it arrived in about 3 days.

If you check it now (on Amazon.com) you'll see that it's available from a number of (independent) Amazon sellers, so it appears your distributor has been pretty busy.

I'm hoping there is info. in the book on the Blohm & Voss BV-155 (a favorite of mine) which would have been one of, if not the, highest altitude combat plane of the period, using a DB-603U and TKL-15.
 
rprosperi said:
It's an odd, but unusually nice story actually.

I'm in US, so I ordered it from Amazon months ago and it was supposed to become available on Dec 9th. That day, I got an email saying the item was delayed (IIRC, to January), so I contacted Amazon and only then found the book was already listed with several other Amazon sellers. As I new it was a brand new title, and didn't want to place yet another order for a 'not yet in stock' situation, I looked into each seller to check inventory. One of them actually had a phone number listed, so I called and luckily reached an immensely helpful young lady who told me that they had some in stock, but they were all reserved for a particular customer, however she was willing to pull a copy from the reserved pile for me if I ordered now. So I did. And it arrived in about 3 days.

If you check it now (on Amazon.com) you'll see that it's available from a number of (independent) Amazon sellers, so it appears your distributor has been pretty busy.

I'm hoping there is info. in the book on the Blohm & Voss BV-155 (a favorite of mine) which would have been one of, if not the, highest altitude combat plane of the period, using a DB-603U and TKL-15.
Click to expand...

I dont really cover that as I concentrate (mostly) on operationally significant types. However, I do have info on the 603U and TK-15, so you are welcome to "pm" me and I`ll send documents on that. It was just impossible to cram any more into the book (you will understand when you get it !)
 
Snowygrouch said:
I dont really cover that as I concentrate (mostly) on operationally significant types. However, I do have info on the 603U and TK-15, so you are welcome to "pm" me and I`ll send documents on that. It was just impossible to cram any more into the book (you will understand when you get it !)
Click to expand...

Okay, I'm callin' "Foul!" Can we please have the info you're talking about placed in the engines folder in the technical section? Please?
 
Crimea_River said:
Totally agree. Making my way through it in small, immersive chunks.
Click to expand...

This is a one bite of the elephant book. Having said that? Just the initial browse after opening the box was extremely satisfying and portends well for future enjoyment.
Shortround and a few others here will be positively orgasmic as they read the book and realize how many future arguments they're going to win. :notworthy:
 
First of all, any of the glowing reviews you may have read elsewhere are not hyperbole. Second of all as I have gone online to read up on various subjects or personalities mentioned, I have been amazed by the number of specialized technical subject matter blogs that have picked up and are quoting this book since November.

Let's start with what the book doesn't cover, you won't find a large amount of coverage on the R2800, the Griffon, Centaurus, or the V1710. (They are of course mentioned and the coverage they receive is excellent.) Hyper programs, exotic programs like the XIV-22 or the RR two-strokes get some mention in passing. With the exception of the missing Me-109 on the cover pretty much what you see is on the cover is what you get. BMW, Rolls Royce, and Daimler-Benz by far constitute the lions share majority text. France and Italy receive some attention in passing with some excellent drawings of the Fiat A38 and A40 in the text with Hispano-Suiza getting a few a paragraphs while establishing the pre-war environment. From there, you will be taken on a journey that starts at the refinery and ends as you go through the exhaust as the author journeys from fuel to the little items taken for granted like spark plugs and indium bearings that no one else ever talks about. For example, the author explains why the bad rap German engines and fuel get are far more inter-dependent upon each other than 99% of the readers realize and how the personalities and working environments exacerbated the problems.

Are there some nits? Of course. There are large numbers of schematics and keyed drawings that are regrettably missing the key. On page 373, the author mentions a potential shortage of 100 octane fuel and thoughtfully provides a copy of the original message. What variant of "100 octane" was it? Was this shortage for all of Europe? The tactical air forces? Did it include operations by the 8th Air Force? Is it, 100 octane, 100/130, 115/145, or 150?
Also, American readers maybe slightly challenged as the author mixes and matches metric and English units. It will also help to have access to a German to English technical dictionary when for many of the charts. None of these are serious in nature or detract from the book. There is no bibliography as such, but the footnoting runs about sixteen pages of what appears to be a size 6 font. The index is also organized into aircraft, engine systems, engines, events, firms, fuels, groups, materials, organizations, people, places, production, technology and finally weapons. It also is in a small font and runs three pages.

If you're attracted by the excellent art on the cover and looking for a nice coffee table book or are a modeler looking for modeling details, this is not the book for you. If you're interested in the technical challenges of getting the engine from the drawing board to the flight line and increasing its power over its service life during WWII this is the one book you must have on your shelf, it is a tour de force.

Highly and unequivocally recommended for anyone with a serious interest in piston engine development, WWII aircraft, WWII engine development. Buy this book!
 
jetcal1 said:
Are there some nits? Of course. There are large numbers of schematics and keyed drawings that are regrettably missing the key. On page 373, the author mentions a potential shortage of 100 octane fuel and thoughtfully provides a copy of the original message. What variant of "100 octane" was it? Was this shortage for all of Europe? The tactical air forces? Did it include operations by the 8th Air Force? Is it, 100 octane, 100/130, 115/145, or 150?

There is no bibliography as such, but the footnoting runs about sixteen pages of what appears to be a size 6 font.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the nice review, a some general points to try to explain areas you found difficult.

1) Which specific image did you feel needed a key ? The only ones I`m aware of that I omitted on purpose are a few exploded views from assembly manuals etc where I`ve not bothered redoing the key which says stuff like "26) Bolt... 27) Stud..... 28) Pin..." as its usually fairly self explanatory and would have needed another half page to fit.

2) Its a shortage for the Normandy Landings support operations, so yes, its a shortage in all of Europe. Letters like that often tend not to go into details like which exact variant, e..g. 100/130, but yes, it is referring to 100/130, which was at that point the "standard" service fuel in Europe.

3) Its worth noting for others reading that the "footnoting" you refer to, is the References section at the end, which is about 1250 references almost entirely of primary archive materials. The reason that there is no Bibliography, is essentially because other than a tiny smattering of properly researched books like "Vees for Victory" I did not use any information from other books. So I couldn't really make a Bibliography, as it would have had a grand total of perhaps nine books in it and so look a bit odd, so the very few books I did make use of (mostly autobiographies), are in the references.

Some of the images are indeed too small for my liking, and I would have liked to lengthen the book to allow them to be stretched, and the references text made bigger, but for commercial reasons I couldn't make that happen. I actually cut about 115 images from the book to provide space to increase the size of them all as much as feasible, but, as you can see, there are still a huge number of images and the book ended up so big that what you have, was about the best compromise I could make. Perhaps in a future 2nd ed. we can try to have the book lengthened (you can only do it in chunks of something like 25 pages).

4) The question of units is indeed a difficult one. Generally, of course they should all be standardised, however... something like half the entire book is quotes from original reports, or
stenographic records which are from spoken word. I took the view that the book would have looked a bit odd if I show a conference in Berlin with people like Erhard Milch saying "I want another 5 PSI of supercharger boost for the Me 109!", or Ernest Hives saying "The Spitfire needs another 100 PS at 8000m altitude!". That leaves a problem, so I decided to leave units as they originally were, talk around them, and make the compromise that the reader is expected to be able to work his or her way around it with a bit of diligence. Another issue was that if I had made the book in SI units, everyone in the USA would have complained, and visa versa. So, I thought the approach used, at least preserves the authenticity of the original reports, and allows everyone to muddle through with a bit of work. I had a look at providing comparisons, but the book`s readability was poor if you have "0.5ata /0.49Bar/7.1PSI" and that sort of thing after every value. Note, that this is one reason I made chapter 10, which gives a set of charts showing the broad progress made by all manufacturers all in one common set of units on charts of all identical scales. At least giving a wrapping-up where no head-scratching is needed.

-----------

Anyway, I`m pleased that despite some niggles you enjoyed it.
 
Last edited:
Crimea_River said:
I'd love to see those additional 115 images!
Click to expand...

oh, I wouldnt worry too much, I didnt cut them at random, and so what was left were the cream of the crop, of the (actually 112) images I cut,
I`d say only about 10 were really good. One image I cut was just small details, like a drawing German engineers who visited Wright Field in the 1930`s made
of the engine test cells. Interesting, but its absence isn't damaging to the story.


IMAGE_56_ZWB_cell.JPG
 
Snowygrouch said:
Thanks for the nice review, a some general points to try to explain areas you found difficult.

1) Which specific image did you feel needed a key ? The only ones I`m aware of that I omitted on purpose are a few exploded views from assembly manuals etc where I`ve not bothered redoing the key which says stuff like "26) Bolt... 27) Stud..... 28) Pin..." as its usually fairly self explanatory and would have needed another half page to fit.

2) Its a shortage for the Normandy Landings support operations, so yes, its a shortage in all of Europe. Letters like that often tend not to go into details like which exact variant, e..g. 100/130, but yes, it is referring to 100/130, which was at that point the "standard" service fuel in Europe.

3) Its worth noting for others reading that the "footnoting" you refer to, is the References section at the end, which is about 1250 references almost entirely of primary archive materials. The reason that there is no Bibliography, is essentially because other than a tiny smattering of properly researched books like "Vees for Victory" I did not use any information from other books. So I couldn't really make a Bibliography, as it would have had a grand total of perhaps nine books in it and so look a bit odd, so the very few books I did make use of (mostly autobiographies), are in the references.

Some of the images are indeed too small for my liking, and I would have liked to lengthen the book to allow them to be stretched, and the references text made bigger, but for commercial reasons I couldn't make that happen. I actually cut about 115 images from the book to provide space to increase the size of them all as much as feasible, but, as you can see, there are still a huge number of images and the book ended up so big that what you have, was about the best compromise I could make. Perhaps in a future 2nd ed. we can try to have the book lengthened (you can only do it in chunks of something like 25 pages).

4) The question of units is indeed a difficult one. Generally, of course they should all be standardised, however... something like half the entire book is quotes from original reports, or
stenographic records which are from spoken word. I took the view that the book would have looked a bit odd if I show a conference in Berlin with people like Erhard Milch saying "I want another 5 PSI of supercharger boost for the Me 109!", or Ernest Hives saying "The Spitfire needs another 100 PS at 8000m altitude!". That leaves a problem, so I decided to leave units as they originally were, talk around them, and make the compromise that the reader is expected to be able to work his or her way around it with a bit of diligence. Another issue was that if I had made the book in SI units, everyone in the USA would have complained, and visa versa. So, I thought the approach used, at least preserves the authenticity of the original reports, and allows everyone to muddle through with a bit of work. I had a look at providing comparisons, but the book`s readability was poor if you have "0.5ata /0.49Bar/7.1PSI" and that sort of thing after every value. Note, that this is one reason I made chapter 10, which gives a set of charts showing the broad progress made by all manufacturers all in one common set of units on charts of all identical scales. At least giving a wrapping-up where no head-scratching is needed.

-----------
Anyway, I`m pleased that despite some niggles you enjoyed it.
Click to expand...

I more than enjoyed it. The nits are minor!
Remember this part? "None of these are serious in nature or detract from the book."
The drawing that I think would have benefited most was the the Fiat Test Chamber. (Please note that I am aware of space and publishing constraints as I make the following comments.)
Please keep in mind while this book could have been easily have been an SAE or RAE publication and sold at a much greater cost, your audience has become a little wider and may not have the the same ability to interpret a drawing as others who have grasped a spanner or play in CATIA, so in some cases like the Jumo 211 Nose Section, the labeling major components would have been useful just simply because the drawing is a little more difficult to interpret for the layman. Others like the Centaurus Supercharger? Maybe not so much..
Thank you for the elaboration on the fuel. (Little anal and pedantic moments like that are part of my personality after so decades of QA and technical writing.)
As far as the footnoting, it was certainly not meant as a slight. Frankly, I think the level of effort for the level of footnoting you provided was bordering on Herculean and can only imagine the man-hours that went into editing it.

The question of units? I agree, and again will refer you to the first and second sentences of this response and the very last sentence of my review.
(I'm just glad I didn't tease you about how "over-engineered" your footnotes and indexes are.)

Thank you for authoring a new benchmark book on engines.
 
jetcal1 said:
The drawing that I think would have benefited most was the the Fiat Test Chamber. (Please note that I am aware of space and publishing constraints as I make the following comments.)
Click to expand...
Coincidentally, I've been trying to find information about the history of wind tunnels. I have a suspicion that some countries fell behind in aircraft design because they fell behind in large-scale and full-scale wind tunnels. Unfortunately, an aerodynamist friend (who teaches aerodynamics for the Navy) doesn't know know of any books on the history and evolution of wind tunnels as a whole.
 
Book has sold-out again, so we`re doing a 3rd printing now. Will be about 3weeks until the Publishers Mortons get more copies (i.e. about 1st March 2021)

Other whole-salers like amazon still have copies in stock, however, we`ve made nearly 100 tiny tweaks and changes since
the 2nd print, so I`d say its just about worth waiting 3 weeks then ordering from the publisher, rather than buying the ones
Amazon has on their shelves. That-said, the changes are extremely minor and really don't impact the value/accuracy of the book a
great deal.
 
Snowygrouch said:
Book has sold-out again, so we`re doing a 3rd printing now. Will be about 3weeks until the Publishers Mortons get more copies (i.e. about 1st March 2021)

Other whole-salers like amazon still have copies in stock, however, we`ve made nearly 100 tiny tweaks and changes since
the 2nd print, so I`d say its just about worth waiting 3 weeks then ordering from the publisher, rather than buying the ones
Amazon has on their shelves. That-said, the changes are extremely minor and really don't impact the value/accuracy of the book a
great deal.
Click to expand...

Congratulations on the strong sales Calum. Is there a way for those of us who bought the first printing to get a copy of errata or updates?
 
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