Why the heck did they design it that way Part II

pbehn · Aug 3, 2018

Shortround6 said:
Rolls Royce may have thought about mass production, but after the fiascoes of WW I engine production they may not have thought much of it. Some body at RR is supposed to have said in WW I that they would rather go to jail than see RR engines built by another company. Given the dogs breakfast that some companies made of Hispanos and other licence built engines some of the builders should have gone to jail.
RR did manage to make over 6000 Kestrels during the 20s and 30s which is a fair amount even if dwarfed by the effort put into the Merlin.

Wiki says 4,750 Kestrels but if you take 6,000 produced over 10 years is 1.65 engines per day or perhaps 3 or 4 per working day. The type of production line that are considered "mass production" produce many more per day and cost much more. At that rate of production the Packard plant would lose money hand over fist or produce thousands of Kestrel engines no one wanted. Then there are other engines in the RR line at the time like the Peregrine (300 produced) and Griffon (8,100).

Shortround6 · Aug 3, 2018

what was considered mass production in the 30s and what was mass production in the 40s during the war years are two different things. RR may not have been working 8 hour days in the early 30s but they weren't working 24 hours a day either.

P & W was supposed to have built around 13,500 engines from 1925 to late 1938 and that included Wasps, Wasp Juniors, Hornet A's and Hornet B's (different bore and stroke), Twin Wasp Juniors, Twin Wasps and a few Twin Hornets.

Wright built about 8,000 Cyclones from when it was introduced (as the R-1750 ?) until Aug of 1938.

Rolls wasn't that far off when it came to aircraft engine production.

pbehn · Aug 3, 2018

Shortround6 said:
what was considered mass production in the 30s and what was mass production in the 40s during the war years are two different things. RR may not have been working 8 hour days in the early 30s but they weren't working 24 hours a day either.

P & W was supposed to have built around 13,500 engines from 1925 to late 1938 and that included Wasps, Wasp Juniors, Hornet A's and Hornet B's (different bore and stroke), Twin Wasp Juniors, Twin Wasps and a few Twin Hornets.

Wright built about 8,000 Cyclones from when it was introduced (as the R-1750 ?) until Aug of 1938.

Rolls wasn't that far off when it came to aircraft engine production.

If you take WW1 there were over 5000 Sopwith Camels and another 5000 Se5as produced which served from 1917 onwards. Basically you need a war to justify it all. Peacetime losses of Hurricanes and Spitfires per year were about the same as weekly losses at the height of the BoB.

Shortround6 · Aug 3, 2018

In war time they tended to work at least two shifts in the factories if not around the clock in order not to leave machine tools sitting idle for hours. They also tended to size the work force to the amount of work to be done. If you have an order for 2000 engines in hand (or more) you hire a work force accordingly. In peace time you were lucky to sell a 1000 engines in one year, very lucky. So a smaller work forces could handle it.

Why the heck did they design it that way Part II

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