.....Posted on 12/05/2014 7:43:00 PM PST by virgil283
"This thundering thing is the Beast of Turin. The Fiat S76 land speed record car. It's a behemoth, nearly as tall as a man, with a four-cylinder engine displacing a staggering 28.5 liters. In 1911 that massive engine propelled the Fiat S76 to 135-mph, an extraordinary accomplishment at the time,.....
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(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
US WW2 military piston aircraft engines were given a letter number name the told you the cylinder layout and cubic inches
V1710 =The GM Allison vee12, V1650 = US built RR Merlin Vee 12, R2800 = PW Wasp Major Radial, R3350 = Wright Duplex Cyclone Radial
Impressive. 100 years old!
Holy cow...that means one cylinder is displacing as much as the biggest V8 engines from the Detroit muscle car era. Either it has huge pistons or a super long stroke. The engine’s height makes me think it was stroke. Stroke means torque so they must have had a tall gearing to get the speed out of vehicle. Four cylinder engines are inherently unbalanced and get harsher with greater displacement. This thing must have been an absolute beast to be around when running flat out.
Where was the ad. I missed it. I’ve wanted one of those since I was a kid. Till I found out how much time & money a group of volunteers took to fix one up.
The Merlin was 1650 Cubic inch, the PT boat Packard were 2490 Cubic inch
Did turn it up to hear them talk and kaboom .....wow ! From the original picture seem they forgot the muffler....LOL !
Awesome !
The PT engines were from airplane engines but they weren’t Merlins.
I walked through a vessel with eight engines on two shafts — they said it was a sub hunter. I think the engines were “straight”, maybe six cylinders?
Pistons are 6-1/2 inches in diameter
Probably the Allison V-12, similar in dimension and cubic inches to the merlin. The output was quite a bit lower, however.
CC
Jay Leno is drooling like a Pavlov dog.
That is a good looking engine.
I thought it looked like it had some king of spring wound hand crank setup, unless it just has such a long stroke it pushes over TDC with such high compression, then with a little late ignition spark it take off. The crank was a major stroker just looking at it in the video.
It actually made me jump...I been a diesel mech for a long time and that big four cylinder sounded damn scary.
I would not spend a lot of time next to it.
What are they using for a carburetor? LoL.
The middle engine faced backward driving the middle prop and two outboard engines faced frontward driving the propshafts through a gearbox.
almost positive they were Packard Merlins, 1650 cid.
It could have had some sort of assist on it. None of the tractors, implements, or cars I have seen used anything but a crank going into the end of the crankshaft.
I understand that broken bones were not uncommon back in the Model T days.
After I bought the Lincoln SA200 (1952 model) and it kicked me several times, I asked the PO about it and he said the same type engine knocked most of his brothers front teeth out while cranking a combine.
I bought the parts to convert it to electric start soon after but it still had crank capability.
For whatever reason, they did not put the exhaust manifold on it when they started it. At the end of the video, they show an old picture of it with the manifold on it.
Anything is going to sound evil without at least having zoomie tubes.
My Boss gets a newsprint monthly magzine of maritime and ships for sale which advertised the PT boats. They were $50k each but not much but hulls. Sorry I don't know the name of the magazine.
my calculations would be 78 Weber side drafts for each cylinder
(!^}
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