~ Some time ago I made some comments on the pre-war Chevy 6 inline engine.
~ Scott Fisher came with the interesting retort that the Austin OHV post war
~ engines were basically derived from it. [. . .]
~ Is there any additional information on this topic?
I pulled this from my original source of the observation that started
all this:
(Excerpted from "BMC and Leyland B-Series Engine Data," Lindsay
Porter, Osprey Publishing, 1985 (ISBN 0-85045-597-9)
Chapter 1, "From Chevrolet truck engine...", p. 24:
"It was in early 1938, according to Wyatt, when the Austin
board decided to go for the medium-sized commercial
market, an area in which Austin had had conspicuously little
success in spite of being for a time the country's largest
car maker. By 1939, the new ohv 3-1/2-liter truck engine
was built and ready after an incredibly short gestation
period. After all, the engine was Austin's first ever ohv
and broke new ground in respect of size and type (although
not block arrangement). The answer must surely be that
Austin *did* copy the Bedford truck engine, which appears
so similar to the Austin unit. And the catalyst? Leonard
Lord! Remember that it was Lord, the man of action rather
than scruples, who was behind the Wolseley design for the
Morris 8 engine and which was most certainly copied from
the Ford 8 unit. Then, Morris had needed an engine in a
hurry; this time Austin needed one quickly and, in both
cases, Lord was the man who made the decisions. The
Bedford truck engine was itself based on the Chevrolet
"Stove-Bolt" engine of 1932 (both Chevrolet and Bedford
were part of General Motors of America, of course) and
so, since A-series, B-series, and ultimately O-series
were descended from Austin's 3-1/2-litre truck engine,
it would seem that there exists a very interesting
transatlantic lineage in the murky past, although such a
connection could never be acknowledged because it looks
as though the 3-1/2-litre engine was born on the wrong
side of the blanket."
There's more about how the Bedford engine came to be,
and more on its connection to the B-series. The men
responsible for the details that make the B-series what
it is were Harry Weslake (before he was Sir) and Eric
Bareham. From p. 27:
"Although it is of course simpler to say it than to do it,
all that had happened was that the engines were scaled
down, first from six to four cylinders to give 2.2 litres
[later enlarged to 2.6L and used in the Healey Hundred --
SF], then right down to 1200cc. In 1951, the Austin A30
was launched, with bodywork styled in the same well-
rounded family style to become the "baby" of the family.
Its 803cc engine (not known at that point as the A-series)
was again a scaled-down version of what had gone before.
There is no doubt that Eric Bareham was one of the
leading figures in the design of the A-series engine and
his notebooks show that the first design brief was drawn
up on 24 May 1949 but that the engine under consideration
at that stage was a side-valve engine, extremely simple
and cheap to produce and with syphonic water circulation
(i.e. without even a water pump)."
Chapter 2, "Designing the B-series," opens with the
information that the A40's engine of 1200cc, in spite of
its similarity to the initial 1200cc B-series engine (which
has identical bore and stroke), was in fact quite different.
This book also details why Len Lord preferred Austins to
any of the Morris products he later came to run as the
head of BMC in the Fifties, something that will explain
many of his irrational decisions about M.G. sports cars
through that decade.
The book is both fascinating and depressing. It's fascinating
because Porter has gone back to primary source for his
research, citing dates and showing diagrams from Bareham's
notebooks to fill in the history of the engine's development
and thereby explaining many of the oddities that I and others
have observed while working on these fine, stout beasts.
(For example, the side-covers that leaked on my MGB from
January through early May were holdovers from the original
side-valve days, in which they were used to adjust the
valve gear back when "valve lift" was literally correct.)
It's depressing, however, to anyone who has worked in a
Large Corporate Environment in which decisions are made
for political rather than engineering or enthusiastic
reasons. As such, I know of many high-technology firms
in which this book, or at least chapters from it, should
be mandatory reading by upper management, with an eye
toward the fate of those who cannot learn the lessons
of history.
--Scott Fisher
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