Quote:
Originally Posted by Sternjaeger
Viper,don't forget Packard Merlins on Mustangs! 
You'd be surprised to see how many warbirds owners and operators tend to go for an accurate engine selection: the third generation of warbirds owners do any possible effort to have their machines to wartime specs,down to wirings,radios and equipment (working gunsights are a must!).
Same goes for superchargers: the era of non working superchargers is gone,pretty much everyone is going for working ones.
It's all down to how deep the pockets are and availability of parts. |
Times have obviously moved on! In that case, mine's a Dh-103 with real Merlin 130/1s please (since Eric Brown gave it such a glowing review). Or an MB.5, perhaps modded with spring tab ailerons...
I'd also love to see a Tempest V with Napier Sabre, because despite the huge reliability issues it would be such a wonderfully different sound! But my true love is and remains the English Electric Lightning... *sigh*...
As for the whole Packard thing, I rather like the original Mustang X with Merlin 65; just a pure scrapheap challenge job by the installation department, but it gave quite a good showing against the vastly more elaborate & expensive P-51B/V-1650-3 combination; AFAIK a few examples even flew on ops. But that's a really obscure machine. You know they also generated performance curves for Mustang + Merlin XX series? It would have arrived earlier and presumably served as a Hurricane replacement (since there would then have been no supply of XX series engines for the Hurricane line). But then Packard made Ford's refusal to play ball irrelevant and the idea got parked.