The Merlin Engine

[Khamsin]

Great post and video.

[Anvilfolk]

Oh, god, all that polishing............

[Viper2000]

Brilliant!

However, IMO the most impressive part of the whole business was the fact that Royce and co were able to just draw the thing in the first place. Once you've got drawing to work from, building an engine is a process.

But the creative task of inventing and engine and then converting that idea into a set of drawings which men could build is almost magical. So I would argue that its the absence of CAD rather than the absence of CAM that really sets apart the engineering process of the past from that of the present.

In the case of the Merlin, it's all the more impressive when you consider that Royce was not in the best of health, and made most of his drawings whilst convalescing far from Derby.

[Trooper117]

Great stuff! Very informative..

No, CAD is just another tool. The genious is not with tools but to find the sweet point between all the contradicting requirements that offers the best performance and a good dose of luck - says the engineer.

[Viper2000]

Originally Posted by 41Sqn_Stormcrow

No, CAD is just another tool. The genious is not with tools but to find the sweet point between all the contradicting requirements that offers the best performance and a good dose of luck - says the engineer.

Bah. I do trade studies all the time. That's just maths. It's big and scary if you don't understand it, but if you do then it's just big maths, and tbh at PhD level you actually find is that 99% of what you do is actually computer-assisted* GCSE maths with scary references.

Drawing the blasted thing is a nightmare. I mean, it's a long time since I actually did design drawings by hand, but heck, even just drawing quite simple parts was massively time consuming. Engines have thousands of parts. They all have to fit together, both at the temperature that the beast is assembled at, and at the considerably higher temperature at which it is expected to run. They must not interfere, even under the worst-case combination of temperatures and accelerations.

And of course it has to actually be possible to build the thing. So there has to be a way of assembling it, and there must also be the necessary jigs and tools.

And without CAD, you've got to work all of this stuff out in your head before you even put pencil to paper.

I'm sorry, but Damn.

*Both in the sense that Wolfram Alpha does the mathematics for you, and also in the sense that you tend to use a huge amount of computing power to perform massive number of quite simple but tedious operations for you at high speed. And then, when you discover that you can get a computer to do a week's worth of maths in about a minute, you naturally write enough code to tie the blasted thing up for two weeks, and then swear at it incessantly when it inevitably crashes after 13 days.

[Nitrous]

I used to work in that exact same building as shown in the video about 3 1/2 years ago.
They have just completed the flattening of the whole of Rolls-Royce Main Works at Nightingale Road Derby, only leaving the Marble Hall, at the front as its listed.
In the new factory we still use the same old gear cutting machines as seen in the video, when manufacturing the engines that go on the Airbus aircraft that you all fly on holiday in.

Great Video.

All I can say is By By to the engineering manufacturing in this country thanks to Health & Safety and accident insurance claims.

[ElAurens]

Heads and cylinders cast in unit?

Kind of puts the engine DM of "blown cylinder head gasket" into question, doesn't it?

[617Squadron]

Originally Posted by Nitrous

I used to work in that exact same building as shown in the video about 3 1/2 years ago.
They have just completed the flattening of the whole of Rolls-Royce Main Works at Nightingale Road Derby, only leaving the Marble Hall, at the front as its listed.
In the new factory we still use the same old gear cutting machines as seen in the video, when manufacturing the engines that go on the Airbus aircraft that you all fly on holiday in.

Great Video.

All I can say is By By to the engineering manufacturing in this country thanks to Health & Safety and accident insurance claims.

The gear cutting machines; were they Sunderlands or David Browns? I couldn't quite tell from the video, but my guess is that they were Sunderlands.

The David Brown site at Lockwood, Huddersfield still had some Sunderland gear cutters when I used to visit it once a week back in 2002. They probably still have them now! David Brown could still probably make parts for them, as they still had the drawings.