Coltrane's Planes & Automobiles: The Supercharger 

I remember him most for that line from this tv series above all other things he did only followed by his cameo in the film Flash Gordon

Well said sir 👏

Yes well said. Black 6 sadly crashed at Duxford, by some Air Marshal idiot who thought he could fly it.

The only issue I have with it is the ridiculous old fool spitfire designer trying to claim you get a net increase of power from a carburettor by spending X amount of energy compressing a gas, while claiming you get a larger output of energy when it expands again afterwards, like friction and heat don't exist. There is ZERO benefit from using a carburettor's venturi to compress a gas. Any gain made when expanding it would be lost in heat of the motor. A ignorant, ludicrous claim. So ludicrous he has to be just plain lying, trying to pretend the spitfire was better because it had a motor 20 years out of date. Next thing he'll say is having .303 bullets helped, when they were pea shooters next to an American .50cal or German 20mm. The British won in spite of the Merlin, not because of it. Idiots

There are stories of Mercedes drivers in period being accused of using a 'siren' on the public road. No officer, that's just the blower.. 🙂

Do I want to hear about his love life? Or did he have an inspiring love FOR life?

A couple of years back l was doing an indicated 90 uphill on the M11 & a brand spanking new MAN Luton overtook me with no problem whatsoever. Vans certainly ain't what they used to be, especially Luton's which used to be down to 25 or 30 on a slope. 😄

ROTFLMAO.... Perfect Rupert, and Lady Dorothy thanks you!

Well eventually he came !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!¡¡!

badum, tish, ithangyou....

That was so dry I pissed myself!

Loved the episode where he dismantled a car engine on the side of the road in America to demonstrate an engineering feature...

@@robleary3353 I remember seeing that !

I think that was the V8 episode that this one mentions at the end was to be the following week. I think it was a little 4-cylinder Honda or Suzuki.

And the music, too!

Damn. Before I read your comment I was feeling 25, somethings not adding up!! Yeah, I enjoyed it as well and I'm definitely not a petrol head. Robbie was a decent, kind guy with a great sense of humour. An entertainer who will be missed, more Hagrid than Cracker.RIP

I just read these comments, I watched this when it was first broadcast, holy smoke 25 years !!!!!!

Just rediscovered these after the sad news of Robbie’s passing. His humour was epic and that line about Lady Dorothy and the blower should be an instant classic!

He did come eventually though.

Yes, I did as well. I must locate my copy of the book and write a note on Robbie's passing.

Amen!

Though it may be fair to acknowledge Bayerische Flugzeugwerke became Messerschmitt AG in 1938.

Yep, after being sent to the western front he only scored 2 victories and then was promptly hammered out of the sky by P47's of the USAAF. He credited that with saving his life knowing that he not survived a shoot down he likely would have eventually been killed by the USAAF.

Both had advantages and disadvantages, the Bendix "pressure carburetor" also known and more correctly called an "injection carburetor" was actually fuel injection, single point fuel injection to be specific, the only reason that it even had the word carburetor associated with it was because that's all they knew to call it back then but it actually is fuel injection, it was the perfect mix between the two, but introducing the fuel before the supercharger still had it's drawbacks, the Wright R3350 engine's were proof of that. The R3350 started out with the Bendix injection carburetor but because of it's particular design it had a tendency to pool gas in areas of the supercharger housing that caused induction fires in the engine's, most supposed aviation authorities and RU-vid documentary makers have erroneously stated that magnesium alloy engine cases and oil coolers and poorly designed cooling baffles and other reasons were the causes of the notorious engine fires on B29's, first of all only a limited number of pre production B29's had engine's with magnesium alloy engine cases, before they went into production the engine's were switched to forged steel cases and it had nothing to do with engine fires as to why they did it, the biggest cause of engine fires on the B29's were induction fires in the intake system, by going to direct injection it solved that problem. If they'd have used direct injection on the Merlin engine they would indeed have been slightly less powerful but by the same token they'd have gotten more range (which the Spitfire certainly could have used) along with eliminating the negative G problem and induction fires in them, B29's and the R3350 engine weren't the only things that had induction fires, all of those aircraft engine's that mixed fuel in before the supercharger were at risk from it happening and it did indeed happen to all of them, just not nearly as often as in the R3350 engine but it did happen. Like the mechanically driven supercharger vs the hydro coupled variable speed supercharger I honestly think the reason they ultimately selected the carburetor instead of direct injection was simplicity, simplicity equals less development time and more units produced per man hour, any talk about more HP or anything else is just getting sucked down a rabbit hole of window dressing and chest thumping, Britain had to produce as many Merlin engine's as they could and get them installed into as many aircraft as they could at that point and couldn't afford to get bogged down by months or maybe even over a year of development time messing around with a direct injection system.

@@dukecraig2402 indeed, i stand corrected since writing that comment, gregs planes channel looked at why: the brits did research into fuel injection but for whatever reason the research lead decided to purposely miss represent the power and fuel saving advantages and this was then taken as lore in the 30s without question - so there was plenty of time. it was only sir stanley hooker that uses some maths to work out how to get a lot more out of the super charger that really won the day. that and access to ever increasing octane ratings for fuels really bumped the power figures. the 150 stuff having a really horrible smell too apparently. as ever political infighting and upper class connections hampered progress.

@@mrrolandlawrence I don't remember that being in a video by Greg but I have no doubt he'd have covered it, he's pretty thorough about things like that. As far as having plenty of time to develop it I don't necessarily agree with that, before the war both US and British aircraft and aircraft engine development was hampered by economic depression's, political infighting and inner service fighting over budgets, things like that coupled with the fact that developments in those fields generally creeps along at a snail's pace compared to something like automobiles and motorcycle's. It's for those very reasons that the Allison engine didn't have a 2 stage 2 speed supercharger version when the P51 was developed, the US Army funded the development of the Allison engine since the mid 30's but they wanted turbos for the 2nd stage of the supercharger systems on their engine's, the US Navy used 2 stage superchargers on their engine's but they didn't use the Allison so they weren't going to fund the development of one, and with an economic depression in full swing and no aircraft in production yet using any version of the engine Allison sure didn't have the money themselves to develop one. Even the 2 stage version of the Merlin wasn't being built by Rolls-Royce yet, it was still in it's final stages of development and wasn't fielded until mid 1942, the Packard built Merlin's were also still single stage at that point of course, I'm not sure exactly when they started making their 2 stage Merlin's but I'm sure it couldn't have been until after Rolls-Royce got everything rolling in England. Even after each country was in the war and their aircraft and aircraft engine manufacturers had blank checks for development look at how many aircraft each one had on drawing boards and in development that never did see action because they weren't ready until just after the war. For a bunch of good reasons in the time before England was at war you can bet the powers that be in the RAF figured that between development time and production time and costs it was better to have 2 carburetor Merlin's produced than than 1 fuel injection Merlin, sometimes in life you just can have it all.

Yup, Germany was running on 90 octane fuel while the U.S was using and providing Britain with 130 and 150 octane fuel.

@@harrymack3565 They also successfully used water/meth injection to compensate, increasing service ceiling, climb rate and providing extra power on tap for dogfighting.