War Hemi: The Story Of The GAA V8 - 1,100ci of aluminum WWII Ford grunt 

That is what engineering is capable of when you dont have a budget but want it RIGHT....Most car manufacturers have a budget that does not allow this kind of engineering.

A really informative video sir, always been mightily impressed by that engine

You were one lucky kid . :)

Awesome! Thanks for sharing.

😊

"hydra-matic"-the greatest transmission ever made !!--even "Rolls-Royce"-grudgenly used it to 1996 !!--AND MY "ROCKET 88 "

@@johncaldwell-wq1hp yes 👍 the 400 was a really great transmission ,I don't have the pleasure of seeing them in my shop very often ,and hard to find

​@@Louis-kk3to how far from Washington NC are you guys? I am looking for a decent trans shop

@@user-ju8po9sy2m well, I think Washington NC IS near the southern coast I'm on the Virginia border on I - 95 ROANOKE RAPIDS NC , I'LL BE GLAD to help you out with any automatic transmission needs

It's extremely ingenious but my goodness it needs precision in manufacture and the thrust loading on the tower shaft is something else. Ford had some extremely good engineers and machinists.

It’s way better than a long timing chain that could most definitely fail under heavy loads

thats what i thought

@@georgegundersen562 Well, worm drives do have other issues. I think possibly in the early 1940s, worm drives were ahead of chains. Certainly before WW2 many racing bikes used vertical bevel drives, after the War they were supplanted by chains and high cam pushrods.

The skew gears were a source of problems throughout the life of RR engines. They have very high pressure contact points. P.S. Ducati used bevel gears in their camshaft drives and were considered to be completely fail safe.

Fall asleep to the drone and the carbon monoxide… 😴

Well, it was a mile from the house.

@@kevinkirk4285 it's ironic the GAA was born out of fords desire to build an aircraft engine ,,,on the opposite side the rolls royce meteor was born out of britians need for a tank engine ,,the 1100CI GAA made 500HP with 8 cylinders and the RR Meteor made 600 with 12 cylinders and 1650CI and had a similar torque number,,,funny that the GAA is only 200 pounds heavier than a modern cast iron big block chevy which weighs 900+ pounds fully dressed

​@@seanwieland9763Better than being burnt to death from an exploding RV

@@wildcoyote34 A big block chevy never weighed more than 750 pounds in its fattest dress. Cast iron block, heads, intake, and exhaust manifolds. For that matter neither did Mopars hemi.

Two legendary lumps!

I vote for the offy

I'd love to know how many full size Offy engines were built because I'm sure the number would be shockingly low. The block was notoriously hard to cast and it's said that only one small foundry on Oakland cast all of them. Others tried but no one claimed success. What I really would love to know is what was the Offy that started the Indy 500 the most times. My bet is at least 10. I consider the DGS engine an offy and the last time a Offy/DGS started it finished third. They dissipated so quickly because the Cosworth DFX was more economical than trying to make more Offy parts. Of course the same could be said for the FOYT/FORD V8 which powered AJ to his fourth win in 1977 and was gone from AJ's car in 1978.

@@brianlohnes3079 Jayne Mansfield?

That was based on a 1904 Peugeot engine.

Thank you for the time stamp.

War, or, better said, the military, are behind the modern evolution of so many things in automotive, weapons (duh!), aviation, engineering, metallurgy, medicine, pharmacy, communications, electronics, etc. Without the power of states and the immense dedicated budget (a good chunk of which isn't even in the public knowledge) we would not enjoy the world as it is today. Just saying... internet was originally a military project (in 1969, at the peak of the Cold War, the US DoD’s Advanced Research Projects Agency started building a network of computers before universities and other government research centers were eventually looped into the network. It was ARPAnet, from which, after many years, the world wide web evolved

@@stevemilo6935 Goodness me! How? HOW will I recover my self esteem after such a harsh blow from an unknown username on YT?

Yeah if they weren't modified at all from original it makes sense that a modified big block could beat them.

Cam chains are fine, but they need small links to handle the inertial forces at the crank sprockets. Duplex or triple row to handle the loads and adequate oil jets.

Right-angle spur gears are notorious for rapid wear. The thumping of camshaft springs would seriously take their toll.

Thank you! A story that had much more depth than I ever understood before digging into it!

Centurion tanks as well! Steel block instead of aluminium, chargers removed, and derated for durability.

Meteors were in a LOT of Brit tanks. And associated vehicles, APCs, engineering vehicles etc.

@@ldnwholesale8552they also made a V8 version, my friend Pete Grieve is working on one for a drag racing Land Rover. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CgV9skMYLxo.htmlsi=uI8dTF4DcrORb4Qn

The Meteor had an 8 cylinder version too. My friend Peter Grieve is working on a turbocharged one for his drag racing Land Rover. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CgV9skMYLxo.htmlsi=uI8dTF4DcrORb4Qn

Thank you!!!

You been missing out!

Thanks for watching it!

You and me both, thank you for watching!

It was the other way round, the Americans were into high volume production and parts interchangeability. They couldn't believe how low the precision standards were on the Merlin and effectively blue printed it. i.e. built it to much higher tolerances than Rolls Royce ever could with their older machinery. The RR Derby engines were originally virtually hand built with parts matched by tolerance, so yes, you could end up with a precision engine but it took too long to manufacter each one. When I worked in the drawing office at JCB excavators in the mid 80's our chief engineer who was about to retire saw war time srevice in the merlin factory and was charged with checking component tolerances and went into great detail about this.

@@russellmills4878 You are absolutely correct. Ford expertise was of course Mass Production and that requires high precision. With a capital intensive operation such as say the Rouge plant you cant afford to have the assembly line go down. If the parts coming into that line are not consistent the line stops and you are now burning money, in wages and the idle machinery you paid millions for. On a trip to England I visited a Birmingham museum that was mostly dedicated to the history of the textile industry. But there was a display of a Ford built Merlin (not a GAA) in the museum, because the plant had been located in Birmingham. In the description in front of this engine was the story of the British government reaching out to Ford to produce the engine because Rolls Royce could not produce engine in the quantities needed. The British War department paid for the plant, and the machinery Ford needed to be able to produce the Merlin in the numbers required for aircraft production. That description with the display included the fact that Ford had to take the RR blueprints, and rework them for mass production, as the RR blueprints were overly reliant on the craftsmanship of their regular rank and file employees.

Rolls-Royce was still hand building merlin engines using obsolete methods of fitting individual parts to an engine, with no interchangeability between one engine and another... completely unsuitable for American standards and production volumes. Britian desperately needed more engines and looked to America for a solution. Ford turned down the Merlin offer for good reasons. Packard had excess capacity and won the contract. the rest is history.

In my first reply, I tried my best to keep it as short as possible but there is yet more to know about this story for a full understanding. First of all, Henry Ford was a pacifist who absolutely detested war of any kind. So, prior to Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into the war, Henry Ford was not open to the production of any war material. That explains his refusal to produce the Merlin in any of his North American factories. After Pearl Harbor and formal declarations of war of course Ford plants were duly converted to the production of any number of critical components for the American war effort. These included Jeeps, and most famously the B-24 bomber built in Willow Run in an entirely new plant designed expressly for bomber production. However, prior to Ford Motor Companies' reorganization of their international operations which took place in the 1960's the overseas operations were separate companies with a mixture of ownership between the Ford parent company and local ownership. Henry wanted local ownership of significant amounts of the stock so that their operations would not be regarded as outsiders in each of those countries. That is how Ford came to produce Merlin engines in Birmingham (see my previous comment with the details of that) and why the British war department had to pay for the plant and the tooling so Ford of Britain could build those Merlin's in the quantities needed. Henry would not have allowed the production of Merlin's in the Dagenham plant.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,amen......same for me..............................................

those are nice, but GM LS engines build more power and are way more reliable.

@@GMCOGRE LS engines make more sense, but hot rodders are known for not always doing things that make sense.

LOL.. there's always some chevy ball slurper to chime in.

@@r000tbeer That's not nice.

@@r000tbeer no need for any "slurping", just pay attention to what people are building and you see all you need to.

Thank you for taking the time to watch it and glad it was fresh material to you!

Great as always. I saw a couple of these in a barn as a kid in the late 80s. Wish I knew what they were at the time. Ah missed opportunity? Thanks as always great work.