Total production of Merlin engines:-
Packard Detroit AND Continental Motors, Muskegan: 55,523
R-R Derby: 32,377
R-R Crewe: 26,605
R-R Glasgow: 23,647
Ford UK Manchester 30,428
Source: ‘The Magic of a Name: The Rolls-Royce Story: The First 40 Years’ by Peter Pugh. Publ Icon Books, UK, and Totem Books, USA. An excellent series of three books. Look out for occasional special offers on the three.
I find the achievements of the manufacturers in WW2 amazing, and I just wish the human aspects were better recorded. Rolls-Royce, like countless other firms, was encouraged to set up ‘shadow factories’ to disperse production just before the war. These were nominally in areas where skilled people were available, but demand soon outstripped supply, especially when many were called up or volunteered for military service.
Workers had to be shipped in for the new factories, and there weren’t the houses to accommodate them. People had workers billeted on them. It’s impossible to imagine the mental and physical duress of working long hours, with severely rationed food, the blackout, air raids, and worries about the safety of friends and relations, and fears about the future course of the war. The Peter Pugh book quotes an example of an early problem of increasing absenteeism at the R-R Glasgow factory, ‘…. due to the workers suffering from mental and physical fatigue, and in a bid to try and resolve the problem we reduced the working hours slightly – i.e. to eighty-two hours a week by means of arranging one half-Sunday a month as holiday.’
For those involved in organising production, there were tremendous headaches in getting material and machines. Much travelling was involved, and though distances in the UK are relatively short, train journeys were subject to much disruption, and fuel for cars was very strictly rationed.
As for the Rolls-Royce factories, Derby had focused on development and production of relatively small batches, relying on a very high proportion of skilled people on the production side. In contrast, Crewe and Derby had to be designed from the outset for high volume production with a much lower proportion of skilled people. Crewe and Derby brought in a fair amount of components and castings from other factories, whereas by 1941 Glasgow machined 98% of its production and made its own castings.
I don’t know much about the Ford Manchester factory, although I think it employed 12,000 people. Presumably it didn’t have the blessing of Henry Ford, as he had earlier refused to make Merlin engines in the USA for a ‘belligerent nation’.
Ford, no doubt like Packard, and perhaps like the R-R shadow factories, had their own drawings, reflecting the different production methods. Packard were stuck with using British thread specifications, which apparently caused some delays early on.
Dynamotive,
This doesn’t help much in your quest! I’ve been looking in old copies of Model Engineer for similar projects, and haven’t got very far. In a 1949 magazine there was a similar-looking crankshaft, but for a truck, which had been turned from solid in 3% Nickel steel. Not many modellers had milling machines in those days!
You've probably seen this model Deltic engine.....
http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/Tomlinson.htm
The innards don't attempt to follow the protoype, and the builder want to avoid splitting the big ends, so he used ball bearings in conjunction with a built-up crankshaft (using Loctite or similar). He commented that he remained concerned about the effect of torsional vibration.
