He certainly was but he also took a long while to realise that Merlin’s (and therefore Crecy) were served by inadequate oil pumps. They literally could not meet to oil demand at high revs that caused big end failures. He also used sleeve valves on the Crecy which were just not necessary. Loop scavenging is enough.

And I’m just slightly more brilliant! All my innovations are, of course, classified. But, like many engineering geniuses, I like to brag anonymously on KZfaq about it.

@@davidelliott5843such a shame he was the only person working on the merlin and all of its short comings fell on one person.

Proper engineers can think in three dimensions. CAD just speeds up the development process.

Don't feel bad buddy you're only one guy! People have a hard time believing the Egyptians built the pyramids, but everyone forgets what is capable when you have enough people working on something especially slaves.

Yeah, the V2 rocked engineering. Good thing the US and Russia split up the spoils of 'Nazi' brainpower or we wouldn't have had the Cold War! 'Spirit' can go perform a solitary ritual in a corner.

@@davidelliott5843 Exactly... CAD doesn't design the engine, humans do, and still have to.... 🍻

I love u put a top fuel blown hemi in this video, great monster that could have been the mighty Crecy

ACrazed Tanker ~ I always thought of Rolls Royce as OHC 4-stroke. Bristol & Napier produced thousands of sleeve-valves engines.

@@rogertycholiz2218 Yes, but Bristol (Napier did use Bristol technolgy) was 4 strokes engines and they specific consumption (gram gas to hp/hour) was excellent (lover than a common 4 stroke), but two strokes have a bad specific consumption and nee more oil than Bristol sleeve valves who not need more oil as common US radial engines...

@@rogertycholiz2218 RR also made the Eagle which was a HH type very similar to the Sabre used in the Wyvern aircraft until it got a turbo-prop. At the same time they were also developing centrifugal and axial jets. Basically the same team went through the Merlin and Griffon onto the RB211 turbo fan which powered some of the early Jumbos and the same family of engines are still used today.

It was too complicated and expensive why it never went into production !!!

@@rogertycholiz2218 RR built various types of engines !!! DUUUUUHH!!!!!

Matchrocket ~ The sleeve-valve-2-strokes had a sound like no other.

The scream in a dive at full power would have made the Ju87 sound like a child's toy.

One to power and three to cool them off and lubricate everything...

Whetstone

Lullington. @@ianmangham4570

I read Italian ww2 airpower engineering were all a work of art. Intricate artwork AWFUL for mass production. USSR and USA engineering 'genius' was war machine designs that lent themselves to mass production. 10,000 planes a month at one point. Even more tanks, shells, etc.

oh yes they will, with vigor.

That’s RR all over, but it also pushes development. The sleeve valve system would of been just amazing. I really wish they could develop some modern race engines out of this technology but there is a lot of parasitical loss with the sleeve valve system plus the parasitic loss of power from the blower (super charger). May be a turbo would be better since it has no parasitic loss of HP on the engine because of the exhaust gases velocity is so fast on sleeve valve system but then again 2 strokes don’t like the resonance been played with on the exhaust system so may be that’s why they went with a supercharger….

@@Biketunerfy They might have been able to extract more power with expansion chamber exhausts as was done on 2-stroke racing bikes. Later aero engines would run at a near constant speed with variable pitch propellors so suited to expansion chambers

@@g8ymw SORRY FOR THE LENGTH OF THIS REPLY BUT ITS NEEDED TO BE EXPLAINED IN SOME DETAIL: but that’s what I’m talking about, basically 2 strokes need a partial vacuum in the exhaust to help scavenge some of the exhaust gasses from the engine so they use what’s called a Venturi on the exhaust to help cause suction which is why 2 strokes with expansion chamber exhausts have more power and throttle response but they don’t like being messed with and you can upset the resonance and suction because of a turbo being fitted. There is a reason why turbos have never been fitted to 2 stroke my friend. If it had a poppet exhaust valve you would not need the expansion exhaust instead of just a hole on the top end. A power valve on a 2 stroke is like turbo in the sense that it opens up at about 6 or 7 grand on the rpm that cause more suction and there for more fuel and air being pulled in and they even feel like a turbo with the lag until you hit the power band and the power valves open up and off you go, great fun. You feel it more on the road bikes than the dirt bikes because of the longer gear ratios but I love 2 strokes. 2 stroke bike engines pull in the air fuel mixture through the reed valve in the crank case instead of the cylinder heads so there is only a set amount of volume of air that can be forced in using forced induction so a turbo is really useless on a 2 stroke because turbos shift huge volumes of air at relatively low pressures like 10 to 35 + PSI for effective boost but some turbos can shift over 400 to 500 cubic feet per Minuit easily on a big bore turbos which makes them way more efficient than a super charger and a lot more cheaper which is why we are seeing them more and more in IC engines these days because it makes them more efficient so they would not work in a 2 stroke bike engine but could on this engine above because if it’s design.

@@Biketunerfy "a turbo is really useless on a 2 stroke" What?! You know there is even several factory turbocharged two-stroke snowmobiles built these days?

Being British, there's actually some hope for that. Abandoned things there usually just get shoved to the side, then to the back, then off to the shop or shed of someone who was involved with it where it may get passed around to several other people before all track of it is lost. Anywhere else it would get stripped for anything useful then turned into scrap metal quickly.

There's probably an old boy in a shed wondering where to start with his strip-down of the big lump he bought off of eBay, lol.

I mostly agree with your take away, the sleeve valve proved a bridge to far even in 4stroke time where simple ports where not an option (see Napier Sabre). However regarding your suggested alternative, 1 way valves in that context prove to be one of those issues that sound simple on the surface, but due to how rapid the changes of direction are intended to be, actually prove enormously difficult, failure prone and restrictive to airflow, and so rarely feature in any 2stroke design (even the V1's reed valved pulsejet capped out at 2,520 cycles per minute, and offered worse power to weight than contemporary 4 stroke motors... it was just more expendable). Instead in the world of high speed engines, cheap small designs use a timed reflection of exhaust gas, and more powerful/costly/larger engines use a "powervalve" which forms the same role as the sleeve here. As is often the case complexity of a motor isn't the number of parts, a v12 has few design challenges and little reduction in mean time before failure of an inline6, despite in many cases having just one shared part in main rotating assembly.

The sleeve valve system is actually less complex than the typical camshaft/cam follower/valve spring/poppet valve system that is almost universal to engines today. They have the advantages of better breathing due to no valve stems getting in the way in the ports, no problems with high-speed dynamics due to valve spring coil surge, they are transparent to heat, allowing higher compression ratio with low octane fuel, and allow complete freedom in combustion chamber design because the valve heads no longer take up most of the available space in the cylinder head.

During the '80s I drove buses equipped with Detroit 6V92 TA engines. Still remember the full throttle sound, scream, of them getting up to full highway speed. Even louder in the garage when they were run at full throttle during steam cleaning.

Drove a '77 Kenworth with a Detroit 8V92 for a few years hauling drywall in the Sacramento region. Ran like a top, very reliable, made good money running this truck, but it always used a lot of motor oil. A LOT of motor oil. Like 1 Gallon every 400 miles or so! And this was just accepted as normal with a solid, good Detroit two-cycle engine. This truck with it's 13 Speed could out accelerate most trucks with an 80K load on flat ground, but get in the hills ... well this "445 HP" Kenworth could not match a small cam Cummins 350 with the same load. Go Figure ...

@@6528ken 4 stroke torque vs 2 stroke HP.

@@6528ken They made several versions of the Series 92 engines. One variant had a broader torque curve for just the situation you mentioned, hill climbing. Tradeoff was a bit less peak HP. There were also the TAA models, turbocharged with an aftercooler. Or at least TAA was the code used when they purchased the buses I drove. Came across something saying later on it was TAC. For the buses they only were TA, but the 6V92 TA buses took off much better than the smaller ones with just a 6V71. As for the oil usage, I recall we saw about 2 qts every 6-700 miles when they were newish.

Would you have an educated guess at what the RR Crecy could have produced with a turbocompounded exhaust system? I imagine the power to weight would be over 2?

Yes, and it's predecessor the 500cc H1. I worked as a mechanic for a dealer just north of N.Y. city when our first H1 was uncrated, serviced, and test ridden. It let out quite a wail, both from the intake and the exhaust. Sound of a Ferrari came to mind. Later smaller triples were produced but their time was limited as pollution standards favored the four cycle engines. The Crecy would have been deafening I'd think.

@@whalesong999 Yes, I rode a friends RZ350 and knew a guy who rode a RD500. But the H2 was by far the most memorable.

Yes it is

@@jackgee3200 "Contemporary developments" being the jet engine. A quantum leap upward from enormously complex piston engines and their multitudes of operation-critical moving parts. The last-generation aircraft piston engines had reached the very pinnacle of their development and could go no further. Piston engines are still the most efficient internal combustion motors, but there is only so much that can be done with parts that go up and down.

By the end of the recip engine era of aircraft propulsion, the superchargers were as big as the engines themselves. In motor-jet systems, the recip engine would have just been getting in the way of power production. Whittle had it right that the path to high speed was the turbojet. Even turbojets have their limits. In the SR-71, by the time it is flying at Mach 3.2, the turbomachinery is just along for the ride, most of the thrust is coming from the ramjet mode.

I'll second that. The sound alone would be astonishing.

Allen Millyard! He could most likely do it. Interesting guy, Mister Millyard. steve

@@monsieurcommissaire1628 Wouldnt it just !!

There is a guy on KZfaq called 2stroke stuffing check him out

True Expansion chamber and power valves on Modern MX bikes.

@@MitzvosGolem1 true that except the KX500 never had more or a better power curve than the power valveless CR500 but that's not the case for everything else that was sold to the public that I'm aware of

@@marcstlaurent3719 I had both bikes 1987 kx500 violent fast . Cr was smoother .True

@@marcstlaurent3719 my point was the chamber initially not kips valve.

Incidentally the RRHT also has a book about fitting the Mustang with the Merlin. It was quite a bit more complicated that you'd think - lots of plumbing issues. Rolls Royce was tasked with this job, they came up with the Mustang X (I think two built) before the effort was moved to the US.

A lot of the time especially after the war it was the stupid labor party, a lot of expertise came over to America

The Brits brought the whittle engine to USA for research, development and PRODUCTION !!!!! Because the USA had more manufacturing capacity. GE did the development on the whittle and seen its limitations and developed their own axial floe design the J35 that went into production and it developed into the J47's !!! !

the reasons was always to allow tricycle landing gear who improve a lot the ground controll and forward visibility (taildragger landing gear was source of a huge level of accidents) and allow a canon firing trough the propeller shaft (was made sinze the 1938 Morane 406 and he's Hispano HS404 20mm canon, but was limited in ammo capacity (60shots drum magazine on Morane 406 and Dewoine D520)

What's the book?

Yeah once they realized just how much simpler they could make this whole system once they figured out the mountain of a learning curve it makes dealing with Pistons, valves look ridiculous.

The Nomad was aimed at achieving the lowest possible specific fuel consumption for its power output. In that regard it succeeded, but of course its complexity made it impractical. But as a piece of engineering, WOW! You just have to wonder about the mad geniuses that dreamed it up.

Jersey Mike ~ The GM EMD locomotive engines had a Rootes blower intake.These engines lasted thousands of hours before maintenance.

@@rogertycholiz2218 The 567D and 645E engines both had a turbo option with the overrunning clutch.

The Germans may have heard it leaving the airport though !!