Through the magic of digital animation, here’s a priceless look inside one of the most famous engines in history, the mighty Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 of World War II.
The Rolls-Royce Merlin just might be the most beloved piston engine of all time. A tremendous amount of romance surrounds the legendary V12 aircraft engine, due in no small part to the two equally legendary Allied aircraft of World War II that most famously made use of it, the Supermarine Spitfire and the P-51 Mustang. Along with Rolls-Royce in England, the engine was also produced under license by Packard in the USA, which only added to the mystique over the years. So when the subject is the greatest piston engines is history, the Merlin is gauranteed a spot at or near the top of the list.
Since the video doesn’t truly convey the Merlin’s size and scale, we’ll mention here that the big V12 displaced 1649 cubic inches with a 5.40-inch bore and 6-inch stroke, was nearly seven and a half feet long overall, and weighed 1640 lbs. However, the animation does clearly illustrate the elegant shaft-and-bevel camshaft drives, the 104-lb forged nickel-chrome-moly crankshaft, and the parallel four-valve combustion chamber layout first employed on the G series Merlin in 1937. Countless variants of the Merlin were produced with power ratings of up to 2,000 hp and more, and the engine’s fame continues on to this day. Without further ado, here’s the video.
We owe an awful lot to this motor and the folks that built them. It gave us the air advantage we needed to win the war. It effectively squelched the Germans, who were very close to jet airplanes, and could have turned the tables. I read, possibly here, these motors were built, ran, taken apart, reassembled, ran, taken apart AGAIN, checked, reassembled, ran, then shipped. They had an incredible appetite for fuel, like 60-100 gallons an hour, so the pilot didn’t have long. Not long ago, at an air show in Fl., someone in a WW2 warbird underestimated the fuel usage and pitched it on the beach as it ran out of fuel. I’ve been next to these on a startup, I can only imagine them in an airplane. Be a fun ride if there wasn’t a Messerschmidt, which had an equally impressive motor, trying to shoot you down. I read, it was the supercharger on Merlins that gave it a high altitude advantage.
Yes, it was Stanley Hooker’s great design of the supercharger which made the Merlin so good.
Impressive, but disappointing. The detail of the vertical shaft for the valve gear and magnetos is very poor. The bevel gear arrangement shows the vertical shaft’s bevel gear upside down and missing the magneto shafts to the skew gear.