In 1915, Alanson P. Brush and Ferro Machine & Foundry created the first monobloc V8, and the engine features some other remarkable innovations, too.

Our sincere thanks to historian, restorer, and Mac’s Motor City Garage reader Neil Dorey, who first suggested this feature and provided leads, information, and photos. That’s his engine in the lead photo above. We couldn’t have done it without him. -McG 

For many years, it was an accepted fact in automotive lore that in 1932, Henry Ford produced the first monobloc V8—that is, with all eight cylinders cast in a single unit on a common crankcase. However, it was never really true. The Oakland/Pontiac and Oldsmobile/Viking divisions at General Motors produced monobloc V8s a few years earlier, though they were less well-known and produced in fewer numbers, But there’s another example of this manufacturing breakthrough that predates all of them by 15 years: the Ferro V8 designed by Alanson P. Brush.

The author of more than 130 patents, A.P. Brush (1878-1952) was one of the great creative minds of the early auto industry. He designed the engine for the 1903 Cadillac, co-founded the Oakland Motor Car Company, and his own car, the Brush Runabout (see our feature here) was full of clever innovations. As one of the few real experts in the early days of the business, he was in great demand as an engineering consultant. His monobloc design for the Ferro Machine & Foundry Company of Cleveland, Ohio, a volume producer of automotive and marine engines (including outboards) was not just one engine, in fact, but an entire family of three V8s and even a V12.

In those days, a V8 engine was more commonly built in one of two ways. Cadillac, Peerless, and others adopted the conventional construction of the time, with cast-iron cylinder banks bolted to an aluminum crankcase. In some others, including Northway (Cole, Oldsmobile) and Chevrolet, the cylinders and crankcase were cast integrally, but split down the middle into two halves on the crankshaft centerline. (See the Chevy V8 here.) To our knowledge—which is always subject to improvement—Brush’s design for the Ferro V8 was the first to use monobloc construction in volume production.

The smallest of the three Ferro V8s, the 8-35 as used in the Scripps-Booth Models D and H, displaced just 162 cubic inches, with a 2.625-in bore and 2.5 in stroke, and was rated at 35 hp. Originally intended for the never-produced Scripps-Booth Vitesse sports car, the 8-35 was designed to be light (360 lbs) and compact, so it used only two main bearings and side-by-side connecting rods. The other two V8s, the 48 hp 8-48 and the 60 hp 8-60, sported three-main bearing bottom ends and fork-and-blade rods. Otherwise the three V8s are similar, sharing a number of remarkable features.

Unlike nearly all the other American automotive V8s of the period, the Brush design featured overhead valves. (The rest were invariably L-heads, Chevrolet being one other exception a year or two later.) This was not only advanced for the period, it was rather ingenious as now the valve gear and porting were relocated to the cylinder heads, greatly simplifying the block casting. Also, there were no combustion chambers as such in the cylinder heads. The head decks were machined flat and the chamber was formed in the cylinder, much like the W-series Chevrolet and Ford V8s that arrived several decades later. The eight spark plugs screwed into the sides of the cylinders. The intake manifolding was between the banks with the exhaust to the outside, a modern crossflow layout. And note the roller cam lobe followers..

Ferro V12

The 1916 Briscoe Eight was powered by the Ferro 8-48 V8 (3.00-in bore x 3.5-in stroke, 198 CID). Jackson also used the 8-48 in the 1916 Model 348 and 1917-18 Wolverine, as did Hollier, Economy, and possibly  a few others. Apparently, Ferro’s sole customer for the biggest V8, the 8-60 (3.25-in x 4.00-in, 265 CID) was the Gem Motor Car Company of Jackson, Michigan. (Briscoe, Jackson, and Gem were all based in Jackson.) In the trade journals, Ferro also advertised a 12-80 V12 (above) boasting 350 cubic inches and 80 hp, still based on the Brush monobloc architecture, but it appears there were no takers.

Among all the novel features in the innovative V8s of A.P. Brush, there was one more that caught our eye. The valvetrain was configured so the valve lash could be adjusted from outside the engine, via screws in the valve covers. Though it’s mounted upside down from the more familiar orientation, see below: Here’s a ball-mounted rocker arm, four decades before it appeared on the 1955 Chevrolet and Pontiac V8s.