for all us WWII nuts and even afterwards

[sturmbird]

picked up a book yesterday that was put out by Allison Engine Company, and pretty much was a detailed history of the company and it's engineering from around 1915 thru 1990. They have a lot of photos in there. The parts about the V1710 was really interesting as it went into the first couple of designs very heavilly (the engine was redesigned twice in the later 1930's). No piston aircraft engine ever went thru the durability tests that these engines went thru; not even close to the testing that the V1710 went thru. They had some nice photos of the B17 that used Allison V1710s as well as the B29 that used the W3460's.

They finally told how the J31 thru J71 jet engines came about, and went into a very detailed chronological history of their evolution, while also bringing in the Whittle and at least one other design. What's interesting is they made no mention of the Jumo 004 engines, and I know for a fact that they owned three of them and studied them extensively. Had a lot of test cell and dynometer photos in there; which is kind of a rare thing to ever get to see. They also showed a lot of photos of their gas turbine development for rotary winged stuff, and turboprops. One thing I didn't know was that the T40 was not their first turbo prop. It was the T38. The first T56 was (production) was shipped in 1953, and not 1955 like most think. Also went into the counter rotating prop stuff a good bit, plus all the new six and eight blade slow rpm engines.
good read
gary

[Deleted]

Sounds interesting. I've a book on Rolls Royce aero engines somewhere and that was a good read too.

[sturmbird]

I love historical stuff, and there was just tons of data in that book. One thing that seriously stunned me was that the original V1710 contracts were from the U.S. Navy, and not the Army! Reading the production data in the book told me why the Germans and Japanese didn't have a chance in WWII. In 1944 the Allison plant 5 made more engines a month than all of Germany and Japan put together! There's also a lot of small bits of data here and there about how the major corporations worked together even though in many cases they were competeting for the same contracts!
gary