I worked on the YFM-1 in A&P school at Keesler Field. If the APU quit you had better be near the field.
It was pretty but a dumb design. Electrical system was ahead of its time.
In a message dated 7/1/2009 12:32:43 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, TonyTales writes:
The left and right rotation feature started with the F Model engines.
They reversed the crankshaft and installed an idler gear in the accessory drive train - this allowed the accessories including the supercharger, camshafts and magnetos to turn in the same direction. on both Left handed and right handed engines. So cooling pumps, oil pressure and scavenge pumps did their thing properly.
Above is from "Vee for Victor" by Daniel Whitney
Problems with Allison V-1710 included poor initial funding of the project by Air Corp and tight money fist of General Motors - they tried to do the development on the cheap, kept engineering staff very small and didn't build many early test engines. When something broke or didn't work, testing stopped until they could repair and rebuild the test engine. Rolls Royce was building many test engines, even had four installed and flying. They could pull an engine for rebuild without stopping testing of other engines.
Another big problem was the Air Corp insistence on turbo-supercharging which meant Allison was very late with a two speed supercharger and even later with two-stage-two speed superchargers. Allison's fitted to P-40, P-39 and P-51A were very poor performers above 15,000 feet as they didn't have turbos. The P-51 Mustang was saved by a Brit who recommended fitting a Rolls Merlin with two-speed two-staqe supercharging. It revo;utionized the aircraft. Very late in the war Allison developed a similar model of the V-1710 and it proved as good as the erlin.
Still another problem was the Air Corp trying to get Allison to fit fuel injection on the engines. Good idea but it held up development by at least a year and never was used anyway.
A lot of time, money and engineering effort went into pusher versions for the Bell XFM-1 Airacuda. Giant waste of time and money.
Tony V
/
-----Original Message-----
From: Rmacact39@...
To: TonyTales@...
Cc: DonDorie@...
Sent: Tue, Jun 30, 2009 7:13 am
Subject: First Allison V-1710
When they reversed the timing and made the engine run backwards how did they make the oil pump and scavenger pump work properly.
I woke up in the night worrying about that.
Could the V-1710 run upside down for more that a few seconds?
You can tell that a lot of strange things go thru my mind.
Johnstone is getting a copy . He wants to keep up with the latest in excellent trivia.
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