Re: What engines were in WWII tanks ?

Posted by D.L. on September 21, 2002 at 21:26:00 from (209.99.119.62):

In Reply to: What engines were in WWII tanks ? posted by Just Wondering on September 21, 2002 at 07:28:59:

Chrysler was the most prolific supplier of U.S. tanks during WWII. They were made in the Warren, MI facility and the factory was considered one of America's "Arsenal of Democracy".

The actual engines for the tanks were made at the Jefferson Avenue plant in Detroit between 1942 and 1943. The engines then sent over to Warren to be installed in the tanks (Sherman M4A3's).
Chrysler produced 7,500 of these tanks.

The Sherman, though was originally designed for the Curtis-Wright 9-cylinder radial engine, but demand was so high for the radial engines to be used on aircraft, the goverment contracted with the auto industry to come up with tank engines.

General motors had a plan to use 2 super charged diesels side-by-side, but was unable to finalize the design in time to be used.

Chrysler figured it would take at least two years to design and build a completely new powerplant and get it into production, so its solution was to come up with something out of its existing parts bin.

Chrysler's tank engine combined not two, not three, but five Chrysler Windsor six-cylinder, passenger-car engines on a single gear casing. It displaced 1,253 cubic inches, weighed nearly four tons and delivered 445 horsepower. Better still, most all of the components were readily available.

The 30-cylinder engine placed its No. 1 engine in a normal vertical position, Nos. 2 and 5 at a 45-degree angle on either side of the vertical block and Nos. 3 and 4 at slightly less than a 90-degree angle below vertical. They called it a "Multibank" engine, while the military officially called it the A-57. But to the soldiers who drove and maintained the five-block beast, it was known as the "Egg-beater" or "Porcupine" motor, and even the "Dionne Quintuplets" after the then-famous five little ladies born in Canada in 1934.

The Chrysler-built Multibank-powered U.S. Army tanks helped rout Germany's Rommel in Africa and led the charge in Burma where Sherman tanks covered 820 miles in just 20 days. General George S. Patton Jr. extolled the Sherman's virtues when he wrote: "In mechanical endurance and ease of maintenance, our tanks are infinitely superior to any other." And it couldn't hurt auto sales to know that the war was being won using Chrysler car engines.

Chrysler also designed an aircraft engine....

Chrysler had developed the large XI-2220 reciprocating piston engine in 1941 for use in fighter planes. The water-cooled, 2,500-horsepower inverted V16 powerplant was essentially two, narrow-angle V8s mated nose-to-nose. Engineers solved the problem of vibration from coupling so many cylinders to a single, long crankshaft by placing the reduction gears to drive the propeller in the middle of the engine rather than at the front or back.

The XI-2220 was flight-tested in a couple of X-P-47 fighters in 1945, but the war ended before production could begin so the project was cancelled, sending most of the engineers back to designing car engines. But the XI-2220 has a special place in Chrysler history because it was the company's first "Hemi" - it was designed with a hemispherical combustion chamber that had the spark plug in the center for more-even burning of the fuel-air mixture. As we all know, this design was applied to large V8 car engines in the 1950s and later spawned the famous racing and muscle cars of the 1960s and '70s.

Sorry so long...but there ya have it ;-)

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• Re: Re: What engines were in WWII tanks ? olddog 04:50:01 09/28/02 (0)

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