New Head

A blob of metal was gingerly toted out of a New Jersey aircraft-engine factory, carefully deposited on the seat of an automobile, carted across the Hudson and hoisted to the RCA building's 32nd floor. A pudgy little man, Perry William Brown, 55, assistant works manager of Wright Aeronautical Corp., told assembled newsmen proudly: "There it is."

"It" was a piece of neatly machined aluminum alloy. It represented, said Wright, a revolutionary advance in the technique of working duralumin, which meant development of a cylinder head that will give U.S. planes speed, altitude, load and range superiority over the Axis.

For a decade or more the world's makers of air-cooled aircraft engines had pondered one problem: how to fabricate strong cylinder heads cheaply. Even the best cylinder heads sometimes cracked under prolonged stress. Heads have two functions: to withstand the tremendous pressures generated by the cylinder's air-gas vapor explosions, and to drain off excess heat with flangelike cooling fins. To drain off the heat was the tough problem. England's Bristol works whittles fins in forged heads at tremendous expense. In the U.S. a less costly scheme was adopted. Heads were cast in a bird's nest of sand patterns. Hundreds of nails, each hand-placed, held the sand in form while the metal was poured.

The new head, forged, has twice the strength of the old. This greater strength permits higher pressures, 12-15% greater power output per cylinder, moves up aircraft speed, carrying capacity and range. Further, the new head gives 30% better cooling.

The new head weighs 26 Ib.--3 1/2 lb. less than the old--bringing the pound-horsepower ratio down to less than one-for-one for the first time in aircraft-engine history. Skilled manpower is saved; eight unskilled boys do work previously assigned to 150 technicians. Finally, the hydraulic press, one of the few large automotive-industry tools convertible to aircraft making, is tailor-made for the forging job.

It had taken technicians five years of Yankee ingenuity and stick-at-it-iveness to do the job. But they had done it.

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