Manufacturing and Durability

Allisons are are a little different. Um, there's one boat that continues to run an Allison today. I don't know exactly what they pull for manifold pressure. The Allison's just a little bit bigger engine, 1710 cubic in. Um, it whereas the Merlin is u mag uh aluminum, the many of the parts on an Allison are magnesium. Um, is that the same Allison that makes transmissions today? Uh, I believe so. Yeah, it was Allison GM. Mhm. Wow. The interesting part about some of these engines, at least on the Merlin, um back during the war, uh there were a lot of US manufacturers uh building parts for the engines. So, you might see an intake manifold that had cast in it general or may tag or stuff like that. It's pretty interesting. So, there all kinds of stuff going on. Yeah. How often did you have to rebuild after a race? Was it after every race or when we were racing the Merlin's the blower drive assembly? And you probably heard maybe heard the term quill shaft. So it was common to break a quill shaft, which was a blower drive shaft. Um was pretty common. By the time I was involved in racing, they had pretty well beefed that particular piece up, but the blower drive assembly was still the weak link, especially on the earlier model engines, which down the road we were forced to use as the years went by. After every time that we ran a boat, it didn't matter if it was one lap, three laps, five laps, every time we ran an engine, I should say, we took the blower off and checked the blower drives, checked the gears and whatnot to to make sure all that stuff was good. Don't you have some parts in there? The engine shop here at the museum is is working on uh a Merlin engine right now. We've got some polished valve covers. We're real close. We're real close. We got to put the harnesses on. And there's