March 31, 1932 - the birth of a super engine..read more

March 31, 1932 -Ford Motor Company publicly unveiled its “V-8” (eight-cylinder) engine.

Despite his determination to offer an affordable V8, Henry Ford’s practical knowledge of that engine configuration was surprisingly limited, so after the V8 program had begun in earnest, he assigned Fred Thoms to gather and dismantle rival designs to study the existing state of the art.

The V8 engine was not terribly common in the late twenties and early thirties. V8 engines then presented several significant practical problems, among them the fact that the cylinder block was considerably more difficult to manufacture than that of an inline engine. Casting the block of a V8 engine as a single piece strained the limits of contemporary technology, so most contemporary V8 blocks were assembled in several pieces and then bolted together, which was time-consuming and expensive.

A second issue was smoothness. With a simple 180-degree (flat-plane) crankshaft, a V8 is essentially two conjoined inline fours, multiplying rather than minimizing the resultant shake. During this same period, GM briefly adopted flat-plane V8s for Viking (Oldsmobile’s short-lived companion make), Oakland, and Pontiac, but the engines were rough and unrefined and were quickly discontinued. The alternative, which Cadillac had adopted in 1923, was the 90-degree (split-plane) crank with a counterweight on each throw. This was considerably smoother than a comparable flat-plane engine (if slightly less powerful), but the split-plane crankshaft was also more expensive and complex to produce.

In a flathead (L-head) engine, the intake and exhaust valves are located in the block rather in the head, which serves as little more than a cover for the combustion chambers. Flatheads are cheaper and easier to manufacture than overhead valve (OHV) engines, but their thermal efficiency is poor and their breathing (volumetric efficiency) leaves much to be desired; intake mixture and exhaust gases have to follow a circuitous route in and out of the cylinders. (author diagram)

(Reference: Ford Company website, BBC News Archives)