Spitfires with the Merlin engine performed- but had lots of maintenance issues- overhead cam drives known to go out at times, supercharger 2 speed drives need attention and crashs happened with engine failures on takeoff. British lend lease purchases of Curtis Hawks-P40s- with Allison engines for ground support often ended up as upper level utility fighters despite comparitively poor high altitude performance because they had still working engine after 100 hours with minimal maintenance-especially in North Africa. Home island had good ready to fly record because engines were quick swapped and rebuilt by close factory- sort of same practice Russians had with MiG 21s, 300 air hours and time for engine swap. Egyptians after the kick out russians trying to take over country had bunch of MiG21s but only about 2 dozen rebuilt engines in country for 100 odd fighters- and after about 350 air hours failure led to most of Mig21s being grounded while engine swaps hunted for- reserve air mech thought commercial Rolls Royce with 75% of power looked like it would fit and got tape measure, prybars and made it work- the Rolls commercial engine and MiG21 engine had same design grandfather but the commercial engine was field maintainable with about 2000 hours expected instead of 300.GE engine about same power had 3000 hours expect between overhauls but size problems to get into MiG21. Berlin Airlift brought out the field maintenace difficulties of Merlin compared to Wright Cyclones- after landing in Berlin the English transports had to do a overnight maintenance before takeing off again, Wright cyclones and P&W radials just turned around and headed back for next load about 10 times before maintenance- which was plugs and valve lash usually. British bought old F4 Wildcats after F6 replaced it in US Navy for their carriers on Atlantic duty as preference over SeaFire-Navy version of Spitfire- because of engine reliability mostly( size of elevators on some of carriers another consideration) Lots of little tricks to get performance from small package- but the maintenance of the little trick here and there can be aggravation for long life. A fighter with short combat life expectancy can use short life high performance engine economicly - but when you try using the same engine on long range required transport or something operating on water, then a high failure rate for critical components gets attention. Jaguar under Ford got the V12 replaced with V8 and improved handling. Couple local shops have Jaguar sedans come in with small block chevy swaps( I know, small blocks GMs are tucked into lots of things) because owners got tired of fixing every other week. The Perigrine engine was also trouble- but the Rolls Royve engineers made choice to try to fix Merlins with time available and the Pergrine engined planes ended up short operational life, design relacements used other engines instead of compact Perigrine sort of derived from Curtis D12 and hopped up from 600hp to 800hp. Limeys sometimes have lots of work need means job security for more workers attitude- especially when Labor party in power. RN
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Today's Featured Article - Hydraulics - Cylinder Anatomy - by Curtis von Fange. Let’s make one more addition to our series on hydraulics. I’ve noticed a few questions in the comment section that could pertain to hydraulic cylinders so I thought we could take a short look at this real workhorse of the circuit. Cylinders are the reason for the hydraulic circuit. They take the fluid power delivered from the pump and magically change it into mechanical power. There are many types of cylinders that one might run across on a farm scenario. Each one could take a chapter in
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