Rolls Royce Documentary on the making of the Merlin Engine.

Its really amazing how the manufacturing process standards have changed in 75 years. I am sure in its day RR factories were the leading examples of the most modern processes.  But the machinery, working methods,  environment & conditions & looks like not much EH&S around!!!   Its almost shocking compared to today's standards.   Yet as you say such places made GB great & truth be told factories like that saved us all in those dark days.  

Its tempting to say imagine what they could do with todays technics & manufacturing,  but no need,  you can see for yourself,  its called the RR Trent 1000

But things were less modern all those years ago.

An interesting sidelight is that General Franko in Spain had ME 109s [made by the Hispano Suisse Company] with Merlin Engines! These Spanish Me 109s are the ones filmed in the Battle Of Britain [1969 fim], and I bet the Nazis wish they had had that luxury!

At the time no company in no country had the technological ability of RR in Britain as regards engine manufacture, though the Nazis did have fuel injection that had a point considering negative gravity and the stall on the Merlin in the wrong circumstances ...

ATB from George

Tell me about it George,  I started work in the marine industry building go faster military stuff - anything marine was typically years behind everything else.  Colledge was not much better with stuff left over from 1940's. 

I thought I'd died & gone to heaven when I got to uni.,  brand new labs & equipment that I was only dreaming about down on the mudflats.    

Me 109s also had their non RR, engines fitted upside down and the canon fires through the spinner.

George, a very interesting link. And contributions from the forum members too!

If I'm right, exist in UK one airshow where SQ of such engine is appreciable (live)...

I have visited all yours air/RAF museums.

Toured the RR factory near Bristol about 10 years back. They were casting turbine blades for commercial engines. An astonishingly manual process, relying heavily on inspection and rejection to control the output quality of a very variable and error-prone process. I was not particularly impressed from an engineering perspective, but the people were nice and appeared competent and experienced.

There are a numbers of airshows where the SQ of the Merlin can be heard,  in fact practically every weekend in the summer.    I get a Merlin SQ flyover very frequently,  my home is under a low level flight path for airshow traffic; Spitfires, Lancaster, Vulcan, Red Arrows even a ME109.  

We have numbers of Spitfires flying in UK,  but the most frequent aircraft that fly every week are from the RAF's Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. They have numbers of Spitfires & Hurricanes plus a Lancaster with x4 of the USA built Packard Merlins.   

http://www.raf.mod.uk/bbmf/

Forgive quality, it was a quick and dirty iphone thing...

Excellent documentry. My late uncle flew mosquito night fighters over France and the Merlin powered them superbly. A striking thing to me was the man operating the forge- no earmuffs! He must have been deaf as a post with constant ringing tinnitus.  Also, what an appalling thing it would have been if the factories were bombed. They certainly looked big enough and must have been tempting targets. Imagine the huge effort to get things up and running again.

I am sure Naim in their own way must have similar standards to RR, consumers can take all the effort of production for granted.

The hangar today

Another good docu on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...index=10&list=WL

ATB from George