Ford DOHC engine

[Art Anderson]

One of my favorites! I have two Olsonite Eagle kits stacked on an AMT Two Much kit. Now I just have to actually build it. There were several feature articles on the car back in the day. Hot Rod had a full page color article, I think. maybe it was Car Craft.

i would have loved to hear it mak a run!

The Ford 4-cam Indy engine (255cid unsupercharged) had a scream like no other engine at speed, especially down the backstretch at Indianapolis (5/8 of a mile long), where those engines would wind out to just shy of 10,000 rpm, an almost unheard-of rpm range for racing engines up to 1964 when it was first introduced to USAC Championship Racing. The megaphone style tailpipes were angled upward slightly, which on the Front Stretch (also 5/8 mile) put the sound right in the eardrums of people in the penthouse seats (the upper deck). About the only other Indianapolis Car engine of those years that was that loud, but with a flat (180-degree) crankshaft was the NOVI V8, at 167cid, supercharged by a large centrifugal supercharger that turned at amost 90,000 rpms (10X crankshaft speed), but the Novi's screaming sound was as much from the blower as from the exhaust. The loudest of the Ford cars was a Leader Card Racers Watson Roadster which Chief Mechanic AJ Watson had installed a 4-cam Ford as a backup team car for 1965. That car had the "bundle of snakes" exhaust headers, but with the megaphone tailpipes angled slightly to the right, which put the exhaust sound right in people's laps down the front straight. (that car failed to qualify--too slow to bump anyone from the field on the 4th day of qualifications that year.)

I think you can find some vintage films on Youtube of Ford-powered cars 1964-67, before the Ford DOHC Indy Engine was turbocharged.

Art

[Mark]

The Busby dragster actually only made a few passes down a drag strip (something like a half dozen or so from what I have read). He bought the engines for cheap because of a rule change that was thought would make them ineffective. When the rule change was rescinded, he had people offering him stupid money for them, so he sold them at a huge profit...

[Art Anderson]

An interesting anecdote about the development of the Ford Indianapolis DOHC 255cid V8: As most know already, the intake ports in the cylinder heads are in the middle of the heads themselves, rather than on the sides (as with say, the Offenhauser 4cyl that was dominant at Indianapolis from 1935 (276cid) all the way out to 1964 in unsupercharged form).

In order to get a good idea how this center induction might be done, Ford's engineers studied the legendary racing engineer Harry A. Miller, whose engines ruled Indianapolis from 1926 through 1934 and were the basis for the Offy design. Miller built 3 DOHC V8 engines for Indianapolis in 1931-32, but where to find one to study? The answer came that there was a Miller V8 in a small museum in Frankfort, IN, which is about 20 miles southeast of where I live--in the back of all places, a funeral home. Funeral Director William Goodwin had been collecting antique and classic cars for a decade or more, and in his collection? An intact Miller V8.

So, Ford Motor Company leased that engine for about 6 months, took it to Dearborn and disassembled it, and their engineers were able to use Miller's centerline induction layout for inspiration. After studying Goodwin's engine, they reassembled it, clearned and polished it, returned it to Goodwin's Museum, where it remains to this day. So, in a way, what was old in the summer/fall/winter of 1963-64 became new again.

Art