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So. it got me thinking...... if a guy up in Canada can fabricate a 392 hemi engine block, what is stopping people elsewhere from fabricating flathead blocks...... and putting in priority oiling, 5 bearings, KickA** porting, rerouted and/or better cooled exhaust ports etc....?
Using technology known prior to 1938, and using a factory flathead engine:
Grind cam for all intake lobes and run cam at crank speed.
Roots blower at low PR runs into intake and exhaust ports.
Turbocharger provides additional boost.
Mill exhaust ports into the cylinders near bottom, bridged, which feeds turbo.
Run methanol and nitrous oxide as a two stroke.
Why?
Period correct technology. More HP available before mechanical limits are hit (at a given peak cyl pressure, you can make more HP). High octane oxygenated modern fuels and nitromethane were later developments. If nitromethane was known to work as a motor fuel, you would have seen it in WWII, like nitrous and methanol.
Not that anyone would do it, but it could make stupid amounts of power without resorting to later technology or aftermarket blocks or heads.
This is a very interesting concept!.... I used a twist of this many years ago to make a compressor out of 4 cylinders of a V8 engine - without a custom compressor head for one side of the engine which results in an odd firing and imbalance 4 cylinder engine powering the compressor...
The four compressor cylinders were "two stroke" and used the intake valves as intake and the exhaust valves as exhausts....I had to make special headers for the exhaust side as four of the ports were now compressor discharge ports andof course, the other four remained as exhaust ports for the engine, but the intake worked okay with a one barrel carb on an adaptor and the the compressor intake being through the other plane of the manifold.
The compressor lobes were nominally 180 degree lobes.... at .005" lift...It was a "faked up" profile.... The custom grind was done by Shadbolt Cam in Vancouver BC..... I don't know where they obtained the blank from but, I guess, cam blanks are made every day somewhere in the world and if you are a cam grinder, you know where to get them. We got thinking about this compressor section being able to be used as a supercharger......
A second one of these engines never got built - at least not by us....
Incidentally, the idea of this came as a result of us rebuilding a fabricated compressor head for a commercially made engine/compressor combo....and, if we were doing this, how could we do it cheaper and better?
The point is though, that JustaRacer's idea about making a two stroke may just be a viable idea as compressors ARE two stroke in principle.... The problem that I always saw as the biggest obstacle to the high performance application of this is that you will need valve train components that are rated at twice the engine rpm of for stroke engines..... i.e. for an engine revving 8000 rpm, you will need 16000 rpm valvegear.
