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Everything visible here says off-road.Those are flotation tires, wide and soft, designed to spread the truck's weight ov...
10/04/2026

Everything visible here says off-road.

Those are flotation tires, wide and soft, designed to spread the truck's weight over loose ground rather than cut into it. A highway truck runs narrow tires at high pressure for low rolling resistance. This one runs the opposite, because sinking is a worse problem than fuel economy.

The front axle is driven. Look at the hub, and at the ground clearance under the differential. That is a 6x6 configuration, three driven axles, built for sites where there is no road at all.

The front bumper is a solid plate with a tow point in the middle, and there is a grille guard protecting the radiator. Both exist because things hit the front of this truck.

The exhaust runs straight up beside the cab rather than behind it, which keeps it clear of whatever the truck is driving through.

And in the lower photograph the chassis is bare. No body, no fifth wheel, just the frame and the driveline, because trucks like this were sold as a rolling chassis and the buyer specified what went on top. A drill rig, a crane, a water tank, a dump body, or a winch tractor.

Underneath it would have been one of the big mechanical diesels of the period. A Cummins Big Cam, a Detroit 8V92, or a Caterpillar 3406, driving through a Fuller Roadranger with enough gears to crawl.

What makes these trucks interesting is that almost none survive. A highway tractor gets retired and sold on. An oilfield or construction truck gets worked until it is finished, and then it gets left where it stopped.

Bugatti had been building straight-eights with a single overhead camshaft and vertical valves in a rectangular combustio...
10/04/2026

Bugatti had been building straight-eights with a single overhead camshaft and vertical valves in a rectangular combustion chamber for years. That architecture had won enormous numbers of races and it was running out of development.

In 1929 two Miller cars had competed at Monza. Bugatti acquired them in exchange for three of his own Type 43s.

What he found inside was a hemispherical cylinder head with the valves inclined at 90 degrees to each other, a design from Harry Miller's workshop in Los Angeles.

That geometry does something Bugatti's vertical valves could not. Opposed inclined valves allow larger valves within the same bore, give the charge a straighter path in and out, and burn the mixture more completely.

Bugatti examined the engines, concluded the Americans were right, and adopted the principle.

The Type 50 of 1930 was the result, and it was the first Bugatti with twin overhead camshafts. Four thousand nine hundred seventy-two cubic centimetres, 86 mm bore and 107 mm stroke, with two valves per cylinder and a Roots supercharger.

Around 225 to 250 horsepower, which was serious in 1930.

The Type 50B was the racing development of it, and the published figures for the various versions run from around 400 to 470 horsepower depending on the specification and the source.

The same thinking carried into the Type 51 of 1931, which won the French Grand Prix that year and Monaco in 1933.

What makes the story worth telling is who learned from whom. The received wisdom is that European engineering taught America. Here it ran the other way, and Bugatti was willing to say so by handing over three cars to find out.

Midget racing in the 1960s ran on Offenhauser power, and the 110 Offy was expensive enough that Hoettels' friends kept c...
10/04/2026

Midget racing in the 1960s ran on Offenhauser power, and the 110 Offy was expensive enough that Hoettels' friends kept complaining about the cost.

He thought there had to be a cheaper way to go just as fast.

The problem was displacement. The small-block Chevrolet was a proven performance engine, but at 265 to 302 cubic inches it was roughly twice what midget rules allowed for a stock block.

So he cut one in half.

Working with Badger driver Don Boorse, Hoettels took a Chevrolet V8 and split it lengthwise into an inline four, keeping half the cylinders and building a new crankcase around them.

The pistons, rods, valves, and much of the tooling came straight out of an engine produced in millions, which is exactly what made it affordable.

That engine made the Offenhauser obsolete in midget racing in 1969.

Hoettels did not stop. When Volkswagen-powered midgets started beating him in the mid-1970s, he built the 2x4 SESCO, converting a Chevrolet V8 into a horizontally opposed four using the same crankcase.

Then came the engine in this photograph.

A V8 built from two banks of four cylinders taken from Suzuki, Kawasaki, or Yamaha motorcycles, on a SESCO dry sump crankcase. Air-cooled, with a 6,400 BTU oil cooler doing most of the actual cooling work, Hilborn fuel injection, and a single belt driving the magneto, fuel pump, and oil pump.

Around 220 pounds complete, with an 11,000 RPM redline, and reportedly around 300 horsepower.

Mel Kenyon raced one in 1974, and it was eventually banned for being too fast.

Later SESCO engines made 256 horsepower at 8,500 RPM and went into drag bikes, boats, and land speed cars. One took a world record in a 2.5-litre hydroplane in 1973.

A radial engine has a problem no other layout faces. All the cylinders in a row point at the same crankshaft journal, an...
10/04/2026

A radial engine has a problem no other layout faces. All the cylinders in a row point at the same crankshaft journal, and they cannot all have their own connecting rod bearing on it. There is no room.

The solution is a master rod.

One cylinder in each row gets a proper connecting rod with a big-end bearing on the crankshaft. Every other cylinder in that row gets an articulated rod, pinned to the master rod rather than to the crankshaft itself.

On the R-3350 that means one master rod and eight articulated rods per row, with two rows making 18 cylinders.

The consequence is that the cylinders do not all behave identically. The master rod cylinder has a true circular piston path. The articulated cylinders swing slightly, which changes their effective stroke and compression a small amount. Engine designers accounted for it, and it is one of the reasons radial engines are harder to build than they look.

The cutaway also shows the reduction gearing at the front. The crankshaft turns far faster than a propeller can usefully spin, because a propeller tip approaching the speed of sound stops producing thrust and starts producing noise and drag. The gearbox drops the propeller speed well below the engine's.

Behind that sits the accessory section, driving magnetos, pumps, and the supercharger.

Three thousand three hundred fifty cubic inches, about 55 litres, with early versions around 2,200 horsepower and later turbo-compound variants going well past 3,000.

Those turbo-compound versions are the clever part. Three turbines in the exhaust do not drive a compressor. They are geared back into the crankshaft, feeding exhaust energy that would otherwise be wasted straight into the output.

It powered the B-29, the Super Constellation, and the DC-7.

Count the wheels. A steer axle up front, then a tandem drive, then two more axles behind the body.Every one of them is t...
10/03/2026

Count the wheels. A steer axle up front, then a tandem drive, then two more axles behind the body.

Every one of them is there because of a weight law rather than because the truck needed them to move.

Highway departments do not care what a truck weighs in total nearly as much as they care about how much weight sits on each axle. Pavement fails from concentrated load, so the rules set a maximum per axle and a formula based on how far apart they sit.

A dump truck wants to carry as much material per trip as possible, because the operator is paid by the load. So you add axles. Each one spreads the weight further and raises what the truck can legally haul.

The extra axles behind the body can be lifted when the truck runs empty, which saves tyre wear and fuel.

That is why American dump trucks look the way they do, and why the configuration changes from state to state.

The GMC 9500 sat at the heavy end of the range, with a conventional cab rather than a cab-over, which meant the engine lived out in front of the driver where it could be reached.

Engine options came from GMC's own range and from outside suppliers, with diesel increasingly taking over by 1970 as gasoline became too expensive to run in this kind of work.

What you can also see in the photograph is how the body is built. Those vertical ribs down the side are structural, bracing the sheet against the load pushing outward, because a full dump body is holding several tons of material trying to get out.

And the whole thing is covered in dirt, which is the correct condition for one of these.

Look at the photograph. Four V12s, laid out in pairs on a four-wheel-drive chassis, with exhaust stacks running the leng...
10/03/2026

Look at the photograph. Four V12s, laid out in pairs on a four-wheel-drive chassis, with exhaust stacks running the length of the car.

Four Allison V-1710s is 6,840 cubic inches. Forty-eight cylinders.

And it never ran.

Quad Al was a mock-up. The chassis existed, the engines were there, the whole thing looked exactly like what you see, and there was no working driveline underneath it.

That sounds like a disappointment until you understand what the car was for.

Lytle was part of a California scene in the 1950s and 1960s built around surplus Allison engines. The war had left thousands of them cheap and available, and people who wanted something nobody else had went and bought one.

Arguably the most famous of them were the Arfons brothers in Akron, Ohio, whose Green Monster cars ran Allison power and genuinely competed.

Lytle built a series of V-1710 machines, each one more extreme than the last, and Quad Al was the end of that progression.

What makes four engines so difficult is not the power. It is getting four separate crankshafts to deliver torque into one driveline without the hardware between them destroying itself. Each engine delivers power in pulses, and four sets of pulses arriving out of phase will tear a gear train apart. Mickey Thompson solved it with four Pontiac V8s in Challenger I, and that took enormous engineering.

Lytle's car was about presence instead, and on that measure it worked completely. People who saw it never forgot it, and it is still photographed and discussed sixty years later.

Not every machine has to run to matter.

Most truck manufacturers in the 1940s built vehicles that looked like what they were. Diamond T did not.The company, bas...
10/03/2026

Most truck manufacturers in the 1940s built vehicles that looked like what they were. Diamond T did not.

The company, based in Chicago, deliberately positioned itself at the top of the market. Chrome grilles, painted and pinstriped cabs, and a level of finish that nobody expected on something hauling freight. The nickname followed naturally.

That was a business decision rather than vanity. Diamond T could not match the volume of the larger manufacturers, so it competed on quality and appearance instead, selling to operators who wanted their name on something that looked like it belonged to a serious company.

The truck in this photograph belongs to Spector Motor Service, which was one of the significant Midwest freight carriers of the era.

Diamond T did not build its own engines. The company bought them, mostly from Hercules and Continental and later from Cummins, which was common practice for a manufacturer of this size.

That is worth noting, because it separates Diamond T from Mack and GMC, both of which built their own. A company buying engines competes on the truck around them: the cab, the frame, the finish, and the service.

The trailer is just as interesting. Corrugated aluminium, built light because every pound of trailer is a pound of freight you cannot carry, and the ribbing adds stiffness without adding weight.

Diamond T built trucks until 1967, when it merged with Reo under White Motor Company to form Diamond Reo. That name lasted into the 1970s before the business failed.

What survives is a reputation. Among people who care about American trucks, a Diamond T still means something specific.

One hundred twenty-seven litres. Thirty-six cylinders. Around 5,000 horsepower.It remains the largest and most powerful ...
10/03/2026

One hundred twenty-seven litres. Thirty-six cylinders. Around 5,000 horsepower.

It remains the largest and most powerful piston aircraft engine ever built in the United States, and almost nobody has heard of it.

The layout is four rows of nine cylinders, liquid-cooled rather than air-cooled, because an engine producing that much power generates heat that moving air alone cannot remove.

Each cylinder displaces over 215 cubic inches, which is larger than many complete car engines, and each has twin overhead camshafts and fuel injection.

Then there are the details that look like they belong to a much later era.

Four variable-speed superchargers, so the engine could be matched to the air density at different altitudes rather than being optimised for one.

Dual crankshafts geared together, because a single crankshaft long enough to serve 36 cylinders would twist under the loads involved.

And cylinder deactivation. The XR-7755 could run on one, two, or all four rows, shutting the rest down to save fuel during cruise.

That is the same principle General Motors sells today as Active Fuel Management, in an aircraft engine designed during the Second World War.

It was intended for very large long-range bombers, including proposed successors to the B-29 and aircraft in the class of the B-36.

By the time it was running on a test stand in 1946, the argument was already over. A jet engine produces more thrust for its weight, has a fraction of the moving parts, and needs none of the cooling, lubrication, or maintenance that 36 cylinders demand.

Two were built.

One survives at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

The most complicated piston engine America ever built, finished at the exact moment it stopped mattering.

Look at the lettering on the body. Ford, in script, on a Top Fuel dragster in an era when the nitro classes belonged to ...
10/03/2026

Look at the lettering on the body. Ford, in script, on a Top Fuel dragster in an era when the nitro classes belonged to the Chrysler Hemi.

Kalitta was one of the few who made the 427 SOHC work.

Ford built the Cammer in 1964 to beat the Hemi in NASCAR. NASCAR refused to approve it, because it was not available in a production car, and when they later offered to let it run with a weight penalty the handicap made it pointless.

So Ford had one of the most advanced racing V8s in America with nowhere to run it.

Drag racing had no such rule.

And the engine's characteristics suited a quarter mile better than they would have suited an oval. Moving the camshafts up onto the heads removes the pushrods, lifters, and rockers from the valvetrain, which is the mass that limits how fast an engine can rev. Hemispherical chambers with large valves gave it the airflow to use those revs, and the FE block underneath had cross-bolted main caps and enough strength to take a supercharger and nitromethane.

Kalitta became the man most associated with it. The Bounty Hunter cars ran against Garlits and Karamesines through the 1960s, and he was as much a tuner as a driver, which in nitro racing is the harder of the two jobs.

A nitro engine is tuned by deciding in advance how much fuel to deliver, how much ignition timing to run, and how hard to lock the clutch, all based on track temperature and air density, before the car ever moves. Get it wrong and the engine comes apart.

Kalitta Motorsports is still competing today, decades later.

And the engine he chose is still remembered for what it did in a class nobody designed it for.

Every V8 before 1932 was built the same way. The cylinder banks were cast separately and bolted to a crankcase, because ...
10/03/2026

Every V8 before 1932 was built the same way. The cylinder banks were cast separately and bolted to a crankcase, because casting the whole thing as one piece was considered beyond what foundries could reliably do.

That is why V8s were expensive, and why they only appeared in Cadillacs, Lincolns, and cars most people would never own.

Ford insisted on a single casting.

The engineers pushed back. The core work alone is extraordinarily complicated, because the sand cores that form the water jackets and the crankcase have to be positioned precisely inside a mould and then survive molten iron being poured around them. Any shift anywhere produces a thin wall, a leak, or scrap.

Early scrap rates were severe, and the foundry had to be reworked repeatedly before it could produce blocks in volume.

But when it worked, the arithmetic changed completely. One casting instead of three, far fewer machining operations, and far less assembly labour. A V8 suddenly cost what a four-cylinder cost.

The engine that came out in 1932 made 65 horsepower from 221 cubic inches, which does not sound like much until you consider what it replaced and what it cost.

For the first time, an ordinary person could buy eight cylinders.

The consequences ran further than anybody planned. The flathead became the foundation of American hot rodding, because it was everywhere and cheap secondhand, and the entire speed equipment industry grew out of people trying to improve it.

Ford built the flathead until 1953 in America, and production continued in France into the 1990s.

This photograph is Ford with the engine he was told could not be built.

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