Inside the 1941 Packard Factory: How America Built the Merlin Better Than Rolls-Royce

Britain designed the greatest piston engine of the war. Detroit figured out how to build 55,000 of them. In 1940, Ford walked away from a contract to build the Rolls-Royce Merlin. Packard took it, and then discovered the engine had never been drawn for mass production: British Whitworth threads no American toolmaker sold, drawings in the wrong projection, 900 design changes in a single month, and an assembly method that depended on skilled fitters working by feel. This is the story of how a Detroit luxury car company rebuilt the Merlin's tooling, tolerances and paperwork until any part would fit any engine, station by station from the aluminum foundry and the nitrided crankshaft to the two-stage supercharger and the acceptance test cells on East Grand Boulevard. Along the way, a two-piece cylinder block drawn for the Packard engine went back to Britain and into Rolls-Royce production. The Packard V-1650 went on to power the P-51 Mustang, the Spitfire Mk XVI, Canadian Lancasters and Mosquitoes. Subscribe for more American factory stories, told the way they were actually built. Historical documentary. Archival material used under fair use for commentary and education.