This is a WWII era photograph of trainee aircraft mechanics being trained in the finer details of Merlin engine maintenance. The cradle that the engine is sitting in looks to be mobile, allowing the engine to be tilted to more clearly show the inner workings, each of these Rolls-Royce engines were capable of producing 2,600hp from their 27-litre (1,650 cubic inch) capacity.
I’ve often wished that a company would spring up offering kits for people to build Merlin engines at home, they wouldn’t be cheap or even remotely sensible, but I still want one. It’d be the perfect engine for that Baby Bootlegger project I keep telling myself I’ll build one day.
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
