Is This A Sign Of The Times???

It’s ready to be melted and used to build merlin parts now.

That music on the first vid how depressing.!

Bad enough a relic like this radial is dragged into a clearing but to be cutup as well?

Looks pretty ‘surgical’ oxy-acetylene work! I doubt it is being cut-up for scrap…..eBay relics more like!

Somebody clearly regards it with some reverence as there is the traditional Japanese offering of food and drink for the dead nearby.

It’s ready to be melted and used to build merlin parts now.

That music on the first vid how depressing.!

Tchaikovsky Symphony No 6 ‘Pathetique’. Melancholy rather than depressing imo, a reminder that not everything in life is beer and skittles.. 😎

Interesting to see that the Japs fabricated the crank case ,from steel components welded together…

I don’t think the crankcase will be welded; it is probably drop-forged (steel) and machined from billet.

I think (to use the technical term) ‘one of the American radials’ was manufactured the same way and I believe many Japanese radial engines of that era owed a lot to American influence. (I know almost nothing about American radial engines.) ‘Old school’ aluminium alloy crankcases are drop-forged too; the good ones anyway!

I also don’t think that the video clip is being made by those responsible for cutting the engine up. Also notice the size of the cut pieces; why such small pieces if you’re just going to scrap it? Not to carry it away surely. Ask yourself this; how did they get the heavy oxy-acetylene gear there? And the cutting seems to have been done to avoid damage to the major components, crankcase excepted.

To me it seems that somebody deliberately cut the engine open with a view to ‘sympathetically’ removing the cylinders (by cutting the slave rods) with the pistons still inside. They’d probably sell well on eBay.

Merlin Pete I am shocked. For 5 years I did site visits and research in Wales and never found one war grave crash site. Do you have any evidence of the status of these crash sites which were cleared?

[QUOTE=Peter;1521144]Bad enough a relic like this radial is dragged into a clearing but to be cutup as well? What if this is a war grave??:mad:

True Peter but no different to what the National Park Authority did in Wales many years ago when they cleared most of the crash sites. Many of these were war graves.

Pete

Interesting to see that the Japs fabricated the crank case ,from steel components welded together…..makes heavy ali alloy castings look a bit old school

CREAKING DOOR…you can see the weld bead and its “uneven” width holding the “outer face ring”.

Do you mean the ‘weld bead’ in front of the Lumix camera at 3:30 on the second video?

Personally I don’t think that is a weld bead. It looks to me like a raised feature on the front of the crankcase that has been peened-over in an irregular way during impact with the ground (which looks fairly rocky near the engine).

That’s just my opinion of course.

My apologies; I should have made myself clearer. I think it is drop-forged and then machined.

I’ll take a look at the second video again.

CREAKING DOOR…..Look at the second video carefully ,you can see the weld bead and its “uneven ” width holding the “outer face ring”.if this was a drop forging tool shut line i would have shot the tool makers.

As to your other suggestions you cannot have it both ways either its a machined forging or its machined from the solid [billet]