IL 2 to appear at Legends this year ?

Beaufighter II’s also flew with dihedral tailplanes, the flat tailplane was preferred for the night fighter as it made the aircraft unstable but more manoeuvrable, Google Beaufighter II images.
Other issues include radiators and a totally different propeller, Dowty no less.
Everything is possible, simple, no!

Yes…. all very simple really……….. Really ?

I think you’d have to take the dihedral out of the tailplane too.

I remember chatting about the whole Hercules issue in the hangar at Duxford one day. ‘Look the solution is simple – go out and buy a pair of Merlins, take the ‘bump’ for the Sperry autopilot off the nose, and paint the damn thing black! There’s nothing wrong with owning a Beaufighter Mk II’

Yes it does have an Allison engine same as the other one in the USA ,the Mig-3 restorations and (currently) most Yak-3/9’s.

Just to bring the thread back to the Il-2 (as I don’t think anybody answered my question and that was how we got onto air-display aircraft flying with the ‘wrong’ engine in the first place); is this the Russian Il-2 that flies with an Allison V-1710 engine?

Yes, back awhile (#42) in the thread…..it ain’t coming!

Thread drift haha

anyway is there any more info on the IL2 at legends?

I messed with a lot of a/c in the Royal Air Force, Canberra’s, Hastings, VC-10, Belfast, Whirlwind, Wessex, Chipmunk, the BBMF a/c, etc.
The most fun time was the Beverley in the Far East, as others say, I’d better get my coat!
Who needed a nav on the Beverley, it was so slow and low you could read the street signs. One trip I was on took two days to cross Australia.
Seems we have a bit of thread drift.

I agree about the R-2600…..they wouldn’t look right, the Beaufighter is all about the engines:

Beaufighter: two very big engines, closely followed by an aeroplane!

As for the Merlin, the only place Beaufighter Merlins look any good, is where they belong…..on a Lancaster!

So it wasn’t true that you only needed a Navigator out the outward leg on the Beverley…

…and simply followed the oil trails on the ground to find your way back?

I’m sure Stephen would’ve loved a pair of 3350’s strapped to her though :stupid:

The size of the sump I guess would be to do with the horse power of the engine and the amount of heat that would need to be dissipated by the oil. More heat more flow.
On the Centaurus fitted to the Beverley we always lost a lot of oil on start up, it had drained to the lower cylinders whilst stationary. On the odd occasion it would be necessary to remove the lower spark plugs to drain the oil. Consumption not a problem as the aircraft was fitted with overload oil tanks and the oil could be pumped by hand to each engine.
Cruise power was not that high, I think ECB (economical cruising boost) was +4, but flight times could be long, in the Far East ten and eleven hour legs were not unusual.

On the Hercules 216 fitted to the Hastings I don’t recall the problem.

I did consider the R-2600 fit but it just does not look right. Same with the Merlin fit.

The later Hercules will fit even though they are longer and wider. Some years ago we designed a replacement engine bearer to cope with these problems. Moving the engine further forward by three or four inches was not the major problem. The later engines have a very large sump which gets in the way of the bearer cross bracing. The early engines have half the number of induction pipes as they are “siamesed” and a much smaller sump which makes life easy.

Thank you for that very informative post. One question; why do the later engines have a larger sump?

I’m guessing it has to do with oil consumption (which was of legendary proportions on the later Bristol Centaurus in the Beverley) and the primary use of the engines at high-power settings in long-range (slow, draggy) transport aircraft?

Would it have been possible to reduce the size of the sump?

Actually, I had no idea that the Hercules even had a ‘sump’ (unlike the Jupiter that has a vey obvious one); I’ll have to go away and have a good look at some exploded drawings.

In the Motorsport Industry it is extremely common to mess-about with the size of the sump of an engine; either to add more capacity for more loss (or better cooling) or to completely ‘dry-sump’ an engine. I’m not saying it would be as easy as that, especially as the oil pumps are often built-into the bottom of the sump, but (given the likely service of the engines) it may be a possibility?

Well, I’d vote for the original engines obviously; especially on something as rare as a Beaufighter (given the level of reworking necessary to fit the R-2600 in the photograph above)!

According to my research (looking up the diameters in Wikipedia!)
An R2600 would fit on the Beaufighter firewall perfect!

When I first read this, I thought what about the weight of the engine? What about the length of the engine including accessories? What about a suitable prop for this installation? What about connecting British systems to US generators and pumps? Or British generators and pumps to a US accessory gearbox?

Now I see that someone’s already gone through the trouble of figuring out whether this is possible, judging from Avro Avian’s post above. But that doesn’t mean that it would be easy to reconstruct this modification, even if drawings and such still exist. It would most certainly encompass a very significant modification to the aircraft and you could ask yourself whether you’d rather have a static Beaufighter with the correct engines, or a flying Beaufighter with completely different engines, nacelles and systems. I’m sure that there will be several votes for the second option, but I do hope that large cheques will accompany those votes. 😉

A Beaufighter did in fact fly with Wright Cyclone GR-2600-A5B engines. One was modified as such by DAP in Australia, as a proof of concept, in case the supply of Bristol Hercules engines became problematic, such as the Taurus engines for the Beauforts did. As you can see in the photo I have stolen from ADF-Serials, the nacelles are quite different…

Just to clarify the Hercules position on the Beaufighter, answered in previous posts.
The later Hercules will fit even though they are longer and wider. Some years ago we designed a replacement engine bearer to cope with these problems. Moving the engine further forward by three or four inches was not the major problem. The later engines have a very large sump which gets in the way of the bearer cross bracing. The early engines have half the number of induction pipes as they are “siamesed” and a much smaller sump which makes life easy. The early engines have a carburettor whilst later engines have a Claudel Hobson injector.
We are currently helping an Australian company with information on the overhaul of early engines.
Can anybody help with manuals for the A.I.T 132 MC, & M , A.I.T 122 MB & M,carburettors?

According to my research (looking up the diameters in Wikipedia!)
An R2600 would fit on the Beaufighter firewall perfect!

I’m not sure the diameters of the engines would be your problem with the R-2600!

Doesn’t the propeller turn the other way on an R-2600 and the exhaust go out of the back of the cylinders, as opposed to the front of the cylinders on a Bristol Hercules?

Wasn’t ‘the whispering death’ name just something that was invented by an (Australian?) newspaper…

…and that has been repeated so often it has become the ‘truth’?