From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Letter to Delco-Remy & Hyatt Ltd. discussing the development and failures of a distributor product.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 168\3\ img011 | |
| Date | 11th November 1938 | |
| HC Rm{William Robotham - Chief Engineer}4/R4. 11th November, 1938. Messrs. Delco-Remy & Hyatt Ltd., 111, Grosvenor Road, LONDON. S.W.1. (For the attention of Mr. W.A. Crewe.) Dear Sirs, Thank you for your letter of November 10th. We are arranging for our Mr. Childe to call at your Factory with a number of cams, and to talk over the problem with you. The Delco-Remy Distributor has had a long and chequered career on development, and there is no doubt that the writer has had to carry the main responsibility of putting it on our products in the face of very considerable objections. You must remember that in the 30 years' existence of this Company they have never before fitted a proprietary make of distributor. We started out with the idea that we were going to use your standard product. It failed under conditions where our own distributor gave satisfaction. It indicated, however, that our own distributor was having an unnecessarily arduous time, and we, therefore, put in a spring drive. We had quite a number of failures with your standard rubbing block. One failure in particular which swung us over to our own material, 'Tufnol', took place on a car which was running about England. If we may say so, the analogy between a 9-cylinder aircraft engine and a car engine seems to be an unfortunate one. Our standardisation test for anything is 15,000 miles, the car being driven as hard as possible, which is a minimum of 300 hours' running. The average aero | ||