Neil O'Connor looked over at Johan. "Say what ever you like, man, that girl is fine." He continued to turn the spark plug wrench as he talked.
"She may be pretty but she is too forward, I think," Albrecht Knopf said. "She is becoming too American in her attitudes."
Neil pulled the plug and glanced at it. Whatever he was planning to say about the girl was forgotten. "Damn! This thing is burned clear through. You guys have been running the mix too lean again, haven't you?"
Neil and Al were doing thousand hour maintenance on the Jupiter, which was known far and wide as the Monster. Neil didn't know why Georg Markgraf didn't just give up and change the name, but he wasn't the designer, so what the heck.
Al poked his head around the cowling. "How's our stock?"
"All down-time made," Neil said. "Change them every hundred flight hours. Frankly I'm a bit surprised that we can make them at all."
"Too complicated?" Al Knopf asked with a bit of a glint in his eye.
"No. Incompatible expansion rates." Neil held up his hand in surrender, or at least partial surrender. "More a chemistry problem then craftsmanship." He had lost a number of bets with Al over the last couple of years. They'd been bets having to do with what down-time craftsmen could do with just a file and a chunk of metal.
Neil looked back at the plug and then at Johan. "You know, I wonder how long it's going to be till we start building aircraft engines."
"Start?" Al asked. "We have already started! How much of that engine we're working on was made here? The plugs, the gaskets, three tappet valves. . . ."
Neil held up his hands, interrupting the list before Al got good and started. Al could talk for hours about the parts of the engines that were now hand made. "That's not what I meant, Al. How long till we start from the design and make engines that are really for airplanes, not just auto engines pushed into service?"
"I don't know, Neil," Johan said. "But if we don't do it soon, we'll be buying our engines from someone who has." He shrugged and grinned. "Anyway, that's a management problem. I'm just a pilot. I just point the plane where they tell me to go." Johan made a great deal of money pointing the plane where he was told. Not to mention the stock options. Still, in spite of being unwilling to bet with Al on what down-time craftsmen could do, Neil didn't believe it. A whole engine was just too complicated for the down-time tech base to handle.
Magdalena van de Passe set down the phone with a sigh. If it wasn't the fuel, it was the engines. She had just had to turn down another job. Because they had just one airplane. Well, three, if you stretched it to include two two-seat small planes that ran with a pilot and a sack of mail. And they couldn't keep the Monster in the air all the time. She had had it all explained to her in great boring detail. In normal use, an automobile engine might reasonably be expected to do thirty thousand miles a year. Perhaps fifty thousand, on rare occasion even one hundred thousand miles a year. But the stress on that engine during most of the time was not that great. The engine would spend time idling, and providing only enough push to maintain the automobile's speed. Not so in an aircraft. For all practical purposes, an airplane spent almost all of its time going uphill, even in level flight. The engines were forced to work as hard as a normal engine going up a grade.
TransEuropean Airlines was making money hand over fist. That was true enough. But they were turning down more jobs than they were taking because and if one of their engines broke in a way they couldn't fix, they were out of business.
"Georg, we need more engines. We need more engines because we need more airplanes. And we need them soon."
"And I have the airplanes for you. Two more Jupiter One air frames sitting in the hanger, ready to go, if I could buy the engines for them. Find me eight one-hundred-plus horsepower engines and I'll have two new Jupiters for you in a month," Georg said.
He stopped talking when Neil burst through the door.Neil always burst through doors, generally without knocking first. Neil had apparently heard him, because he said, "Al and Johan figure you should build your own." He shook his head.
"I've been thinking the same thing."
"Maggy, you don't know how complex internal combustion engines are," Neil insisted.
Magdalena and Georg shared a look. It figured that it would be the up-timer in the room that brought that up. Sometimes the up-timer's constant harping on the great and amazing complexity of the up-timer technology got more than a little old. In point of fact, Magdalena, in the past year, had twice been involved in the complete disassembly and reassembly of one of the Monster's engines. And she probably knew—well, almost—as much about them as Neil did. But Neil failed to grasp the degree of precision that fine craftsman of the seventeenth century were capable of. Even Magdalena hid a grin after all the bets he had lost with Albrecht Knopf.
At first they were going to go with a V8 or perhaps a radial engine Then a research project at the National Library suggested that the Wankel rotary engine made popular by Mazda was the way to go. This was because if it over-heated you lost some power, but the engine didn't seize up, as well as the fact that it was lighter per horse power. They also considered turboshaft and turboprop engines, but all three fell victim to the materials problem. They would be better airplanes if they had the materials to make them . . . but they didn't. After much debate and several library research projects, they had been forced back to either a radial or a V engine. Then to a radial design, because the radial design was simpler to manufacture and cooler than the inline cylinders.
Magdalena looked around the room like a nervous conspirator. Well, actually more like a twelve-year-old pretending to be a nervous conspirator. "Can any up-timers hear us?" she whispered, rather loudly.
Georg Markgraf rolled his eyes and Farrell Smith stuck his fingers in his ears. He was, after all, an up-timer.
Arnold Swartz snorted. Arnold, it had to be admitted, had something of a love/hate relationship with Grantville and its machines. He was a master blacksmith whose shop in Suhl now had several production machines running. His senior journeyman could run those, so Arnold felt a bit unnecessary there. It wasn't an especially comfortable feeling for him, either.
"It's not that bad." Georg insisted, looking apologetically at Farrell.
Farrell grinned "You couldn't prove it by me." The issue was, of course, tolerances. Up-timers—some up-timers—were still insisting that down-time craftsmen weren't capable of the tight tolerances modern machinery needed. "Look, Dad is a good guy and a good engineer. But most of his work has been in the office and not that much on the factory floor. Mostly he's adapted well enough. I know he can be a bit of a by-the-book guy, but he is right about the fact that a lot of people died to write the words in FAA manuals."
"That is not what I object to," Arnold said. "I can deliver the tolerances and the material strength needed. But not if he insists on testing half the parts to destruction. The up-time engineers have told me that the usual percentage for critical components is 10%. Granted, machines, at least well-made machines, produce more consistent results but his attitude is both expensive and insulting."
Farrell just nodded. "How long will it take your shops per engine?
"Less than you might think." Arnold smiled. "The cylinder casings can be cast to their basic shape, cooling fins and all, then finished by hand. We'll use crucible steel, not as light as aluminum but quite strong enough for what we need. By being extra careful with the molds, we will save finishing time on the parts themselves. I have craftsmen working for me, not what you call 'hacks.'
"But it will be expensive. Craftsmanship takes time and craftsmen need to eat. It's not the precision of your machines that we can't compete with—it's the speed."
"And that brings up another issue," Magdalena said. "To the extent possible, we want to use off-the-shelf parts, and adjust the design to fit them. That will save us money and save your craftsmen's time for where it's needed."
"How much can we get from the auto companies?" Arnold asked.
"Not that much. They still haven't fully finalized their designs," Georg complained.
"It's not that bad. They do have some of the parts in limited production," Farrell corrected him, gently."Someone over there has been at least a bit clever and realized that some of the parts they would need for their automobiles would also be useable for other products. They prioritized those for production. They are building their heads to take the plugs Grantville-Zuendkerze-Kompanie makes. They've settled on a cylinder size, even if they aren't making them yet."
As a whole, the auto people were working in the red and probably would continue doing so till the assembly line got up and running a few years down the road. But by making parts that could be used in other devices as well as automobiles first, they were managing to keep the red ink from getting quite as deep as it would otherwise be. Standard-sized nuts and bolts, ball bearings, brake pads, hydraulic brake systems—even, oddly enough, rotors. But they were still years away from a mass-produced automobile or a mass-produced engine. "On the up side, the parts of an engine that wear out fastest are coming into production pretty fast now. The biggest problem is going to be the engine-specific parts, especially parts specific to the radial engines. Things like the finned cylinders Arnold mentioned."
Arnold Swartz didn't seem at all put out by that. In fact, he grinned widely. With dollar signs flashing in his eyes, near as Magdalena could tell.
Six months later Swartz Aviation engines delivered four seven-cylinder 120 horsepower air-cooled radial engines. They weighed 220 pounds each. By then Arnold wasn't smiling quite so wide. Word had recently arrived that another firm was also making aviation engines.
Georg Markgraf, on the other hand, was ecstatic. And Magdalena was pretty pleased herself.