Sleeve valve
The Scottish Argyll company used its own, much simpler and more efficient, single sleeve system (Burt-McCollum) in its cars, a system which, after extensive development, saw substantial use in British aircraft engines of the 1940s, such as the Napier Sabre, Bristol Hercules, Centaurus, and the promising but never mass-produced Rolls-Royce Crecy, only to be supplanted by the jet engines.
It was used in some luxury automobiles, notably Willys, Stearns, Daimler, Mercedes-Benz, Minerva, Panhard, Peugeot and Avions Voisin.
It was used by the Scottish company Argyll for its cars,[2] and was later adopted by Bristol for its radial aircraft engines and the Halford-designed Napier Sabre.
He conceded that some of these advantages were significantly eroded as fuels improved up to and during World War II and as sodium-cooled exhaust valves were introduced in high-output aircraft engines.
Kilbourne, a number of engines were constructed, followed by the "Silent Knight" touring car, which was shown at the 1906 Chicago Auto Show.
[11] Although he was initially unable to sell his Knight Engine in the United States, a long sojourn in England, involving extensive further development and refinement by Daimler supervised by their consultant Dr Frederick Lanchester,[12] eventually secured Daimler and several luxury car firms as customers willing to pay his expensive premiums.
The Burt-McCollum sleeve valve, having its name from the surnames of the two engineers that patented the same concept with weeks of difference, Peter Burt and James Harry Keighly McCollum, patent applications are of August 6 and June 22, 1909, respectively, both engineers hired by the Scottish car maker Argyll, consisted of a single sleeve, which was given a combination of up-and-down and partial rotary motion.
[16] Barr and Stroud Ltd of Anniesland, Glasgow, also licensed the SSV design, and made small versions of the engines that they marketed to motorcycle companies.
In an advertisement in Motor Cycle magazine in 1922[17] Barr & Stroud promoted their 350cc sleeve valve engine and listed Beardmore-Precision, Diamond, Edmund, and Royal Scot as motorcycle manufacturers offering it.
Vard Wallace, known for his aftermarket forks for motorcycles, presented in 1947 drawings of a Single Cylinder, Air-Cooled, 250 cc SSV engine.
Some small SSV auxiliary boat engines and electric generators were built in the UK, prepared for burning 'paraffin' from start, or after a bit of heat-up with more complex fuels.
Its motors and its people', William Wagner, Armed Forces Journal International and Aero Publishers, 1983, ISBN 0-8168-4506-9) Potentially the most powerful of all sleeve-valve engines (though it never reached production) was the Rolls-Royce Crecy V-12 (oddly, using a 90-degree V-angle), two-stroke, direct-injected, turbocharged (force-scavenged) aero-engine of 26.1 litres capacity.
Hives & RR were very much focused on their Merlin, Griffon then Eagle and finally Whittle's jets, which all had a clearly defined production purpose.
Bristol sleeve valve engines were used however during the post-war air transport boom, in the Vickers Viking and related military Varsity and Valetta, Airspeed Ambassador, used on BEA's European routes, and Handley Page Hermes (and related military Hastings), and Short Solent airliners and the Bristol Freighter and Superfreighter.
The difficulty of Nitride hardening, then finish-grinding the sleeve valve for truing the circularity, may have been a factor in its lack of more commercial applications.
This fact coupled with other legal and technical arguments[21] led the judge to rule, at the end of July 1912, that the holders of the original Knight patent could not be supported in their claim that it gave them master rights encompassing the Argyll design.
Mike Hewland with his assistant John Logan, and also independently Keith Duckworth, experimented with a single-cylinder sleeve-valve test engine when looking at Cosworth DFV replacements.
[citation needed] The same company can also supply somewhat larger engines for use in military drones, portable generators and equipment such as lawn mowers.
