Posted: 3/7/2012 9:12:22 AM EDT
I was reading the Mustang thread and thought I'd share this little piece of history:
The Turbonique Drag Axle (pictured above), was a diff centre section, with nothing less than a thermolene powered rocket nozzle mounted to the diff.
At the touch of a button, it would add an extra 1,300 horsepower (yes that's one thousand, three hundred). The power was not purely thrust power like a jet engine on a plane - instead the power was passed through the diff housing to the rear tyres, which resulted in many cars smoking their tyres the whole way up the 1/4 mile on 1960's drag slicks. http://www.tunersgroup.com/TunerWire_Live/Turbonique.html |
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Did machinists hand mill these parts by the numbers back in the day, or were there automated processes and tricks to get the shapes and curves of the housings right? Those are castings - they use a wooden pattern to define the casting shape. Ah. Makes sense. I'm so used to watching videos of CNC machines cutting those types of contours on parts that I never even thought of it. The article/ad referred to them as being fully machined parts. I guess they meant that you would only need to install them, as opposed to finishing them first. 
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